'Incredible amount of blood,' but NYPD finds no crime after string slices bicyclists on bridge

The NYPD says it found no criminality after a string suspended across the Marine Parkway Bridge critically injured a cyclist and left another with stitches across her face.

The more seriously injured cyclist remained in intensive care Friday after being slashed in the throat and will likely be out of work for several months, his friends said. Police said a group of cyclists were crossing the bridge from Rockaway to Marine Park when they struck a kite string draped across the bike lane.

Robert Hillebrand was taken to Coney Island hospital and later transferred to Kings County hospital, where he was stable condition Friday in the intensive care unit, his friends said. The incident severed his windpipe and required blood transfusions in order to save his life, they said. The incident has so far rendered him unable to speak.

“It was an incredible amount of blood,” Joey Eichler, one of the friends, said in an interview. “It was an image that will stay with me, the look of someone who just had their throat cut.”

Hillebrand runs the bike touring company Freewheelin’ Bike Tours.

A second cyclist, Crown Heights resident Jennifer Noble said she received stitches and a broken finger.

Police said the injuries were caused by a kite string draped across the roadway, and Noble has said she’d seen a kite that looked like those used for “kite fighting” — where participants try to cut the strings of their opponents' kites, sometimes by using strings with glass coating.

But some witnesses are less sure it was a kite string.

Julian Rose, a 43-year-old cook and woodworker, said he was behind Hillebrand when the string struck him. Rose described it as a yellow nylon string that was stretched across the road.

Rose and others said the group members had stopped cycling and were standing on the bridge when the string suddenly jerked into Noble and Hillebrand. According to Rose, a string was later retrieved from the water by a boat.

“They collected a string,” Rose said. “But it’s not clearly determined that that was the specific string or not.”

Kite string has been blamed for injuring people and animals in this same area, according to Danny Mundy, president of the Broad Channel Civic Association, who blamed the sport of kite fighting for loose string littered throughout Jamaica Bay.

Mundy said his own father was injured in 2022 by kite string.

“He was on a bike trail by [Broad Channel American Park],” Mundy said. “He couldn’t see it and it hit him in the throat and he ended up with a laceration.”

Mundy said numerous waterfowl have been strangled by kite string as well.

Mundy has made several complaints to the city parks department to halt the practice and said the city eventually put up signs warning against kite fighting. A parks department spokesperson said kite fighting is not allowed in city parks and that it is looking into the issue.

In 2009, a 12-year-old boy won a lawsuit against the parks department after he received 400 to 500 stitches when he was sliced by a string that had fallen from a kite fight, according to news reports at the time.

“It's absolutely dangerous and unacceptable,” Mundy said. “ We can't do this no more because someone is going to get killed.”

This story has been updated with new information from the New York City Parks Department.