Posted on 05/02/2007 5:50:30 PM PDT by upchuck
A sport-utility vehicle jumped a curb outside a middle school Wednesday afternoon and plowed into a group of children waiting for a bus, seriously injuring at least two of them, police and hospital officials said.
The incident occurred around 12:30 p.m. as Ralston Middle School was letting out for the day. Witnesses said the car, a 2004 Honda Pilot, was in the school parking lot when it hit the students and then rammed into a tree before stopping.
Chopper11 showed several emergency crews at the school. It also showed a gold SUV on the curb nearest to the school entrance. The SUV appeared to have been stopped by a tree planter.
NBC11 spoke to one student who witnessed the crash who described a scene of chaos following the crash.
"I saw many of my friends helping in the accident. I was devastated. I wasn't really prepared for it," Donald Heatherington said.
Five to seven children were hit, including several who were trapped under the SUV when it flipped onto its side, said Belmont Police Lt. Dan DeSmidt of Belmont police. Other students were injured or shaken up as they tried to escape the oncoming car, DeSmidt said .
A witness called into San Francisco radio station KCBS and said the victims are children. He said an SUV-type vehicle jumped a curb and struck the children, who were walking on a sidewalk.
He said people used a tire jack and their own muscles to lift the vehicle off the young people. He also said the injuries do not appear life-threatening, but that some of the victims did suffer broken bones.
The youngsters may have escaped getting crushed because of the vehicle's relatively high clearance and the angle at which it landed.
"They are little kids and they can fortunately fit under there," a fire official said.
In all, 13 children and the SUV's male driver were taken to a half-dozen area hospitals, according to Fire Chief Doug Fry of the Belmont-San Carlos Fire Department. Information on their injuries and conditions was not immediately available.
"All I can say is for some unknown reason the SUV lost control," Fry said.
The SUV's driver was at the school in Belmont to pick up a student, although DeSmidt said he did not know his relationship to the youngster.
The Honda was registered to Mauro H. Yan and Lorenza Y. Yan, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles. A telephone listing for Mauro Yan was not in service.
At the scene, investigators combed through debris spread over a 30-foot-wide radius, including the SUV's front grill and discarded sneakers and backpacks. They noted the absence of skid marks that would have indicated the driver tried to stop, but said it was too soon to draw conclusions about what that meant.
"It certainly all falls into the investigation, but at this point we have no cause to believe it was an intentional act," DeSmidt said.
Four teenage boys were admitted to Stanford Medical Center, two with potentially life-threatening injuries, including a head injury and a possibly fractured pelvis, hospital spokeswoman Jonnie Banks said. The other pair had superficial injuries, he said.
"I want to emphasize these are possibly life-threatening injuries. They are still being assessed. Any head injury could be life-threatening, as could any possibly fractured pelvis,' she said.
One young victim was taken by helicopter to Eden Medical Center's trauma center in Castro Valley but was likely to be treated and released, hospital spokeswoman Cassandra Phelps said.
Several other hospitals, including San Francisco General Hospital, reported receiving patients involved in the incident.
Students were leaving school at the end of a day shortened because of standardized testing, school officials said. They planned to open as usual on Thursday, but would cancel the tests for the remainder of the week.
"It happened right as school let out so I'm sure a lot of students saw what happened," said Lawrence Chu, office manager at Fellowship Bible Church, which is near the school.
The church's pastor, who is also the Belmont police chaplain, went to the school to counsel students shaken up after witnessing the crash, Chu said.
This is an amazing story.
I started reading about all the horrible, unbelievable damage this SUV had caused. And I'm thinking to myself, "Gee, I wonder if the SUV had to be trained to do this kind of damage or maybe it did by instinct?"
Finally, I get to paragraph eleven and discover the SUV had a DRIVER. Whew! I thought for sure we had another case of a SUV gone wild.
This is a perfect example of the kind of POS journalists being produced by the journalism colleges today. Crap!
The Flying Dutchman strikes again!!
Sorry, I don't believe this. SUVs don't drive themselves...I bet there was a GUN behind the wheel!
Prayers for all the children & their families ~Pandora~
Thirteen, by my count.
Yan Can't Drive.
Every journalist knows instinctively that pretty much every SUV is out of control.
The headline was essentially SUV jumps curb, attacks elementary school children in California.
Those SUVs are getting as mean as pitbull dogs.
On a serious note, they reported that the driver is an undentified lone male, and several children were hurt.
lol....the SUV lost control of its driver, eh?
Indeed there was, and it was smoking a cigarette!
LOL!
What do you know about this?
This must be at least the hundredth story I have read that accuses SUVs of causing accidents or killing people.
If you saw these stories occasionally, OK, so reporters these days are kind of dumb and don’t know how to write properly. They are better trained in leftist ideology than grammar. But is seems as if EVERY SUV story does the same thing.
It seems as if the MSM hates SUVs even more than they hate President Bush.
The most bizarre sentence in this report is this one:
“All I can say is for some unknown reason the SUV lost control,” Fry said.
The SUV lost control? Control of what, its driver? How can an inanimate object LOSE CONTROL?
Clearly we need SUV Control measures to be passed. Only the police need SUVs.
Sarcasm? Of course.
According to reports, the SUV had been doing a fine job of driving up to this point. Police are speculating it have have been distracted by a nice looking pickup truck.
My screen name is linked to my husbands FR name, Pan Yan. He enjoyed works by the author Henryk Sienkiewicz. In the book, With Fire and Sword, Pan Yan is a main character. Funny, though... on FR I am often mistaken as being Asian. :)
What was this SUV doing, yapping on its cell phone? What was it, halfway through the article before the author mentioned that the SUV contained a - gasp - driver?
After reading the story, I wanted to make my own sarcastic statement about the Suv having a mind of it’s own and so many beat me to it. Too bad for the kids but this is so poorly written by making the inanimate object animated.
It was smoking to cover the smell of gun powder on its breath. It didn't want people to know it was driving around half cocked!
It depends on the breed. This one may have been a Pit Bull SUV. Very unpredictable.
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