Crash Into A Kid? Still No Crime

Out on Howard Avenue, 3‑year-old Jameson Jones was vulnerable. A driver drove right into him. Sent him to the hospital. Could have killed him.

But according to the New Haven police interpretation of state law, Jones was not a ​“vulnerable user.” The driver, who admitted not watching the road, left the scene with a ticket for failing to grant the right of way to a pedestrian.

Jameson was holding hands in a ​“human chain” that day two weeks ago when his daycare class was crossing Howard Avenue on the way back from a visit to a playground. He ended up in the hospital for two days with internal bleeding. A classmate also hit by the driver’s car spent a few hours in the hospital.

Two weeks later, the class hasn’t returned to its regular walks through the neighborhood. It took a week before they even ventured outside at all. The kids and the teachers were too nervous. Some of the teachers remain traumatized.

Most of all, they question whether the city and state are doing all they can to keep not just them, but daycare communities in general, safe. Beginning with enforcing Public Act 14 – 31, a state law passed four years ago to protect ​“vulnerable users” from reckless drivers. By all evidence, the law has failed to do that.

Public Act 14 – 31 defines ​“vulnerable users” as pedestrians, cyclists, highway workers, animal-riders, skaters, blind people, and wheelchair riders out on the street. The act provides for fining drivers up to $1,000 if they ​“fail to exercise reasonable care and cause the serious physical injury or death of a vulnerable user of a public way, provided such vulnerable user has shown reasonable care in such user’s use of the public way.”

“We were outraged,” said Georgia Goldburn (pictured), who runs the daycare center, Hope Child Development Center. She has been an outspoken advocate for more government protection for preschoolers. ​“How do you mow down two babies, and you get to go home with a ticket?”

“A Miracle”

Jameson and five other 3- and 4‑year-old ​“vulnerable users” were stopped at the corner of Howard Avenue and First Street (pictured) in the City Point neighborhood at around 11:30 a.m. on Aug. 6 when one of their teachers stepped into the middle of the road. A teacher, Tanaiza Glass, stepped into the crosswalk and put out her arms to signal to oncoming drivers to stop.

The daycare center, which is based at 1 Long Wharf, is used to the drill. Teachers make a point of taking the children out into the community pretty much every day, to make them part of the community. They visit the Long Wharf marshes. They walk down to IKEA. And often, as on this particular Monday, they visit the park on Greenwich Street, from which they were returning.

Glass saw a woman driving northbound on Howard toward Yale-New Haven Hospital. The woman slowed down, stopped.

Farther in the distance in the other direction she saw another vehicle, a white Subaru Legacy, drive through a light in the kids’ direction.

The way seemed clear. She waved the kids on. They joined hands and walked in pairs through the crosswalk, with another teacher, Lisa D’Alessandris, in the rear.

The driver of the Subaru, Irmarie Rodriguez, did not stop. She did not slow down. She approached the intersection, suddenly swerved. Her Subaru slammed straight into Jameson. The side of the car brushed a second child as well.

“The car was going so fast. It was clear as day she was speeding. The car swerved out and swerved back in,” D’Alessandris recalled in a conversation this week at the daycare center.

The car kept moving another 25 feet or so. The teachers and kids saw Jameson remain pressed to the front bumper of the moving Subaru, then slide underneath as the driver slammed to a halt.

“I thought for sure he was dead. She was going so fast,” D’Alessandris said as tears welled up in her eyes. ​“It was a miracle. I thought for sure he would have bruises all over his body.”

Several people were nearby on the street and raced to help the children. They also called 911. Police arrived and began collecting evidence. They interviewed two witnesses who described the crash; one told the cops Rodriguez was ​“traveling at a fast rate of speed.”

Rodriguez remained on scene. She talked to Officer Eric Pesino. ​“Rodriguez stated … she briefly was not paying attention to the road. Rodriguez stated that as she got to the stated intersection she did not see the children crossing the street, and was unable to stop before hitting” Jameson, Pesino wrote in his report on the incident.

“Rodriguez stated she was not on her cell phone. [S]he just looked down for a brief second.”

“It happened so fast. When I saw the car hit Jameson — he just knew the car was going to hit him. It was a miracle” that he survived, D’Alessandris said. ​“It was clear as day she was speeding.”

