WINDHAM – The 10-year-old Windham girl struck in the head by a vehicle’s side-view mirror last Friday afternoon credits a higher power for saving her life.
“I think that there’s an angel on my shoulder. My aunt Amy said that’s the only way I could have survived. That’s what my mom thinks, too,” said Savanna Demmons, a fifth-grader at Manchester Elementary School who, despite a small wound, is back at school.
Demmons, who is still afraid to be near the roadway, had gone on a walk with her friend Nicole Clark prior to the accident. The two usually walk on quieter Overlook Road, but had ventured to the nearby Stone Brook Road neighborhood after school on Friday to see if another friend was home. The collision occurred on the way back, as the friends were about to cross the road, about 25 yards from the Demmons’ home at 121 Albion Road.
With Clark behind her, Demmons recalls looking both ways and then proceeding to walk across the busy two-lane road when a vehicle’s side-view mirror struck her on the side of the head near her left ear, spinning her around in the air. As she fell on the ground, she bruised her knee, as well.
Despite the collision, Demmons was spared serious injury, though family took her to Maine Medical Center for examination.
“I didn’t see anything at all,” Demmons recalled Tuesday. “I looked (right) and then I looked (left) and I saw nothing. Then, when I started crossing the street, I heard wind. As I was spinning around it happened in slow motion and I saw a dark car. And then I saw some pieces on the ground, like a little bit of glass or plastic on the ground.”
The collision was witnessed by several of Demmons’ relatives and friends who were outside the family home, trying to free a vehicle stuck in a snow-covered roadside ditch. Using the witnesses’ description of the vehicle, Windham police are trying to locate the driver of a dark-colored Chevrolet pickup truck with a red Boss, V-shaped plow. Police are also in possession of the passenger-side mirror that broke off after hitting Demmons.
After the collision, without knowing how serious the injuries were, several of the adults ran to pick Demmons up off the ground and console her. The little girl was in shock, but as her uncle picked her up she started to realize what happened.
“Right after I got hit, I was like surprised and all of a sudden, when I found out I got hit by a car, I kind of, a little bit, cried,” she said. “First I was shocked and I didn’t cry at all and that was shocking to me also, so then after I got picked up I started crying.”
The incident along the road, which connects Route 302 with Falmouth Road and has a speed limit of 35 mph, has prompted calls from the family to reduce the speed limit to match the road’s 25 mph speed limit near its intersection with Route 302. Savanna’s father, Ryan Demmons, who was at a friend’s home in South Portland at the time of the incident, doesn’t know how fast the vehicle that hit his daughter was traveling, but from what the witnesses told him, he estimates it at 45 mph, which he said is not an unusual speed for the road.
“I grew up close by here and have lived here for three years and there are a lot of speeders on this road. And I would just like to see it reduced and have the cops on the road more,” the father said.
He also doesn’t understand why someone would be traveling quickly through the area, since there was also a disabled vehicle by the side of road.
“I was freaked,” Ryan Demmons said, recalling a phone call from his wife, Erica Demmons, right after the accident happened. “It was very scary. And then when I found out the driver didn’t stop, it went from scared to being angry with it all. I can’t believe some human being out there hits a child and can’t stop for them. I can’t fathom that in my head.”
Because the mirror was torn off, the family believes the driver must have been aware of the collision.
“To take a side mirror off a vehicle, to have it smack against the vehicle, is an awful loud bang, it’s like a shotgun sound,” Ryan Demmons said. “So I’m either thinking it’s a young kid who’s really, really scared or a drunk guy that didn’t care.”
Though Demmons is back at school after the accident, she still has some scabbing where she was struck, and she is still feeling the psychological effects of the near tragedy, her parents said.
“My daughter, all she said when I saw her in the hospital was, ‘Why me? Why did this happen to me?’ And I don’t have answers to tell her,” her father said. “I just want the guy to turn himself in. My daughter will feel safer and I’ll feel safer.”
Ryan Demmons and his 10-year-old daughter, Savanna, stand near
Comments are no longer available on this story