Upper Mountain Avenue is a dimly lit thoroughfare with narrow lanes where motorists drive fast and joggers often take the bike lane, according to neighbors who reside close to where a Montclair man on foot was killed in a hit-and-run Saturday.
"Sad to say, it doesn't entirely surprise me," said Maris Davis of Upper Mountain Avenue. She resides across the street from the Van Vleck Street intersection, where the death occurred around 11 p.m. Saturday.
Douglas M. Williams, 49, was reportedly walking in the bike lane when he was hit by a car, police said. Williams was pronounced dead at 12:10 a.m. Sunday in Mountainside Hospital.
Davis, who was walking her dog along Upper Mountain Avenue Sunday evening, said no one in her household heard anything when the victim was struck. Another neighbor near the crash site, Amy Putman, likewise said she did not hear the incident.
Both residents looked outside after noticing flashing lights and a large police presence along Upper Mountain Avenue. Investigators shined floodlights, similar to glaring movie-set lights, on the street as they combed over the crime scene for evidence for hours, until at least 2 a.m.
Putman said there were squad cars as far as the eye could see from her window, and she had never seen so many police vehicles at the scene of an accident in Montclair during her 12 years as a resident.
She also noticed two people guiding a body lying on a stretcher into the back of an ambulance.
Worried that the victim might have been one of the many teenagers who live in the neighboring houses - Putman has two daughters of her own living at home, who are 10 and 16 years old - she went outside for a few minutes to find out what had happened.
A plainclothes police officer told her the person on the stretcher was an adult and she walked back home. She observed that part of North Mountain Avenue had been cordoned off by orange traffic cones, which was apparently the spot where the victim's body had been found. There were objects in that coned-off area, but Putnam averted her eyes.
"It's really disturbing, upsetting, and traumatizing," she said, occasionally taking long pauses between her statements. "It could have been anyone."
She said the fact that the driver fled was "terrible."
"Who does that?" she asked. "They should turn themselves in for the family and for themselves, because they will have to live with it for the rest of their lives."
Davis said "people really race up and down Upper Mountain" since it provides a direct route from Bloomfield Avenue to northern Montclair that is free of speed-humps, stop-signs and traffic lights.
She said that could make the avenue more dangerous than the other "main drags" spanning Montclair.
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