Boy,15, in Lamar Odom crash dies

[vikesfan]

Neighbors have buried a teenager who died when a motorcycle collided with a vehicle carrying Los Angeles Lakers player Lamar Odom and hurtled onto a New York City sidewalk.

Police spokesman Paul Browne said a motorcycle tried to turn left in front of the chauffeured Cadillac Escalade sport-utility-vehicle that Odom was riding in on Thursday.


The motorcycle hit the front bumper of the SUV and went out of control in the Woodside neighborhood of Queens. It struck 15-year-old Awsaf Alvi Islam, and he died on Friday from head injuries.

"He was brought in in grave condition," Elmhurst Hospital spokesman Dario Centorcelli told the New York Daily News.

The boy's family decided to donate his organs, according to the Daily News. His mother was by his side when he died, the newspaper reported, but his father was in the family's native Bangladesh.

Mourners gathered on the sidewalk in front of the mosque on Monday and bowed their heads in prayer around Islam's plain wooden casket. Members of a local mosque took up a collection to pay for the burial.

The motorcyclist has been treated and released, the Daily News reported.

Odom, who was in town for a cousin's funeral service, offered his condolences to the boy's family via Twitter.

"My thoughts and prayers are with the young boys family," he tweeted.

A spokesman for Attitude New York, the transportation service involved in the accident told ESPNLosAngeles.com: "We are deeply saddened by the family's loss. Our thoughts and prayers are with them. We are cooperating with the investigation and can not say anything further at this point."

Odom was not at the scene of the accident when officers responded and was not mentioned in the police report, a source not authorized to speak publicly on the matter told ESPNLosAngeles.com's Dave McMenamin.

A source close to Odom told the New York Post that he was not physically injured in the accident, but was "shaken up" by the incident.

Odom's wife, Khloe Kardashian, is with the Lakers player in New York, but her publicist confirmed that she was not in the car at the time of the accident.