The Bronx man accused of fatally hitting an emergency medical worker with her own ambulance was convicted of first-degree murder on Wednesday. Jose Gonzalez, 31, was found guilty after a nearly month-long trial in which his attorney attempted to argue he’d been “delusional” when he climbed into Yadira Arroyo’s ambulance in March, 2017. Arroyo, a 14-year FDNY veteran and a mother of five, had been responding to an emergency when a teenager who’d just been robbed by Gonzalez waved it down. When Arroyo got out to help, Gonzalez charged for the driver’s seat, climbing in as she and her partner tried to stop him. He then backed over Arroyo, who died at the scene. “She was a first responder but more importantly she was a hero, out there doing her job, serving the public and to lose her life in this way,” Darcel Clark, the Bronx district attorney, said after the verdict. “It means so much that today, almost six years later, we finally, finally get justice for her.” Arroyo’s aunt, Ali Acevedo-Hernandez, added, “We waited six years, through ups and downs, anger, despair, emotion, agony, but we finally did it.”
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