The victims were spread along the bike path between Houston Street and Chambers Street. The first person struck was a Belgian tourist cycling with her mother and two sisters; she was killed instantly. Three members of another Belgian family were hit moments later; the mother survived but lost both legs. Ten Argentine tourists, friends in their late forties who had come to New York to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of their high school graduation, were cycling in two columns of five. The truck struck all ten, killing the entire left column and injuring the five on the right. Darren Drake, thirty-two, from New Milford, New Jersey, was riding a Citi Bike on his lunch break. Nicholas Cleves, twenty-three, from Manhattan, was the last cyclist killed. A teacher from nearby Stuyvesant High School was thrown into the air but survived with minor injuries. In total, eight people died and eleven cyclists were wounded along a single mile of what had been, minutes earlier, a peaceful riverside path on a clear autumn afternoon.

After the mile-long attack, the driver accelerated to sixty-six miles per hour, jumped the median, struck a sign and a traffic light, and slammed into a school bus carrying students with special needs near the corner of Chambers Street and West Street. Two of the four people on the bus were injured. The driver exited the truck and ran in a zigzag pattern, brandishing what appeared to be two firearms -- later identified as a paintball gun and a pellet gun. He shouted "Allahu Akbar." NYPD officer Ryan Nash shot him once in the abdomen. Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, a twenty-nine-year-old Uzbekistan-born permanent U.S. resident living in Paterson, New Jersey, was taken into custody and transported to Bellevue Hospital. Inside the truck, investigators found an ISIL flag and a handwritten note pledging allegiance to the group.

Saipov had entered the United States in 2010 on a Diversity Immigrant Visa. He lived in Ohio, then Florida, then New Jersey, where he worked as an Uber driver for six months and held a commercial truck license. In 2015, federal agents interviewed him about his contacts with two suspected terrorists but did not open a case. An acquaintance from his early years in the U.S. described him as "a little aggressive" and not particularly religious. His radicalization appeared to accelerate in the months before the attack, during which he regularly prayed at a Paterson mosque. After waiving his Miranda rights, Saipov told investigators he had deliberately chosen Halloween to maximize civilian presence, had rented a truck on October 22 for a test drive near the route, and had been planning the attack for about a year. NYPD Deputy Commissioner John Miller said Saipov had followed ISIL's published guidance on vehicular attacks "almost exactly to a T."

Federal prosecutors charged Saipov with eight murders in the aid of racketeering, twelve attempted murders, destruction of a motor vehicle, and providing material support for a terrorist organization. Jury selection began in October 2022. On January 26, 2023, Saipov was found guilty on all counts. The prosecution sought the death penalty, but the jury could not reach unanimous agreement on capital punishment for any of the charges. On May 17, 2023, Saipov was sentenced to eight consecutive terms of life without parole, plus two concurrent life terms, plus 260 years. He is incarcerated at ADX Florence, the federal supermax facility in Colorado. The victims' names are not abstracted into a statistic: Diego Enrique Angelini, Ariel Erlij, Hernan Ferruchi, Hernan Diego Mendoza, Alejandro Damian Pagnucco, Ann-Laure Decadt, Darren Drake, Nicholas Cleves.

Transportation Alternatives, a cycling advocacy group, had been pushing for protective bollards along the Hudson River Greenway since 2006, when two separate vehicular incidents caused fatalities on the bike path. The city had made only cosmetic changes. After the attack, officials installed temporary barriers along the path and began planning permanent protections. Argentine President Mauricio Macri and his wife Juliana Awada visited the Chambers Street site a week later and met with survivors. One World Trade Center's spire was lit in red, white, and blue. And the Village Halloween Parade -- tens of thousands of costumed New Yorkers marching up Sixth Avenue -- went forward that same evening, with Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo joining the procession. The decision to march was itself a statement: the deadliest terrorist attack in New York since September 11 would not cancel Halloween.