Teen Driver Kills Father of Three In Boston’s Arborway Park
An as-yet-unidentified 18-year-old driver lost control of his vehicle and killed Ilir Janko Melka, a 48-year-old father of three from Worcester, in a head-on crash on Boston’s Arborway outside the Arnold Arboretum on Sunday afternoon.
The crash occurred around 1:50 p.m., according to Boston first responders and eyewitnesses.
Dashcam footage of the crash obtained by WHDH (warning: graphic content) shows a white sedan speeding northbound on the Arborway, taking advantage of the roadway’s multi-lane layout to veer around slower traffic, before going into a skid on the curve north of the Arboretum’s Forest Hills gate.
The driver then loses control, strikes the roadway’s battered concrete median barrier, which launches the vehicle into the air, and crashes head-on into the windshield of a red Honda CRV that Melka had been driving in the Arborway’s single southbound lane.
The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office reports that Melka was declared dead on the scene, and that the teen driver was injured and hospitalized.
The speed limit on the Arborway is 25 mph.
Planned safety improvements are years overdue
The Arborway is allegedly a public park roadway owned by the state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR).
For seven years now, DCR has been hosting public meetings for a proposed redesign of the Arborway that would improve safety and reduce the amount of asphalt in the public’s parkland – if it ever gets built.
Those plans have called for converting most of the roadway along the Arnold Arboretum from a multi-lane divided highway into a more typical two-lane street with a simple painted yellow line in place of a median.
Had been implemented, the plan would have eliminated two features of the roadway that contributed to the lethality of Sunday’s crash: the passing lane that enabled the perpetrator to speed around slower vehicles, and the median barrier that subsequently launched his vehicle into the air.
DCR hasn’t provided a public hearing about the project’s status since January 2025.
In the 21 months since that meeting, drivers have caused at least 39 other injury-causing crashes along the Arborway, plus over 120 other less-serious crashes, according to the MassDOT IMPACT crash database.
On Tuesday morning, StreetsblogMASS inquired about the status of the project, and we also asked whether DCR would implement any immediate emergency safety measures in light of Sunday’s killing.
The agency had not yet responded when this story was published at 4:15 p.m. (we’ll update this article if they do provide a statement).
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