Incident location, Long Island
What Happened
Fifteen months after a 15-year-old Copiague boy was struck and killed by two vehicles while walking home from a high school volleyball game, Newsday is reflecting on how that tragedy — and the investigative series it inspired — permanently changed how Long Island’s largest newspaper covers road safety. The reflection was published on June 23, 2026, marking a pivotal transition point for the project.
Amir Porterfield was 15 years old when he was struck and killed by two vehicles near his Copiague home on March 27, 2025 — the date that also marked the launch of Newsday’s “Dangerous Roads” investigative series. He had been walking home from a high school volleyball game when he was hit. The road where he died was posted at 50 miles per hour and required pedestrians to cross six lanes of traffic. His mother, Iesha, has since told reporters that the crash permanently altered her life, the life of Amir’s father, and the life of Amir’s surviving brother. Her repeated question — “What can be done?” — became, in the words of reporter Peter Gill, “the impetus for this whole series.”
According to Newsday, the “Dangerous Roads” series was an all-hands-on-deck effort at the Melville-based newsroom, ultimately encompassing dozens of individual stories, a documentary video, two town hall events, and a weekly newsletter authored by transportation reporter Alfonso A. Castillo. The reporting examined the root causes of fatal and serious crashes across Long Island — including speeding, impaired driving, unlicensed drivers, lax enforcement, and poorly designed or maintained roadways. The series also looked at solutions, traveling to a suburb that had set a goal of zero traffic fatalities and testing technology specifically designed to prevent crashes.
The project earned recognition from five separate journalism organizations: the International News Media Association, the National Headliner Awards, the New York Press Club, the Silurians Press Club, and the Press Club of Long Island, per Newsday’s reporting. The honors came as the series was wrapping its newsletter phase and preparing to expand into broader transportation coverage.
In a conversation published as part of the final “Dangerous Roads” newsletter, reporters Castillo and Gill reflected on the personal weight of the project. Gill, whose own grandfather died in a car crash, described speaking with a woman in Brentwood who had lost her son — a bicyclist who was struck and killed — and who had additionally lost two other close family members to car crashes. “When you add up the numbers, it’s pretty staggering,” Gill said, noting that car crashes are the number-one cause of accidental death for young people and that Long Islanders are statistically more likely to be killed in a crash than in a murder. Newsday also added a fatality tracker to its homepage specifically to prevent readers from treating each crash as a disconnected, isolated event.
Castillo, who has covered transportation for Newsday since 2008 and has been with the paper since 1999, said he deliberately approached the newsletter less as a transportation reporter and more “as a Long Islander, and a driver, and a husband of somebody who commuted on the Southern State Parkway every day, and father to teenagers who are walking to school and learning to drive.” He noted that after covering dozens of fatal crashes over his nearly three-decade career — often on weekend shifts when reporters cover whatever breaks — it becomes easy to become desensitized. “When you’re on your 50th one or something like that, it’s easy to get hardened,” he said, adding that the series forced a deliberate recalibration: “Let’s stop normalizing this.”
The reporters also addressed the significance of language. Gill argued that calling a crash an “accident” makes it easier to treat as something inevitable and beyond prevention, while using the word “crash” acknowledges that specific actions — or failures to act — led to the outcome, and that changes can be made. He drew a comparison to aviation safety culture, noting that air traffic controllers operate on the principle that multiple things must go wrong simultaneously for a serious crash to occur. “It seems like fewer things need to go wrong for there to be a serious crash on our roadways,” Gill said, particularly in areas designed like the one where Amir Porterfield was killed.
A reader identified as Darlene Scarangella of Garden City also weighed in, questioning why more police officers are not deployed on Long Island highways and asking whether automated cameras could be used to issue tickets to dangerous drivers — a sentiment that echoes a central thread of the Dangerous Roads series regarding lax enforcement.
Location & Road Context
Amir Porterfield was killed in Copiague, a hamlet on the South Shore of Suffolk County. The specific roadway where he was struck has characteristics that safety advocates have long flagged as dangerous: a 50-mph speed limit and six lanes of traffic that pedestrians — including students traveling to and from school — must navigate on foot. Copiague is served by a network of state and county roads that intersect with residential neighborhoods, creating a persistent conflict between high-speed vehicle traffic and pedestrian movement.
The Newsday team’s newsroom and editorial base for the project is located in Melville, also in Suffolk County, where reporters Alfonso Castillo and Peter Gill were photographed discussing the project. Long Island’s road safety challenges are not unique to any single corridor — for more on traffic conditions across the island, see our accidents and towns coverage.
Broader Impact
The closing of the “Dangerous Roads” newsletter phase and its expansion into a broader “In Transit” transportation newsletter signals an institutional shift at Newsday — but the underlying issue remains urgent. Newsday’s own fatality tracker, introduced as part of this series, quantifies a reality that Long Island families like Amir Porterfield’s know firsthand: traffic violence is the leading cause of accidental death for young people in this region, and it is a problem driven by identifiable, addressable factors. Readers with story ideas for the expanded newsletter can contact Newsday at roads@newsday.com. For ongoing Long Island traffic and road safety coverage, visit our accidents page.