2 cyclists crossing Marine Parkway Bridge get sliced by kite string

A kite string suspended across the Marine Parkway Bridge cut into one bicyclist’s throat and another’s head and finger as they unknowingly rode into it on Sunday, one of the cyclists told Gothamist.

Police confirmed two cyclists were transported to a city hospital in Coney Island after the collision, and that they’re investigating the incident.

One rider, 36-year-old Crown Heights resident Jennifer Noble, said she was biking north on the bridge’s bike lane with her friends at around 5:20 p.m. after a beach day at Jacob Riis Park, when she and one other person rode into the string.

“ I caught it with my hand. I tried to prevent it from moving, but it cut through my fingers and then my forehead and then hit me on the helmet, and I went backwards and it went over me and hit him,” she said.

The string struck her friend, a 40-year-old man, in the throat, causing serious injury, she said. Police also confirmed reports of both riders’ injuries.

Noble said she had noticed a kite flying erratically near the bridge moments earlier, but said the string on the path was completely invisible until it was too late. She said she didn’t see exactly where the kite had come from before it ended up there.

“ I'm a birder, so I'm always looking at the sky and I'd noticed this very, interesting-looking black-and-white kite in the sky as we were coming up the bike path,” she said. “That was my first thought when I ran into the skirt string — I could feel the tension of the wind on it. I just knew it was a kite string.”

Noble said the group she was with and other cyclists who were on the bridge jumped into action, applying pressure to the two riders’ wounds and calling first responders. Noble’s friend is now recovering at Kings County Hospital's intensive care unit, according to a GoFundMe page created to help him with the costs associated with his injuries.

Noble said she didn’t see what happened to the string after the collision.

She said the kite looked similar to those used in kite fighting, where participants try to cut the strings of their opponents' kites, sometimes by using string with glass coating. The sport has raised environmental concerns in the Rockaways, where the strings have ended up in the bay’s wetlands, or across rooftops of homes in Broad Channel, according to a Rockaway Wave report in 2023. At the time, the newspaper described two incidents similar to Sunday’s, in which cyclists ran into kite strings they didn’t know were there.

Now, Noble said, she fears more people will get hurt.

“ If part of kite fighting is that one of the kites gets cut off and flies away, I don't see how there's a way to do that safely,” Noble said.  ”It's such a danger, it just feels like a matter of time before someone else gets hurt in this way. So as a public safety concern, I would like to see that addressed.”