Positivity: Tot Survives Being Dragged 80 Yards
“Lucky to be alive” seems an inadequate phrase:
Tiny tot’s survival ‘a miracle’
July 15, 2006The mother of a girl who was dragged beneath a van in Oakland Park spoke out from the child’s hospital room.
Jennifer Marisol Romero lay wide-eyed and quiet in her room at Chris Evert Children’s Hospital in Fort Lauderdale on Friday amid scattered toys, get-well balloons, news cameras and a dozen strangers.
Her mother caressed the diminutive girl’s body, which was covered in bright-red road burns.
Three days after Jennifer and her grandmother were struck by a van in Oakland Park, the girl’s mother, Ester Lopez, was stroking the little girl’s hair in the hospital room, amazed that she had escaped relatively unharmed.
Lopez invited the news media to the hospital Friday to talk about the incident.
”When I heard what happened, I imagined the worst,” Lopez, 28, of Pompano Beach, said in Spanish, wiping tears from her eyes.
“Honestly, I tell you, this is a miracle.”
Jennifer and her grandmother were crossing the street at Northeast First Terrace and East Commercial Boulevard in Oakland Park after buying groceries Tuesday morning, Lopez said.
The white 1999 Ford van struck the little girl, who turns 2 next week, and her grandmother. The van’s front wheel pinned down the toddler’s stroller — with her still in it — and dragged the girl for 80 yards.
The grandmother fell to the ground, according to the Broward Sheriff’s Office. Grocery bags and food were strewn across the road.
A few tense seconds after the accident, a band of onlookers pulled the child out from under the wheel, leaving her bruised but alive.
Jennifer was in good condition Friday at the hospital with road rash. But her grandmother, Florencia Ortega, 55, was in serious condition at Broward General Medical Center, where the children’s hospital also is located.
Ortega has several broken bones and cannot move, Lopez said.
”She is here in shock, because she can’t sleep,” Lopez said of her mother. “She wakes up screaming.”
Lopez blames Gerson E. Palma Aguilar, the van’s driver, for not stopping soon enough to avoid her mother and her child.
