Ten-Year-Old Struck and Killed by Semi-Truck in Orlando

By Orlando Personal Injury Attorney on April 27, 2019

A ten-year-old child was killed on Wednesday, April 24th, after being struck by a semi-truck while riding a bicycle home from Wetherbee Elementary School in Orlando. At the time of this writing, the truck and the driver involved have not been located or identified.

The reports from the Florida Highway Patrol indicate that it was during the afternoon that the incident took place. The child had just gotten out of school, and the area was filled with parents picking their children up and taking them home. The ten-year-old involved was riding their bike away from the school and had reached the intersection of Wetherbee Road and Landstar Boulevard. This intersection lies not even one half mile from Wetherbee Elementary. This intersection features a crosswalk, and the child in question was using this crosswalk to get from one side of the road to the other.

At this same time, a semi-truck was turning right off of one of the intersection’s roads onto another. The path of the truck’s turn took it directly over the crosswalk being used by the ten-year-old. It was while the center of the truck’s trailer was passing over the crosswalk that the child was struck. After the crash, the driver of the truck continued to travel down the road. Because of the angle of the crash, the distance from the cab at which it happened, and the difficulty for semi-truck drivers to see all around their enormous vehicles at any given moment, it is not certain that the driver was even aware that a crash had taken place.

Emergency services were immediately called and soon the critically injured child was being rushed to Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children. It was sometime after they were admitted to the hospital that the emergency medical staff was forced to declare that the child had died.

At the time of this writing, efforts by troopers with the Florida Highway Patrol to locate the truck and its driver are underway, although reports from the FHP are honest about the difficulties faced in locating the individual and vehicle responsible. All that is known about the truck is that the cab was white with blue and black lettering along its side and that it was pulling a white trailer.

Sources:

• Semi hits, kills boy on bike near Orlando elementary school, troopers say

James O. Cunningham

Since 1977, personal injury lawyer James Cunningham has provided effective legal advocacy to people who are injured through the negligent actions of another person or entity throughout the Central Florida area. He fights to obtain recoveries for his clients’ physical and emotional pain and suffering and pursues his clients’ personal injury cases with a commitment to excellence and impeccable preparation.