A man driving a red Dodge truck last week smashed into a minivan parked in the driveway of a Riverdale daycare. A baby and a young child were inside, and two more children were nearby.
The driver fled the scene, but was later apprehended by police. No one was seriously injured.
“Who hits a van full of children and takes off like that?” asked Ashley Burns, mother of the two children inside the van.
“It’s sickening. Literally I haven’t been eating or sleeping for days thinking about the type of person that would do something like that.”
Burns arrived at the daycare Thursday afternoon to pick up her two sons. Her 10-month-old daughter was strapped in a car seat in the van.
One of her sons, age three, went out and into the parked minivan along with two older children to say hello to the baby, as they do every day, said Burns.
Burns went inside to help her other son clean up a mess he had made downstairs, she said. She could see the van parked in the driveway through the basement window.
Then she and her son made their way back upstairs.
“By the time I got to the top of the stairs, one of the other kids from the daycare was running through the door: ‘Somebody hit your van, somebody hit your van!’ He was screaming and crying. All the kids were screaming and crying.”
The two older kids who had been in the minivan saw the truck approaching and got out before the collision.
Burns’ three-year-old was thrown from the van in the crash and hit his head, possibly on an armrest, said Burns.
The van was pushed on to the daycare’s lawn, turned to about a 90 degree angle.
The rear axle and both rear wheels were gone. A stroller in the trunk was destroyed. The van was “completely totaled,” said Burns.
Witnesses said they saw the driver of the Dodge laughing as he drove away, said Burns.
The two children were taken to the hospital with minor injuries.
After the crash, her son behaved strangely, said Burns. He would repeat the same question, and he seemed unusually fearful.
Doctors X-rayed him, and may do further testing, she said.
Drugs and alcohol were not involved in the accident, according to an RCMP spokesperson.
The driver of the truck will appear in court in November on a charge of leaving the scene of an accident.
Contact Jacqueline Ronson at
jronson@yukon-news.com