Boy scootering to school struck dead by tow truck in front of his mum | US News

A seven-year-old boy scootering to school alongside his mother was fatally run over by a tow truck.

Kamari Hughes was riding his scooter with his mom next to him around 7.50am on Thursday when a New York Police Department (NYPD) tow truck hit him and made him fall to the ground, police said.

‘You hit my child!’ Kamari’s mother yelled at the driver, witness Marlo Stevens, 50, told the New York Post.

The truck driver, employed by NYPD, ‘got out for a second to look, to see what she did, and then got back in the car’, according to Stevens.

‘When the mother realized the child was not moving she said, “You killed my child!”’ Stevens said. 

Kamari was pronounced dead at the scene, at Myrtle and North Portland avenues near Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn.  

Video from the scene showed the mother sitting at the crosswalk next to the body of her son which was covered by a white sheet. Investigators knelt down to talk to her.

‘When you saw that little baby’s skull… that was heart-wrenching,’ another witness, Antwoan Hayes, 40, told the Post.

The driver made a right turn on North Portland Avenue and struck Kamari as he was on the crosswalk, cops said.

Hayes said that the truck driver ‘kept moving’.

‘She kept going nine cars down, and two people jumped out in front of her vehicle,’ said Hayes. ‘That’s when she noticed and stopped. Everyone had to stop her and jump out in front of her vehicle for her to stop.’

But NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey said the driver stopped right away.

The driver who is a civilian member of the force, Stephanie Sharp, 54, has been charged with failure to yield to a pedestrian and failure to exercise due care, the Post reported on Friday.

Sharp was given a court-appearance ticket and subsequently released.

Kamari grandfather, Derrick Vaughn, 58, lamented that he ‘just held him in my arms yesterday’.

‘He was amazing at math at seven years old, loved doing division, loved school,’ Vaughn told the newspaper.

‘He was a very outdoor dude – he liked to do flips, sports, basketball, and anything daredevil. 

‘If you met him, you’d love him.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.