- NYPD arrested 72-year-old Michael Griffiths on Sept 29, eight months after former Nickelodeon child star Kianna Underwood, 33, was struck and killed in a Brooklyn hit-and-run.
- Griffiths faces charges of leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death and leaving the scene of an accident with injury; he has not been convicted.
- Surveillance footage from Jan 16 showed Underwood crossing at Watkins Street and Pitkin Avenue when an SUV crossed a double yellow line, hit her, and a second car dragged her body.
- Weeks after the crash, Griffiths told reporters he had done "nothing wrong" and that he left the scene because he felt faint and needed medication.
- Underwood was 10 when America first saw her on Nickelodeon's "All That"; she had been struggling with homelessness in recent years.
Eight months. That's how long the family of former Nickelodeon child star Kianna Underwood waited for somebody — anybody — to be held accountable for the morning she was struck down in a Brooklyn crosswalk and left there. On Tuesday, the NYPD finally made an arrest.
Michael Griffiths, 72, was taken into custody on Sept. 29 and charged with leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death and leaving the scene of an accident with injury, law enforcement sources told the New York Post, which first reported the arrest. Underwood, 33, was killed on the morning of Jan. 16 at the corner of Watkins Street and Pitkin Avenue in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.
The morning the cameras caught
It was just before 6:50 a.m. when Underwood stepped into the intersection. Surveillance footage later obtained by investigators showed her crossing against the light — and showed a Ford SUV crossing the double yellow line to pass a stopped car. The SUV struck her in the crosswalk with enough force to send her flying.
What happened next is the part her family will never unsee. A second vehicle, a black-and-gray sedan, then ran over her and dragged her body "several hundred feet" down Pitkin Avenue, according to police accounts. She was found with severe trauma at Osborn Street and Pitkin Avenue and was pronounced dead at the scene. The drivers of both vehicles kept going.
Police identified Griffiths' 2021 black Ford Explorer through the footage. The car was later impounded, and the Post reported its registration history showed 41 violations, including 25 speeding tickets. The driver of the second sedan has still not been identified.
"I did nothing wrong"
Weeks after the crash, while the investigation quietly ground on, Griffiths sat down with reporters — and his account raised eyebrows then. It reads differently now.
"At the time it was a little bit darkish. I was going to work… It felt like I hit something, and I pulled over and stopped," he told the New York Daily News in late January. He claimed he saw another car hit Underwood and start dragging her, got out of his SUV, joined bystanders trying to flag down the second car, and then left the scene — because, he said, he "felt like I was going to faint" and needed to get home to take his medication.
To the Post, he put it more bluntly: "I did nothing wrong."
Prosecutors and the NYPD clearly saw it differently. The charges handed down this week — fleeing a fatal crash and fleeing an injury crash — suggest investigators believe he knew exactly what his vehicle had hit, and drove away anyway. Griffiths has been charged, not convicted; he is presumed innocent unless proven guilty, and it will now be up to a courtroom to sort out whether "pulling over and stopping" was enough.
The girl America watched grow up
For a generation of kids who grew up in the early 2000s, Underwood was a familiar face. She joined the cast of Nickelodeon's sketch-comedy show All That for its tenth season in 2005, when she was just 10 years old. She went on to voice Fuchsia Glover on the PBS animated series Little Bill and played Little Inez in the first national tour of the Broadway musical Hairspray.
But the years after childhood fame were unkind. Underwood had been struggling with homelessness in recent years, living in the Brownsville neighborhood where she died. A former castmate, Angelique Bates, had publicly voiced concern about her wellbeing back in 2023.
That contrast — a child star the whole country once watched laughing on television, ending up a struggling 33-year-old in a Brooklyn crosswalk at dawn — is what made her story stick. It's also what makes the eight-month wait for an arrest feel so long.
What happens next
Griffiths is expected to be arraigned on the charges in Brooklyn court. The investigation remains open: the second driver — the one behind the sedan that police say dragged Underwood hundreds of feet — has never been identified, let alone charged. Anyone with information can call the NYPD's Crime Stoppers line at 1-800-577-TIPS; all calls are confidential.
For the people who loved Kianna Underwood, an arrest is a beginning, not an ending. But after eight months of silence, it's the first real movement in a case that once looked like it might be forgotten entirely.