Boston drivers have hit and seriously injured two children in the past three days, and in both cases, the drivers fled from the scene without stopping to care for their victims.
The first assault happened Wednesday morning, when 11-year-old Francis Nedwell disembarked from an MBTA bus with his aunt and mother on his way to 5th grade at Roxbury Prep’s Dorchester campus, according to family members.
Witnesses say that a white SUV (pictured above, with front-end damage from the crash clearly visible) struck Nedwell near the corner of Columbia Road and Intervale Street, then kept on driving.
The driver's assault sent the 11-year-old to the hospital with broken ribs and a collapsed lung, among other injuries, according to family members.
On Friday morning, Boston police reported that they had identified a suspect, who has not yet been identified, and that they planned to take the case to Roxbury District Court.
Also on Friday morning, another driver struck a child and fled from the scene near the Boston Police Academy in Boston's Hyde Park neighborhood.
Police say that the child, who has not yet been identified and whose age is unknown, was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.
That crash took place on Williams Street just after 8 a.m. on Friday.
Both of these crashes took place in neighborhoods with high proportions of Black residents: 35 percent of residents in the area around Williams Avenue in Hyde Park are Black, and 64 percent of residents in the vicinity of Columbia Road and Intervale Street are Black.
As previously reported on StreetsblogMASS, fatal crashes that kill bicyclists and pedestrians in Massachusetts are more likely to happen in neighborhoods where 10 percent or more of the population identifies as Black than in whiter-than-average neighborhoods.
This summer, the City of Boston was due to begin construction on traffic-calming improvements to several side streets in the Grove Hall neighborhood near where Francis Nedwell was injured, as part of its Neighborhood Slow Streets program.
However, according to project plans, that traffic calming effort will avoid making changes to Columbia Road, where Nedwell was hit.
