By Zach Patberg
This one did. Minus, of course, some banged heads and tattered nerves.The Dec. 27 accident, which sent four pedestrians and three passengers to the hospital with non-fatal injuries, started when a Honda Odyssey minivan broadsided a Mercury Grand Marquis at the intersection of Kissena Boulevard and Jewel Avenue in Kew Gardens Hills, police and witnesses said.As the Marquis ricocheted off to collide with a green Saab stopped at the light, the minivan careened off the road toward a tree, hitting a woman and an elderly man and pinning the woman's 12-year-old daughter and another older woman under its bumper. A 2-year-old boy in the van was ejected from the passenger side into the street.Jerry Gillespie, 37, was in his apartment watching television when he heard the initial collision.”I went to the window,” he said. “All I saw were bodies rolling and a car coming behind them.””Everybody was screaming,” he continued. “It was chaotic.”Emily Alicea, 20, her brother and two friends were standing on the steps of their building across the street at the time.The group ran to the van, she said, and together lifted the front end while others dragged the man and girl out from under.When Gillespie came to the scene, he talked soothingly to the girl, saying, “Take it easy, don't go to sleep, don't close your eyes.”But by contrast to the other victims, the trapped girl, who had a long scrape up her leg, remained composed, Gillespie said, even giving him her father's cell phone number when her mother was too hysterical to do so.Meanwhile, the woman driving the van got out and raced toward her son who had been thrown to the curb, Gillespie said.”She was screaming, 'Where's my baby, where's my baby?'” Alicea said. But Gillespie's wife, Rhonda, who had come out with her husband to help, already had the toddler in her arms.Soon two police officers came running from the nearby 107th Precinct, took the boy from Rhonda and called in a cruiser to rush him to the hospital.The driver of the green Saab was shaken but unscathed, witnesses said.Indeed, those at the scene expressed shock at how everyone involved escaped with injuries that police said would most likely heal.”Thank God nobody was killed,” Alicea said. “Thank God for that.”Although rumors circulated that one car had run a red light, police said no summonses were issued or arrests made.Standing in front of her building last Thursday across the street from the corner scene where bits of taillight still littered the curb and tire marks scarred the sidewalk, Alicea attributed the relative happy ending to teamwork.”We all just worked together,” she said, “and everything turned out OK.”Reach reporter Zach Patberg by e-mail at news@timesledger.com or by phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 155.
