Eleven days ago I published an essay on this site under a title I thought was about as blunt as the subject allowed: Another Horse Is Dead in Central Park. Enough. I was writing about Deniz, the sixteen-year-old gelding who went down on West Drive, and I argued that the welfare case against the carriages was long settled — that the only thing still missing was the political will to act on what we already knew. Three days after I posted it, a young man was killed in that same park, on a carriage ride. This time, the one who died was not a horse.
His name was Romanch Mahajan. He was eighteen, on a family trip from India, and on the afternoon of June 17th he was near Tavern on the Green when the horse pulling his carriage — a gelding named Sampson, six weeks into the job — bolted for reasons no one can name. The carriage clipped the wheel of another and went over on its side with people still in it, a small child among them. Romanch was thrown into the roadway. He was rushed to Weill Cornell in critical condition, and he died there. According to the union, the driver was not in the carriage at the time; he had stepped about an arm's length away to take a photo of the family. According to the family, Romanch spent the last seconds of his life trying to pull his mother clear. They called him a bright, brave eighteen-year-old. They called his death not an accident but "a direct result of a severe safety violation and systemic failure."
For a decade this fight has been argued almost entirely on the horses' suffering, and defenders of the trade have long offered the same reassurance: freak accident, isolated incident, thousands of rides without a problem. But a half-ton flight animal that panics in a crowded park was never a danger to itself alone. A frightened horse cannot weigh the harm it might do to itself against the harm it might do to the people beside it. The same animal that can be hurt on the asphalt is the animal that can pull a carriage into another and throw a passenger from it. The risk was never confined to the horse between the shafts. Sooner or later, it was going to reach a person.
I want to be honest about something. When I wrote about Deniz, his cause of death was still pending, and I speculated that a sixteen-year-old body had simply given out under a job it was never built for. The necropsy has since come back, and I was wrong about the mechanism: Deniz died after eating a toxic plant in the park. I'll take the correction gladly. But notice what it does not change. A horse died because a horse was there — grazing where poisonous plants grow, working where traffic moves. Poisoned or panicked, the common denominator is the animal being in the park at all. The mechanism keeps changing. The premise never does.
And the premise is the thing reform cannot reach. The union's answer to June 17th was a four-day "safety stand-down," refresher training, tougher exams, and hitching posts, so a driver can tether a horse before stepping away. They suspended the driver and are retiring Sampson, and they were right to call leaving the carriage "unacceptable." I believe the grief in their statements is real; the driver will carry that afternoon for the rest of his life, and I don't envy him a single day of it. But the lesson here is not one man's mistake. It is a system in which a single ordinary lapse — turning to take a family's picture — can end with a son dead in the road. We cannot call something safe when the distance between an easy afternoon and a death is as small as a driver turning to take a photograph.
NYCLASS put it plainly, and I think rightly: no amount of regulation or reform can stop the next horse from spooking and hurting someone. You cannot train the startle reflex out of a prey animal. No hitching post changes the fact that horses are easily frightened, and that a frightened horse in a crowded park is a danger no rulebook can fully contain. Reform assumes the problem is execution — a driver who erred, a protocol that needs tightening. The deeper problem is the premise: that we place the animals there at all.
And so I would gently retire the phrase "freak accident," the way I asked last time that we retire the word "tradition." A death is not a freak accident when the people who steward the park warned, in writing and for more than a year, that this very thing could happen. The Central Park Conservancy said as much the day Romanch died — this is the tragedy we feared — having called for a ban last year precisely because of the risk to public safety. We cannot honestly claim to be shocked by a danger we were warned of, named plainly, and licensed anyway. That is not a freak accident. That is a forecast.
Romanch was the eighth carriage incident in just over a year. When I wrote about Deniz it was seven, and every one of them was a horse. Now the tally includes a person — believed to be the first ever killed on a carriage ride in Central Park — and the bill that has not yet passed finally has a face to set beside the name. Council Member Christopher Marte, who carried Ryder's Law until it died in committee last November, stood at a vigil for Romanch this week and announced he is renaming it Romanch's Law, with a hearing set for July. Nearly four in five New Yorkers already want the trade gone. The Conservancy wants it gone. The mayor has said it should go. What is missing, still, is a single vote of the Council.
So here is where I will be plain. We do not need another study, another stand-down, another round of refresher training, another hitching post set into the ground. We need the Council to do the one thing it has put off for years and take the carriages off the streets of this city — for the horses, who were never truly safe, and now, just as clearly, for the people riding and standing beside them. Pass the law.
Romanch Mahajan came to New York to see the park. He was eighteen. He spent what turned out to be the last minutes of his life trying to get his mother away from a panicking animal this city never should have put in his path. His family has asked for a memorial in Central Park, and they should have it. But the memorial that would actually mean something is an empty stable and a law that carries his name. Retire the horses. End the trade. Make him the last.