Sapulpa police say they’ve located and spoken with the driver who struck a seven-year-old Sapulpa elementary student on Tuesday morning, as first reported by Sapulpa Times.
According to a statement by Sapulpa Police on Facebook, the driver of the vehicle was “quickly identified” and is “cooperating fully” with the police:
Sapulpa Times spoke with Officer Troy Foreman, who says that the situation is more of an extremely unfortunate accident rather than an intentional hit-and-run.
“This was a grandmother dropping off her grandchild,” he said. “As she pulled to a stop at the exit, she was looking left, because that’s the direction the traffic was coming from as she was starting to turn right, and she didn’t see the girl who had stepped off the sidewalk to cross the street.”
Foreman said the video evidence shows that the woman hit the curb about the same time she struck the girl, which follows with the statement she gave to the police, that she thought she had hit the curb. “She then stopped at the stop sign and continued, not realizing anything had happened,” he said. “She wasn’t fleeing the scene, even though it technically became a hit-and-run at that point.”
Sapulpa police met the woman at her house and described her as “visibly distraught” as they got her statements about what happened that morning. After speaking to the sibling of the victim, they concluded that the woman had not seen the children crossing the street.
Foreman said the girl was in the hospital in stable condition as previously reported, and that they were waiting on a couple of other tests to come back.
He concluded by saying that the incident should serve as a reminder to drivers to use extra caution when near schools as students are arriving or leaving for the day, and for parents to talk with their children about safely crossing the street and being wary about the drivers in their immediate vicinity.