The second boy also reported feeling injured. They both went to the hospital.

Firefighters responded to the scene, which initially was erroneously called in as a fatal accident. One of the firefighters on the scene is the father of a child at New Hope. The firefighters took charge of making sure Yale Child Study Center showed up, according to center Director Goldburn. She said it was the firefighters, not cops, who made sure the other children were safe and walked the teachers and children back to New Hope. A second grouping of children had been behind the group crossing the crosswalk during the collision; those children did not have a view of the crash, according to Goldburn.

Kids were crying. Everyone was shaken up. Goldburn and her staff immediately called parents through a prearranged phone tree to inform them of the crash. They soon had reassuring news of sorts: the children’s injuries were not life-threatening. Jameson, who had internal bleeding, would spend two days in the hospital before being released; the second child, who had minor bruises, spent just a few hours.

The cops issued Rodriguez a citation for failure to grant the right of way to a pedestrian, which carries a $265 fine. Rodriguez went on her way. (Reached by phone Thursday, she told the Independent she does not want to discuss the incident further.)

“Serious”-ly

The police kept in touch with Goldburn. They told her they wanted to charge the driver with more than an infraction. They wanted to charge her with violating the vulnerable users’ law.

The police did not assign the Crash Reconstruction Team to probe the crash. That’s because the team looks into only those crashes that involve fatalities or potentially life-threatening injuries, according to police spokesman Officer David Hartman. (The team was originally called the Fatal Accident Reconstruction Team; the name was changed after someone noticed that it made for an awkward acronym.)

Jameson’s injuries didn’t end up being ​“serious,” according to their understanding of the law. Also, police reviewed video footage of the crash from a private surveillance system near the corner and concluded that Rodriguez was not ​“obviously traveling at a high rate of speed,” said police spokesman Officer David Hartman.

“Thank God the child’s injuries weren’t severe enough” to qualify as ​“serious” under the law, said top Hill cop Lt. Jason Minardi, who stayed in touch with Goldburn in the days following the crash.

“Police officers and investigators may not interpret laws or manipulate them to fit crimes or violations. Though some may seem vague based on the language, they are not vague in the eyes of the courts. In this case, it is clear the charge of ​‘vulnerable user’ did not fit. There was no probable cause to charge that violation,” said Officer Hartman.

​“We understand the public is, as we are, interested in harsh penalties for those responsible for causing injuries to others in crashes –- even for damage to personal property, however, we are bound and limited by law as to what we are able to charge and what penalties can be imposed. We are not the legislature and do not write the laws, frustrating, at times, as that may be.”

New Haven State Rep. Roland Lemar said that the law — which he wrote — was intended to cover just this kind of crash.

​“I think they’re misunderstanding the standard,” Lemar said in an interview. ​“Under the intent of the law, this was ​‘serious.’ It led to a hospitalization. It is a result of a vulnerable user and a negligent driver. It led to a multi-day hospitalization and near death. To determine that that is not serious misunderstands the intent of the bill.”

Lemar has been in this spot before: Since the law took effect in 2014, he has cited other crashes in New Haven in which the police did not invoke the law, and Lemar felt they should have.

One example: A collision that occurred at the corner of Orchard and Elm streets on Oct. 29 around 3:20 p.m. A school bus had dropped off a 7‑year-old boy there at the end of the school day. The driver had extended the bus’s stop sign out into the street. A Yale graduate student happened to be driving on Elm Street at the time. She ignored the stop sign, drove through it, and struck the boy. The boy went to the hospital, where he received a cast on his right ankle to help him heal from a sprain and a fracture. Police decided that didn’t count as a ​“serious” enough injury.

The police faulted 81-year-old pedestrian Dolores Dogolo for the crash that killed her on Olive Street. Click here to read about another case in which Lemar disagreed with the police decision (from incident shown in above video).

Lemar called the decision not to invoke the law in these cases ​“infuriating.”

Police have regularly faulted pedestrians and cyclists, not the drivers, in fatal crashes like this one since the law’s passage.

