Monday. Fifth Avenue near 5th Street. I heard a crashing sound and looked over at Belleville Restaurant; a plexiglass and metal cafe gate had fallen—on a small boy.
I don’t know why the gate fell. The child may have been playing on it. There may have been a wind. I’m really not sure.
The child’s mother threw her groceries and a box of pizza down on the sidewalk and ran to the boy who was momentarily pinned beneath the large, plexi Cinzano sign/gate.
The mother sat on the sidewalk with her screaming and bleeding son in her arms. She shook with tears herself. A young woman ran over.
“Omigod, omigod, there’s so much blood,” she said and immediately called 911 on her cell; she told them to send an ambulance.
As sometimes happens, wonderful people miraculously appear during an emergency. It happened to me when OSFO crashed into another child at the sprinkler in JJ Byrne Park and bit into her lip. There was so much blood; she later got stitches.
A nice man appeared who told me that he worked with children and knew First Aid; indeed he did; he got the bleeding to stop. He calmed me down.
Yesterday, a nice man swooped in to help the little boy. He told the mom that the boy’s nose was broken. Before our eyes the boy’s nose and the area under one eye looked black, blue and bruised.
The mother moaned as she held her child. She whispered endearments to him in French while the man held the boy’s hand until the ambulance arrived.
Mainly, he was trying to prevent him from falling asleep. Someone from Belleville rushed out and offered the boy cold water. He held a handful of paper towels.
I walked over to the boy’s sister; she was wearing a cute pastel raincoat and rain boots and was standing by the groceries and looking scared.
“How are you?” I asked. She looked about five-years-old.
“I’m not the kid who got hurt. That was my brother,” she told me.
Within five minutes, the ambulance arrived and the boy’s mother carried him to the car.
“A television fell on my nephew. He fell asleep and now he’s retarded,” the woman who called 911 told me. She watched while the EMT guys carried the boy into the ambulance. The man who held the boy’s hand walked away; so did the woman eventually.
I wonder how the boy is doing now. He should be fine.
