VIDEO: Teen Killed By Runaway Horse Carriage

A red alert button with the word 'ALERT' above it — SHOCKING NEWS ALERT

An 18-year-old tourist is dead, a horse bolted, and now the fight over New York’s carriage industry is back on a boil.

Story Snapshot

A carriage horse in Central Park bolted without a driver on board, killing an 18-year-old tourist.
The fatal crash came just days after another Central Park carriage horse, Deniz, dropped dead after eating a toxic plant.
Supporters of a ban say the twin deaths prove horse carriages are unsafe in a modern city.
Industry defenders blame rare freak events, plant hazards, and a driver’s mistake, not the entire trade.

Two deaths in eight days turn a long-running dispute white hot

Police say an 18-year-old tourist from India, visiting New York City with his family, died after a Central Park carriage horse bolted and flipped the carriage on Wednesday afternoon.^[2]

The crash happened near West 67th Street around 2:45 p.m., on one of the park’s busiest carriage loops.^[2]^[3]^[4] This was not a slow mishap. Video shows the horse running at speed, carriage rocking on two wheels, other drivers and bystanders caught in the chaos.^[4]^[7]^[9]

An 18-year-old man died after a Central Park carriage horse got loose and took off in the park on Wednesday afternoon. https://t.co/CWT1rGhp0q pic.twitter.com/Pmc1GuoRKR

— Action News on 6abc (@6abc) June 18, 2026

The teen, identified as Romanch Mahajan, was riding with three relatives when the horse suddenly took off.^[2]^[3] According to union officials, the driver had stepped away from the horse to snap a photo of the family, an action the union itself admits is not allowed.^[1]^[5]^[6]

As the loose carriage sped down the loop, at least two people jumped clear. The carriage then clipped the wheel of another carriage and tipped, throwing Mahajan to the pavement.^[2]^[3]^[4]

What happened in those final seconds

Witness video and union accounts line up on the basic chain of events. A horse named Sampson, in the park only about six weeks, is seen taking off with the carriage still loaded.^[3]^[4]^[9] The driver runs after the rig but never regains control.^[4]

The carriage sways, then strikes another carriage, and finally overturns.^[3]^[4]^[7]^[8] Mahajan was rushed to NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in critical condition and died a few hours later.^[1]^[2]^[4]

Police say no one else required hospital treatment, and the horse appeared physically unhurt.^[2]^[3]^[4] The carriage owner suspended the driver, and the union says the horse will be retired from service.^[1]^[4]

The Central Park Conservancy, which manages the park grounds, said this is the first known death of a carriage passenger in the park’s history.^[4] For families who think of carriage rides as harmless nostalgia, that fact alone is chilling.

Eight days earlier, another horse died on the job

The fatal wreck did not happen in a vacuum. Just over a week earlier, a 16-year-old carriage horse named Deniz collapsed and died while pulling a carriage near East 90th Street with passengers on board.^[1]^[2]^[3] None of the people in that carriage were seriously hurt, but video of the horse trembling and falling helped ignite a heated blame game between activists, drivers, and park managers.^[1]^[2]^[18]

A veterinary pathologist at Cornell University found “abundant” Japanese yew needles and plant material in Deniz’s mouth and stomach and concluded the amount present was enough to be lethal.^[1]

Japanese yew is a decorative, non-native shrub that is highly toxic to horses and can trigger cardiac arrest after even a small dose.^[1]^[2] The union seized on those findings to argue that park landscaping, not carriage work, killed the horse.^[1]^[18]

‘Ban them all’ vs. ‘Fix what failed’

Animal-welfare groups that have long pushed to ban carriage horses in cities see these two incidents as the last straw.^[19]^[21]^[22]

They point to years of horses collapsing, spooking into traffic, or dying on the street and argue that mixing prey animals, cars, buses, bicycles, and tourists on phones is a recipe for exactly what just happened. From that view, a teenager’s death is not a freak event but a predictable result of ignoring warnings.^[19]^[21]^[23]

ALERT: Horse dies in Central Park after eating Japanese yew plant, and the local union is outraged.

Deniz, a 16-year-old gelding horse, died after allegedly eating Japanese yew, a “highly toxic” poisonous plant, according to TWU Local 100, which represents carriage horse… pic.twitter.com/tfifL0WE4Q

— E X X ➠A L E R T S (@ExxAlerts) June 17, 2026

Carriage drivers and their allies push back hard. They note that serious passenger deaths are extremely rare and say most rides end without incident.^[23]^[26] In Mahajan’s case, even the union concedes the driver violated basic safety rules by leaving the horse to take a photo.^[5]^[6]

In Deniz’s case, they say the science points to a poisonous plant that could have killed any horse, anywhere, not just a carriage horse in Central Park.^[1]^[11]

What common sense says should happen next

When government allows a business to use public streets and parks, the baseline duty is simple: protect innocent people and animals as much as possible.

Two glaring failures stand out here. A park that allows lethal landscaping where horses work daily is asking for tragedy.^[1]^[2] And a driver who walks away from a hitched horse with a loaded carriage is courting disaster.

None of that proves every carriage ride is unsafe. It does prove that rules only matter if people follow them and if city leaders enforce them.

Reasonable steps exist between “do nothing” and “ban every horse tomorrow”: remove toxic plants on routes, mandate stricter training, and suspend any driver who leaves a horse unattended during a ride. But if city officials will not do even that much, calls for an outright ban will only get louder—and after an 18-year-old’s death, those calls will be harder to dismiss.