Twelve-year-old Mallorie Broussard was sitting in a wheelchair Tuesday afternoon — wrapped in a blanket with two broken legs and just home from surgery at Portland’s Legacy Emanuel Medical Center.
Four days after being hit by a car in a crosswalk in front of Crestline Elementary School in Cascade Park, the talkative sixth-grader was having pain from a broken right thigh and two broken bones in her lower left leg, but she was buoyed by the attention of visitors.
And her high spirits peaked when her best friend, Sierra Long, 11, knocked on the front door of her home.
“This is from everybody at school!” Sierra announced as she walked in.
Sierra, a classmate from Wy’east Middle School, had brought a big green poster, and cards and letters from kids in the choir, extending their good wishes and sympathies.
“When I heard what happened to you, I went into a total freak-out zone,” a friend named Ena wrote.
“When you get back to school everyone will crowd around you and ask what happened,” another student wrote. “You are so popular at school now I think all the cute guys will ask you out.”
“I have a lot of friends,” Mallorie explained. “I think they are being very nice and it’s helping me a lot. It’s making me happier and it takes my mind off the pain I’m having.”
The accident happened at 3 p.m. Friday, as Mallorie was escorting her two stepbrothers, 6-year-old twins, in a raised crosswalk in front of the school at 13003 S.E. Seventh St.
Vancouver police said a substitute teacher, William “Bill” Reinert, 53, had been driving west on Seventh, after leaving Crestline, and later said he didn’t know why he didn’t see Mallorie in the crosswalk.
Mallorie said Tuesday she’d seen the car approaching from about two blocks away and was walking behind the 6-year-olds. She said the boys had nearly made it across Seventh when she realized the driver didn’t see them and the car wasn’t going to stop.
“I told the kids ‘Run!’” Mallorie told The Columbian. “I gave them a little push and I started running back. I knew if I kept running forward, I wasn’t going to make it.”
She said she saw the driver looking to his right as his car neared the crosswalk.
“When he saw the twins already on the sidewalk, he freaked out and turned because he thought he was going to hit them, and hit me. I tried running, but I wasn’t fast enough,” Mallorie said.
Mallorie, who initially was knocked onto the car’s hood, fell off onto the pavement. She said the driver who hit her, Reinert, stopped his car and ran to her.
Mallorie said she touched her left leg and knew it was broken. Lying on the pavement, she gave a witness her mom’s phone number.
“I was like, ‘Whoa! Call my mom!’”
Her mother, Amanda Brady, was working in her garage a few blocks away when she answered the call.
Running to Mallorie, Brady met Sierra, who had seen the accident.
“I said, ‘Is she OK?’ and she said, ‘No, she flipped off the car!’ and I just ran faster,” Brady said. “I was like, ‘Oh God, not my baby, not my baby!’”
Brady found Mallorie covered by a blanket in the street.
“It was horrible,” she said. “You never want to see your child lying in the rain with her legs twisted and buckled. Never.”
Reinert has taken full responsibility for hitting Mallorie.
“I can say the driver was cooperating fully and was very upset over the circumstances,” Sgt. Patrick Johns with the Vancouver Police Department’s Traffic Unit said Tuesday. “I believe he was remorseful.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t see them,” Reinert told The Columbian on Tuesday. “Believe me, I just want to say how profoundly sorry I am that it happened.”
When he saw the children in the crosswalk, from about 20 to 30 feet away, Reinert said he “braked hard and cut hard left to avoid hitting them.”
At that point, he said, “The car skidded and I hit her.”
Police said Reinert hadn’t been drinking, wasn’t impaired by medicine and hadn’t been speeding.
Reinert, who lives in Portland, has written freelance stories for The Columbian.
The accident remains under investigation, police said Tuesday.
Asked how she was doing Tuesday, Mallorie said: “Terrible but not horrible because it could have been worse. Terrible because no one wants to be hit by a car.”
She said she’s now scared of crossing streets and riding in cars.
The girl will be in her wheelchair at least a month, and may be able to return to school in the wheelchair in three weeks, her mother said. She’s undergoing painful physical therapy.
Mallorie said she’s forgiven Reinert, who visited her in the hospital. She thinks he just had a moment of blankness.
“I know it’s an accident,” the girl said. “He apologized and we all have those moments.”
Brady said drivers, who take Seventh Street to avoid red lights on Mill Plain Boulevard and stop signs on McGillivray Boulevard, need to be more careful.
“Seventh Street is kid-central,” the mother said. “There are so many apartment complexes and the school’s here.”
Mallorie asked the newspaper to warn drivers.
“Make them know how it feels (to be hit),” she said. “And be more careful and not do the same thing and pay attention.”
