Mother demands answers after four-year-old son is killed by hit-and-run driver outside New York hospital
TheGrio...
Harmonie Wright had already lost her oldest son to gun violence. Now she must bury her youngest next to him.
A New York mother is pleading for the public to assist after her four-year-old son was killed by a hit-and-run driver outside of a Brooklyn hospital earlier this week.
Harmonie Wright told police to “find” the driver who ran over Zachariah Padilla outside Brookdale University Hospital in Brownsville.
“God already sees you,” Wright said. “There’s no hiding place. There’s nowhere you can go if God is in charge.”
The young child’s sudden death has led to Wright noticing his absence and the silence of his voice. At her home, with her little boy no longer present, her house is empty. The tragedy is double for her as her eldest son, Elijah Jonathan Wright, was shot and killed in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2024. Now she will bury her youngest child next to him.
According to police, Zachariah was struck Thursday morning after breaking away from his mother on Rockaway Parkway near Linden Boulevard around 11 a.m. Per witnesses, a driver in a Ford vehicle kept going after striking the little boy, and authorities have been going over surveillance footage looking for leads.
The suspect currently remains at large.
The greater tragedy? Zacariah and Wright had just left the Brookdale Urgent Care Center on the opposite side of the hospital.
The child’s mother was nearly speechless, wondering how someone could hit her child and drive away.
“I lost everything,” Wright said. “He just f–king hit my kid and then ran him over. They messed with his brain, that’s how hard they hit him. Not only did he hit my child, he hit me too and I want justice for my child. He was my last child!”
A witness to the scene, a cab driver named Jules, saw Wright rush to her son after he was hit.
“He was lying there, bleeding all around. He was slumped on the ground,” the 70-year-old cabbie told the New York Daily News. “His mother grabbed him and lifted him up.”
“She was screaming,” Jules recalled. “He was gone, so young. I never saw anything like it.”