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Warren official lauds public’s reaction in hit-and-run incident
Photo
12-year-old Camorin McGhee
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
The community’s response to a hit-and-run accident at a school crosswalk is a textbook example of how getting involved can make Warren a safer place for everyone, Warren’s police chief said.
“That was a great community effort,” Tim Bowers said Monday of the citizens who assisted 12-year-old Camorin A. McGhee, called 911 for him, noted the license-plate number on the vehicle that hit him and tracked down the woman who drove off.
McGhee is in Forum Health Trumbull Memorial Hospital, recovering from surgery to remove his spleen, the most serious of the injuries he sustained in the Friday afternoon accident, said his mother, Carrie McGhee.
Police charged Nicole M. Dowell, 22, of Pershing Avenue Southwest with failure to stop after an accident and a traffic-light offense. She was written citations but was not taken to the Trumbull County Jail for processing or kept there over the weekend. She will make her first court appearance at 9 a.m. next Tuesday in Warren Municipal Court.
Witnesses told police Camorin had just stepped off the sidewalk to cross Tod Avenue Southwest at Fifth Street, a short distance from his home, when a vehicle came through the intersection heading south and struck a glancing blow.
Witnesses told police the traffic light was red for the driver. The intersection has a crossing guard, Carrie McGhee said.
The car skimmed the boy and spun him, police said. He was thrown when the 2007 Chevrolet Blazer’s mirror hit him, and he ended up next to the curb on a manhole cover.
The driver got out of her vehicle, looked at Camorin as he lay on the road, got back into the car and drove off, police said.
Ashraff Mohammad, an employee at Shadi Food Market on Tod Avenue, just south of the accident, learned of the incident just after it happened, got into his car and located the vehicle while telling the 911 operator of his location.
A Warren police officer stopped Dowell’s car on Tod Avenue in Lordstown, about 2.5 miles south of the accident scene. Police seized the vehicle for analysis.
Carrie McGhee said Camorin was still in intensive care on Monday but was walking by Sunday morning and doesn’t have any facial or brain injuries.
“It’s a miracle his neck was not broken,” Carrie McGhee said, adding that Camorin has a long scar on his belly from removal of the spleen, which bled as a result of the accident.
Camorin is a seventh grader at the nearby Jefferson K-8 building of Warren City Schools. He walked across the intersection at 2 p.m. to go home and was returning to the school at the time of the accident to walk his sister back home. She is in kindergarten.
“He’s done this four times a day for the last five years,” Carrie McGhee said of Camorin, adding that everyone who saw the accident said Camorin looked both ways before entering the intersection.
Carrie McGhee said she’s angry with the woman who hit Camorin for driving off.
“If you hit a dog, a cat, you’re going to stop to see if it’s OK. This is a child, and she left,” she said. Carrie McGhee got to the accident scene before an ambulance took him to the hospital.
“When I found my baby, his head was in the gutter,” she said of the storm drain.
Carrie McGhee said she’s grateful to Mohammad, known to her Southwest neighborhood as “Ash,” who knows her son but didn’t know he was the boy who was injured.
Bowers said traffic enforcement will be increased near that intersection, which has been a trouble spot.