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Warren honors store manager for help in hit and run case
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Ashraf Mohammad
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12-year-old Camorin McGhee
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Mayor Michael O’Brien honored the manager of a southwest Warren convenience store for helping police locate the woman they believe hit a 12-year-old boy and left the scene Friday.
The mayor gave Ashraf Mohammad an award at a ceremony Wednesday.
Mohammad, manager of Shadi’s Food Mart on Tod Avenue, was driving south on Tod at Fifth Street at about 3 p.m. after evening prayers, when he saw a boy lying face down on a sewer grate on Tod Avenue.
He saw a couple of his customers nearby, who “started screaming that the car was just a short distance up the street” that had hit the boy.
Mohammad could see the car, so he drove after it, then called 911 to alert police.
After Mohammad followed the car a couple miles, a Warren police officer pulled up and arrested the driver.
The woman was “a little frantic” when she got out of the car, Mohammad said. The side mirror of her car was missing, with wires hanging out.
The boy, Camorin McGhee, of Fifth Street, had tried to cross Tod at Fifth to get to the Warren City Schools’ Jefferson K-8 Building to walk his little sister home. Camorin, a seventh-grader, also attends Jefferson K-8 but gets out of school at 2 p.m.
The traffic light was red for the car that hit Camorin, police said, adding that the driver got out of the car after hitting and spinning Camorin, looked at him on the road, then got back in her car and drove off.
The driver, Nicole M. Dowell, 22, of Pershing Avenue Southwest, was later charged with failure to stop after an accident and a traffic-light offense. She will be arraigned at 9 a.m. Tuesday in Warren Municipal Court.
Camorin’s spleen was injured and had to be removed at Forum Health Trumbull Memorial Hospital, but everything else is OK, his mother, Carrie McGhee, said.
“You’re taught from a young age to help people, and that’s just what you do,” Mohammad said of why he took action, adding that he has a son of his own, “and you imagine him laying in the same place.”
O’Brien said USA Taxi of Warren has agreed to provide rides to Carrie McGhee so she can travel back and forth from home to the hospital to visit Camorin. She has no means of transportation, the mayor said.