Hit-and-Run Driver Kills 4-Year-Old Boy In Hyde Park
Surveillance footage from the corner of Wood Ave. and Stafford St. in Hyde Park shows a gray hatchback, whose operator is suspected of hitting and killing a 4-year-old boy nearby. Courtesy of the Boston Police Department.
Boston Police homicide detectives are searching for a driver who struck and killed a 4-year-old boy in Boston's Hyde Park neighborhood Tuesday night.
Around 9:30 p.m. on July 18, Boston Police responded to a reported crash near 165 Wood Avenue in Hyde Park. There, they found a 4-year-old boy suffering from serious injuries.
Emergency medical technicians took the boy to a local hospital, where doctors later pronounced him dead.
Police suspect that the driver of a "dark grey subcompact hatchback" hit the boy and fled the scene without stopping.
On Wednesday evening, police released a short surveillance video from the neighborhood that shows the suspected perpetrator driving aggressively through the intersection of Wood Avenue and Stafford Street, headed north towards the scene of the killing.
Wood Avenue is a two-lane street that runs through a mostly residential neighborhood between Cummins Highway in the north and River Street in the south, roughly parallel to Hyde Park Avenue.
In 2022, the City of Boston installed flexible-post bollards and small speed humps at several intersections along Wood Avenue in the vicinity of Tuesday's killing in an attempt to calm traffic.
Those bollards encourage turning cars to slow down by forcing them to make turns at a tighter angle through the neighborhood's wide intersections.
But they have less effect on vehicles traveling straight on Wood Avenue, as the suspected killer appears to be doing in the surveillance video.
The adjacent neighborhood east of Wood Avenue has been targeted for an early phase of speed hump installation under Mayor Wu's "safety surge."
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