‘IT’S A MIRACLE SHE SURVIVED’
A Hebron woman was left for dead in a church parking lot after a hit-and-run. State police are stumped about who almost killed her.
Lois Roy was filling in the cracks of a mostly empty church parking lot in Hebron one May morning when the improbable happened: She was run over by a hit-and-run driver. Roy, the church sexton in charge of maintenance, nearly died. She spent six weeks in intensive care at Hartford Hospital, intubated, and only recently began talking and walking.
“It’s a miracle she survived,” said the Rev. Michael Phillippino, pastor of the Church of the Holy Family.
Phillippino and an assistant were in church offices at the time and didn’t see what happened.
It appears no one else did, either.
“We really don’t have a witness,” said state police Sgt. Rob Scavello. “We’re kind of at a dead end. We don’t have much. We’re hoping someone will come forward.”
Broken bones, damaged organs
Roy, 58, had a broken pelvis and shoulder blade, a punctured lung and broken ribs and fingers. She also suffered internal bleeding and strokes, said her daughter, Rochelle Roy. She was dragged more than 10 feet from where she was working and left for dead.
Perhaps her most serious injury was a lacerated liver, her daughter said. It was a complication with her liver that forced her to return to Hartford Hospital recently after she had already spent two weeks at Gaylord Hospital in Wallingford for what is expected to be a lengthy rehabilitation.
Roy couldn’t talk until mid-july, and at first her voice was weak. She started walking the first week in August, Rochelle Roy said.
When Gaylord staff had her try taking a first step up a set of stairs, she did that and more, said Lois’ husband, Kevin Roy.
The hospital worker turned around for a minute and when she got back to Lois, she was at the top of the stairs, he said.
“She’s improving, a lot,” he said. “The doctors are flabbergasted.”
So are his wife’s many supporters.
When Rochelle Roy showed parishioners a video of her mother sitting up in her hospital bed, talking into the camera during a July fundraiser, there was a collective gasp in the church basement, followed by cheers.
Her mother thanked them for their support.
“It was short, but it was amazing,” Nicole Bernier, the church’s director of music ministry, said of the video message.
Said Rochelle Roy, “Everyone was kind of like, ‘What?’ ”
Roy said she is convinced it was videos like that that kept her mother alive during the early days of her recovery. She played short cellphone greetings for her mom from the very beginning of her hospitalization, and while her mother couldn’t see them at first, she could hear what was being said and later talked about them.
Some 250 people came to the July 24 pasta dinner, sitting inside, outside or stopping by for takeout, Bernier said. The church raised $11,000, and a Gofundme fundraiser has exceeded expectations, raising almost $25,000.
“It was amazing to see the generosity,” Rochelle Roy said.
Bernier said that’s how Hebron works.
Case in point: Lois Roy was injured before she was able to finish gardening, so the church divided the flower beds and bushes into sections and asked for volunteers to pick one, weed it and put mulch down, Bernier said. The job got done.
“Whenever we call for help, people step up,” she said.
Even from her hospital bed, Roy heard about the acts of generosity. Asked in a brief phone interview Wednesday if there is anything she wants to say, she said, “Just that I firmly believe that Jesus saved me. ... Thanks to the community and my faith community for all the prayers. The support from the entire community has been overwhelming.”
How did it happen?
With the exception of passing traffic on Route 85, the morning of May 27 was quiet, and the weather was fair. After painting part of the church office building’s front door, Roy switched gears and went to the north lot to seal some cracks. She knelt down, removed grass, weeds and debris from one and started filling it in.
Phillippino and an assistant, Roger Demers, were in the nearby building, each in his own office.
“I came into my office, I looked out the window and she was working in the parking lot,” the pastor said. “She was doing her thing.”
It wasn’t long before a frantic woman knocked on the front door that had just been painted. She didn’t speak English well, and she struggled to convey that she had seen Roy down in the parking lot while on a walk. “Down!” she said. Confused, Demers, followed by Phillippino, went out to see what was going on. They found Roy and called 911.
The woman who alerted church staff “saved her life,” Bernier said. “She could not have survived another 10 or 15 minutes.”
Although the woman left before troopers could talk to her, police eventually tracked her down and learned that she had not seen how Roy became injured. It is obvious to investigators that Roy was run over by a vehicle, state police said, although there was no evidence as to what kind.
Demers recalls having seen an unfamiliar small, black SUV in the parking lot when he first found Roy, but it had disappeared by the time troopers arrived.
Police don’t think the driver intentionally struck Roy.
“I don’t think anyone ran her over on purpose,” said Scavello, the state police sergeant. He said Roy “probably was crouched down” and may have been hard to see.
Parishioners think it was an accident, too. They’ve seen drivers mistakenly head down the church’s north entrance, thinking it was the driveway of a new town nature preserve next door. Raymond Brook Preserve’s driveway is parallel to, and only about 25 feet from, the church driveway, which is next to where Roy was patching the parking lot.
Rochelle Roy and others think the driver went down the wrong driveway, turned into the church parking lot to make a U-turn and, perhaps glancing at a cellphone GPS map, struck her mother.
What they find harder to understand is why the person didn’t stop and call for help.
Like the state police, Lois Roy’s church family hopes the driver comes forward.
“Accidents happen all the time. Silly little ones and big ones,” Rochelle Roy said. But “they have to take responsibility.”
Bernier suggested that coming forward might help the driver as well.
“Imagine what this person is carrying,” she said.
Anyone with any information that may help investigators is asked to call state police Detective Kyle Gorra at 860-896-3238 or Sgt. Rob Scavello at 860-848-6529.
Donations to help pay Lois Roy’s medical expenses may be sent to the Gofundme online account or to the Church of the Holy Family, 185 Church St., Amston, CT 06231.
Christine Dempsey can be reached at cdempsey@ courant.com.