Rutgers student dies in fatal crash
Approximately an hour past midnight yesterday, a head-on vehicle collision on Route 18 left one person dead, according to a University-wide email alert.
Max Spivak, a senior in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers—New Brunswick, was in one of the vehicles involved in the crash. He was transported to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
University President Jonathan Holloway commented on the crash at a Rutgers University Student Assembly (RUSA) town hall last night.
"The fragility of life is in all of us, as one of your peers died in a head-on collision. He was doing nothing wrong as far as we know. And yet, he met an untimely death, someone going down the wrong direction of the freeway," he said.
The incident occurred when a vehicle was traveling Northbound in the Southbound lane and collided with Spivak’s car at approximately 12:58 a.m., according to the email alert.
Nageswar Polamuri, the driver of the other vehicle involved in the crash, fled the scene but was later found and then charged by the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office with second-degree leaving the scene of a fatal motor vehicle crash.
Route 18 was closed for several hours yesterday morning while investigators from the Piscataway Police Department and the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office analyzed the scene.
The email asked anyone with information or footage of the crash to contact the Piscataway Police Department or the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office, who are handling the investigation.
