A 5-year-old is in the hospital and his mother is recovering at home after a driver hit them while they were in the crosswalk leaving a Halloween event at their church.
Mother Katlin Bentley, 29, and her family were crossing Jefferson Street in Statham about 8:30 p.m. Tuesday when a 2010 Chrysler Town and Country hit her and her son, Kross, Georgia State Patrol said. The driver in the crash was cited for failure to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk.
Kaitlin Bentley was taken to Piedmont Athens Regional Hospital and Kross was flown to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston.
Bentley told Channel 2 Action News the accident sent her into “panic mode.”
The mother of two pushed her younger son’s stroller to her husband, who was able to get out of the way of the crash.
But Kaitlin wasn’t able to get Kross and herself out of the intersection in time.
“I started screaming, begging for someone to get him and make sure he’s OK,” she said.
Bentley said she’d already lost one child — a 10-day-old daughter who died in her arms from a seizure last month, Channel 2 reported. The Bentleys lost another baby, who was born with a congenital heart defect, in 2014.
“All I kept thinking was I can’t lose another,” she said.
On a GoFundMe set up to help the family with expenses, father Matthew Bentley said doctors were still running tests on Kross, who suffers from a fractured eye socket and has an "extensive road rash that might require skin graft."
The Bentleys have taken off from work while their son recovers.
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