SUV mows down girl, 10
Qns. driver hits woman, kills child & slams into building
An out-of-control driver plowed into a woman and a 10-year-old girl, killing the youngster, before slamming into a shuttered car wash in Queens on Wednesday afternoon, police and witnesses said.
Rescuers desperately tried to save Davina Afokoba, who was pinned underneath the driver’s SUV, but the car wash collapsed on top of the vehicle, pelting it with bricks and a steel beam.
The horrific crash was caught on video — the youngster was carrying her book bag, walking along a sidewalk on Beach Channel Drive by Dix Ave. in Far Rockaway, when a black Mazda CX-9 rocketed out of the parking lot of the Shop Fair Supermarket across the street just before 4:15 p.m.
A family friend said she was on her way home from her charter school, and had stopped at a deli moments earlier with her teenage brother, who witnessed the ghastly carnage from across the street.
“She was with her teenage brother. She stopped to get something from the store. When she came out she was in the walkway, and the car came up on the sidewalk and crushed her,” said the friend, who gave only his first name, Ibrahim.
“He came home and told us all,” he said of her older sibling.
The 35-year-old woman at the wheel had just finished shopping, and was trying to make a left turn, edging too far into the street as she waited for traffic to ease, said supermarket worker Legend Jones, 43.
“She went across there from zero to 60. She gunned it and went straight into the building,” he said. “She meant to take the left, but she went straight.”
Her SUV barreled across the street and mounted the curb, striking the girl and a woman, 33, before smashing through the long-closed car wash and hitting a support pillar, sources said. Two other pedestrians, a man and a young boy, scrambled out of the way in time, sources said.
“She clipped a lady and then went straight into that little girl,” Jones said. “The little girl had no time to do nothing. She didn’t have a chance. We tried to pull her out of there. I was holding her hand. She was moaning.”
He recounted how he tried to assure the girl, urging her: “Hold on, shorty. We’ve got you, we’re going to get you out.” But time wasn’t on their side.
The façade of the car wash came crashing down on the SUV, sending a steel beam through the windshield, police sources said.
“The building started falling apart. The bricks were falling. A cinder block hit my hand,” Jones said. “The beam came down on the car, and it was over.”
The driver stayed on the scene. Jones said she got out of the car, wailing in alarm and vomiting.
A yellow sticker on her car’s rear bumper read, “New driver please be patient.” Her car had a temporary paper license plate.
“The Fire Department had to cut the bricks out to get her body. Her head was one way, and her body was the other,” Jones said. “It was crazy.”
Davina’s mother, identified by neighbors as Priscilla Afokoba, rushed to the 101st Precinct stationhouse after hearing about the crash, and collapsed in grief, police sources said.
She could be heard crying out through the open door of the family’s home, three blocks from the crash: “My daughter! My daughter! My little girl! She was just walking home!”
Davina’s family came to the U.S. from Nigeria, according to Ibrahim, the family friend. He described her as a “beautiful girl” with a creative streak and a penchant for writing.
“She was a very, very brilliant girl. She was working on a novel, and when she got home today, she was going to go over it with her mother,” he said. “She liked to write scripts.”
Medics took the injured woman — who managed to pull herself from underneath the station wagon after suffering leg injuries — to St. John’s Episcopal Hospital in stable condition.
The investigation was continuing, police said.
The child’s death came a little more than an hour after a motorist struck and critically injured a 5-year-old Brooklyn boy who’d fallen in a driveway near his home.