The death of a 26-year-old yeshiva student in Crown Heights has stirred concern among members of the tight knit chasidic community, with some of them questioning how the student lapsed into a fatal coma two days after entering Kings County Hospital Center for treatment of a fractured foot.

The student, Efraim Vexler, an Israeli, was taken to Kings County Hospital June 30 after he was struck by an allegedly drunken driver while crossing Kingston Avenue on his way back to his dormitory on President Street. Friends of Vexler’s say he was conscious and fully alert when he entered the hospital.

A New York City attorney who represents Vexler’s estate, Alvin Bernstone, declined to provide details about the young man’s treatment at the hospital but said the student died July 28.

Officials at Kings County Hospital, on Clarkson Avenue, said in a statement: “Our deepest sympathy goes out to the Vexler family at this time. Although we are not permitted to comment on a specific medical case without the consent of the family, the treating physician has met with the family on a number of occasions.”

Someone who works at the hospital, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that he spoke with Vexler while the student was in the hospital and that the student anxiously asked doctors July 1 to treat his injured foot. According to the hospital worker, later that day, Vexler began to have trouble breathing and received an oxygen tube, and he fell into a coma July 2.

The assistant director of trauma and critical-care surgery at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, Sheldon Teperman, said complications involving pedestrians hit by motor vehicles sometimes develop days after the initial trauma.

“There is no such thing as a minor ‘pedestrian struck,'” he said.

Vexler’s death comes a little more than a month after the city settled a $10 million malpractice lawsuit brought against the municipal hospital by the family of Yankel Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum was a chasidic doctoral student who was fatally stabbed during the Crown Heights riots in 1991 and died while under emergency care at the hospital.

The family of Rosenbaum accused the hospital of failing to detect one of the stab wounds, and city officials, reaching a $1.25 million settlement with the family, acknowledged errors in the hospital’s treatment of Rosenbaum, according to a statement released by the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation.

At Lubavitch headquarters on Eastern Parkway yesterday, students and rabbis described Vexler as one of the older bachelor students, who felt responsible for those colleagues coming to study at the center with scant financial resources.

Some described a level of concern about the hospital in the community at a level reminiscent of the early years following Rosenbaum’s death. An official at the Ahavas Chesed charitable organization in Crown Heights, Shneor Goodman, said students have expressed fear about being treated at the hospital.

When a 20-year-old student complained of stomach pains this week and requested an ambulance, Mr. Goodman said, friends of the student instructed the ambulance driver not to take him to Kings County Hospital. Mr. Goodman said the ambulance was already directed to SUNY Downstate Medical Center, which handles such illnesses.

Vexler’s family members, who live in Beersheba, Israel, have filed suit against the driver and the owner of the Honda that struck the student and are considering suing the hospital, Mr. Bernstone said.

In fiscal 2002, medical-malpractice payouts for Kings County Hospital totaled $35.6 million, according to a city comptroller’s report. In fiscal 2005, malpractice payouts for the hospital totaled $27 million. The hospital is opening a new emergency, diagnostic, and treatment pavilion in the fall, part of a five-phase redevelopment project that started in 1997.