Irving Schachter
75 years old

The Sunday Irving Schachter died, he’d planned to run 18 miles in Central Park, his third and longest run of the week. At 75, the former physics professor was in training for his second New York Marathon.

“I didn’t think of him as elderly,” his wife, Hindy, told The New York Post shortly after he died. “He was a fantastic amateur cyclist. We liked to go to the theater, we hiked.”

The couple met in the summer of 1967 and married shortly after. They settled on the Upper East Side and Irving got a job teaching AP Physics at Brooklyn Technical High School in Fort Greene, where he taught for decades and was known to his students as “Shack”. “He was a brilliant guy,” said former student Eugene Cheleshkin told The Post. “He could take a complicated subject and make it fun.”

His son-in-law, Alexander Levi, told the Post that Schachter enjoyed applying his knowledge of his physics to his passion for cycling. “He would have entertained all your debates about the physics of collisions, momentum, mass, acceleration, and demystified it all for you, with a broad smile,” Levi said.

This collision happened on August 3, 2014 near East Drive near 72nd Street in Manhattan. See details in the Mean Streets Tracker.

Mean Streets 2014: Who We Lost, How They Lived

Throughout 2014, WNYC tracked the 265 men, women and children killed in traffic crashes in New York City. In addition to reporting the circumstances of their deaths, we looked at who they were in life: mothers, fathers, grandparents, students, recent immigrants and native New Yorkers. To read some of their stories, click on a photograph.