An 8-month-old baby is in critical condition after a car slammed into a mother pushing a stroller with the baby inside in London on Jan. 13.
The crash killed the mother, who was identified as Nicole Newman, 23. Newman was pronounced dead by paramedics at the scene of the crash, the Penge neighborhood in south London.
Charlie Bianco-Ashley, 25, the father of baby Luciano and Newman’s childhood sweetheart, was near his partner and child but escaped uninjured.
Gabriella Bianco-Ashley, Charlie’s mother, said that the couple had been together for about a decade.
She also said that Luciano was resuscitated twice and was due to undergo surgery.
“He’s going to have a scan and then he’s going to have surgery. There’s something wrong with his vertebrae,” she told the Daily Mail.
Of the accident, she said: “There were no cars on the road and the car came from nowhere.”
A community member said the road is frequently the source of anxiety. “I am really shaken up. People are always speeding on this road and they need to do something about it,” she said. “I can hear them revving their engines from the top of the hill. There needs to be more speed cameras.”
She said that the force of the impact knocked Newman off her feet and the stroller away.
A woman who said she was near the scene added to the Evening Standard: “The baby was in the middle of the road in the pram. I went straight to the baby.”
“Another lady came over and gave me her big scarf to put over the baby. I was on the phone to the paramedic. I didn’t want to move it out of the pram. The front wheel of the pram had come off and was on the other side of the road,” she added.
And another person who lives near the scene of the crash said that Newman’s final words were “Where’s my baby?”
Joe Ball, a 30-year-old electrician, said that he overheard Charlie Bianco-Ashley speak: “I heard her boyfriend say, ‘My girlfriend is dead’. It was just horrendous to see something like that,” Ball said.
Baby boy fighting for life after mother killed by car while pushing pram https://t.co/pnDTKgDH0n
— The Independent (@Independent) January 14, 2019
Officials Appeal for Witnesses
The Metropolitan Police said in a statement that officers responded to the traffic collision in Bromley around 8 p.m. on Sunday.
They found that the car had struck Newman, who had been pushing a stroller, or pram, with her baby inside.
“Despite the efforts of officers and paramedics, the mother was declared dead at the scene. Her next of kin have been informed. We await formal identification and a post-mortem examination will be held in due course. The baby boy was taken to [the] hospital, where he remains in a critical condition,” the police said.
The driver of the car wasn’t identified but was described as a 51-year-old man who was stopped at the scene and taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
The man was not arrested as of yet and is assisting authorities as officials investigate what exactly happened leading up to the tragic crash.
Detectives from the police’s Serious Collision Investigation Unit are asking anyone with dash-cam footage, or who witnessed the incident, to come forward and speak to police.
Anyone with information was asked to contact the Serious Collision Investigation Unit based at Catford Garage on 020 8285 1574 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
