Malachi watched as his 6-year-old friend turned his Christmas bike in the intersection of their Ellenwood subdivision to ride the 100 or so yards back to his house by the cul-de-sac. They had strayed against the instruction of his mother.
Then tragedy struck. “The car came around and hit him,” Malachi, 5, told The Atlanta Journal Constitution Friday. “I thought he was dead.”
Malachi stood over his friend, weeping, while his 9-year-old sister, Zamya, ran over and jostled the injured boy’s shoulder.
He didn’t move.
Gloria Guyton, who was visiting from Florida, heard the collision and walked around the corner from her daughter’s house, thinking she might see a crushed mailbox.
Instead she saw the two children standing over a body by a mangled bicycle. She ran over and saw blood running from the boy’s mouth. She touched the artery in the unconscious boy’s neck. She felt a faint pulse.
“The little girl was shaking him, calling his name,” Guyton said. “I was saying, ‘Lord, please let this baby live.’”
DeKalb Police were still searching Friday for the driver of a silver BMW coupe for the hit-and-run on Christmas day which seriously injured the 6-year-old bicyclist. Investigators believe it is a BMW 6 series with damage to the front passenger side of the vehicle, said Sgt. W.L. Wallace.
Police did not release the name of the boy. He had ridden his bike, a Christmas present, down Ward Lake Lane to Ward Lake Trail — a 25-mile-per-hour street, around 1:30 p.m.
Phillipia Walker, Guyton’s daughter who lives in the subdivision, saw the man in the BMW and estimates he was driving at twice the posted speed limit. She said she often sees the car speeding on Ward Lake Trail and believes the owner lives in the subdivision or nearby.
Moments after the accident, Kemah Hudson, Malachi’s mother, followed responding paramedics into the subdivision when she came upon the scene.
“The bicycle was all bent up,” she said. “At first I thought it was Malachi.”
When she had left to make a short run to the Shell Station around the corner on Bouldercrest Road, Malachi and the boy had been riding their new bikes in front of her house.
She said the cul-de-sac was full of children playing. She lectured the boys not to ride down to the street but they disobeyed, she said.
Now she is insisting that Malachi ride the bike in the backyard instead of on the narrow strip of blacktop out front.
“They’re kids,” she said. “A 5-year-old thought he saw his friend get killed. That is sad.”
Guyton, Walker and Hudson voiced concern about the 6-year-old who was still hospitalized on Friday. They expected the parents were spending all their time at the hospital.
It ruined Christmas for everybody, they said.
“My heart sank at seeing this little boy with blood coming out of his mouth,” Guyton said. “The driver who did this, You need to come forward. You hit a child… how can you live with yourself? Own up to what you did.”
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