Hothead horror
Qns. bus driver doesn’t know when she’ll walk again after run over in road rage
A chance road rage encounter with a hotheaded gang member put a school-bus driver from Queens in a wheelchair — and she fears it will be months before she walks again.
Camilla Gainey suffered broken ribs, a shattered pelvis, and an array of other injuries when, police say, 22-year-old Kymani Hardie ran her down in East New York, Brooklyn, because he didn’t want to wait behind her at a red light.
And the kicker, Gainey says, is that Hardie was free on $1 bail in a stolen-car case after allegedly stealing an Infiniti sedan at Livonia and Alabama Aves. on Feb. 8. Hardie, who has a suspended license, blew through a red light and slammed into another car driven by a pregnant woman and took off on foot, according to a Brooklyn Criminal Court complaint.
Hardie was arrested on attempted murder and other charges Monday.
“My life has been changed, all over someone who has 19 arrests and got out on a dollar bail,” Gainey, 44, an ordained clergy member, told the Daily News in her home in Far Rockaway. “Look at me, I’m in a wheelchair with five broken ribs. My pelvis is shattered, my back is fractured and I have a lacerated liver.”
She needs pins in her knees and wrists after the April 30 road rage clash, which was recorded in horrific detail on surveillance video.
“He was out on a dollar bail, that’s crazy. Whoever heard on a dollar bail? Look what I’m going through. I can’t walk and I’m in pain. Maybe in six months I’ll be able to walk again. Maybe.”
Hardie, a member of the Folk Nation gang, became enraged while behind Gainey’s bus on a Linden Blvd. service road near Hinsdale St., cops said.
“I was stopped at a red light. He got out and told me to move the school bus. The light was red,” she explained.
She had already dropped off the kids, and her matron, and was on her way home, she said.
“We didn’t argue or anything. All he said was move the bus. I said I couldn’t move the bus at a red light,” she recounted. “He punched my mirrors out, both the convex and the flat mirror. He walked away and I thought it was over.”
Gainey took out her phone and started recording, since she’d have to file an accident report over the broken mirrors.
“If I got a picture of a plate, that might be good,” she recalled. “I got out to put [traffic safety] triangles out. I noticed a vehicle turning toward me.”
She continued, “I put my hand out and I felt the hood of the Subaru. It made contact with my leg.” Then, she blacked out. “When I woke up, I said move this off me. They were cutting off my clothes. They said they couldn’t move me until they checked if my neck was broken,” she explained. After that, she said, “I came to in the hospital after surgery. The detective, my mother and my daughters were there.”
Gainey said she gets nervous every time she hears a car rev up.
“All this could have been avoided. He shouldn’t have been on the street,” she added, “Even if he does 20 years, he gets out before my age, and he gets to live a full life.”