In fact, Connecticut police departments, in general, have reacted similarly to New Haven’s police. Rhonda Hebert, a spokeswoman for the state judicial branch, said its database shows just one instance of a person being found guilty of violating the law since it was passed. That happened to be a New Haven case. Police arrested a 36-year-old driver who struck a pedestrian on Foxon Boulevard; the pedestrian was originally in critical condition but survived. By the time the driver pleaded no contest to the charges in 2017, his fine was lowered to $50, and he was allowed not to pay it, according to court records.

One other case is pending in the state, involving a crash in Middletown, according to Hebert.

The state judicial branch initially gave police departments advice at odds with Lemar’s interpretation of the law. Its website for a while had a posting advising cops to interpret ​“serious” injury” as one that ​“creates a substantial risk of death, or which causes serious disfigurement, serious impairment of health or serious loss or impairment of the function of any bodily organ.”

At first, Lemar said, he saw the solution the way Hartman and members of the police departments in the state did: Legislators needed to fix the law to put more specific language about what injuries rise to the level of ​“serious” under the law. He prepared to submit an amendment.

Then the state’s Office of Legislative Research weighed in. It argued that the existing language gives police departments and prosecutors and judges the leeway to apply the law more broadly, as Lemar and its sponsors intended at the time of its passage, Lemar said. More specific language would actually limit application of the law by expressly describing some injuries but, inevitably, not others. The law needs the vaguer language ​“to give prosecutors and police officers latitude,” Lemar said.

So Lemar’s next goal, he said, is to meet with cops to make his case for applying the law to crashes like the one that sent Jameson to the hospital for three days and traumatized his school.

Venturing Back Out

The teachers and preschoolers at Hope Child Development spent the entire first week after the crash inside, according to Director Goldburn. A team from the Yale Child Study Center spent hours with them walking through what happened and how they felt about it.

The next week, beginning Aug. 13, the school decided to take the kids outside. But not on the street. They decided to venture out into the parking lot of the 1 Long Wharf complex where the center is based. A small playground sits at the other end of the lot.

“It was traumatic for all of us. We were terrified,” teacher D’Alessandris said of setting off on that first Monday morning walk. She cried along the way.

Two city officials from New Haven’s government’s economic development office — Mike Piscitelli and Carlos Eyzaguirre — arranged for a crossing guard to accompany the group on that small walk for a week. (The pair had worked with Goldburn on the Long Wharf revisioning project.)

“It was so helpful to know how much we were loved in the community,” Goldburn said of the help the center received from those two city officials, from the firefighters (whom the kids thanked during a visit at the center last week), and others in New Haven.

At the same time, Goldburn argued that the crash also pointed out the ways in which the city and state have failed adequately to protect preschoolers. The city should have had protocols in place for the cops to immediately attend to the needs of all the preschoolers and teachers at the scene, she said. For years she and others have pushed for a speed bump and a traffic light at that Howard Avenue intersection.

The state also needs to improve its procedures for reacting to emergencies at daycare centers and informing them when and why a building is in lockdown, she said. Her work pushing for state attention to the issue has earned her a nomination from the Connecticut Early Childhood Alliance as a 2018 “children’s champion.” She and fellow childcare operator Kim Harris have organized leaders of centers to form an advocacy group called Cercle. (Read more about that here.)

Goldburn cited a new security/surveillance program being put into place at New Haven Public Schools this month; she asked why preschools don’t get the same attention. 

“Early childhood is not seen as critical,” she argued.

This week the center was ready to cross the parking lot to the playground without the help of a city crossing guard. Thursday morning the kids — including the two healed boys who were struck on Aug. 6 — linked hands with the teachers and chatted happily en route to the jungle gym, slide, and toy cars.

“What are we going to do?” a teacher called out.

“Not play with the wood chips!”

Wood chips, after all, can get in someone’s eye.

The center plans never to venture back out to Howard Avenue. After 12 years on Long Wharf, it is moving to a new home. Starting Sept. 4, the center will operate out of a space recently vacated by New Haven Head Start on Olive Street.

Goldburn said they already have their walks mapped out. Around the corner to Wooster Square Park, for one. And down Chapel to the Elm City Market.

They’ve checked the crosswalks, she said. They look safe. They will make extra sure any way to stay away from dangerous drivers.

Thomas Breen contributed reporting.