'Every day you think about it, every day you shed tears'
In united mourning, the city called them the "Feltonville Four." Four lives cut too short. Four lives taken by an act of senseless criminality. Four lives that touched so many more.
In united mourning, the city called them the "Feltonville Four."
Four lives cut too short. Four lives taken by an act of senseless criminality. Four lives that touched so many more.
On June 10, about 7:30 p.m., on 3rd Street near Annsbury, in Feltonville, Latoya Smith, 22, was sitting on the steps of her brother's home with her 11-month-old daughter, Rimanee.
Nearby, two young girls - Gina Rosario, 7, and Aaliyah Griffin, 6 - were preparing to jump rope on the sidewalk.
In an instant their lives were taken by Donta Cradock, an 18-year-old man who was fleeing authorities and crashed his car onto the sidewalk, police said.
Janice Brown, Smith's mother and Rimanee's grandmother, remembers the call. She rushed to the scene but her daughter and granddaughter had already been taken away.
She went first to St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, where she had to identify her granddaughter's tiny body, when she should have been planning the girl's first birthday two days away.
Brown then went to Albert Einstein Medical Center, to be with her daughter.
"They said everything was broken," she said. "Everything in her was shattered."
Brown was at the hospital with her daughter from 9 p.m. that night until 2:15 a.m. the next morning, she said. Smith was brought back to life five times during those five hours.
"The sixth time she passed, she died," Brown said.
On June 19, mother and daughter, both in white dresses and tiaras, were laid to rest together, in a single casket.
"Every day you think about it, every day you shed tears," Brown said. "It's always going to be there, but you just have to thank God for the time you had with them."
In December, Cradock, of Feltonville, and the passenger in his car, Ivan Rodriguez, 20, of Hunting Park, were held for trial on charges of second- and third-degree murder and homicide by vehicle following a preliminary hearing.
Even six months after the accident, the first officer on the scene wept on the stand when he was asked to recount what he had seen.
"That day will never be erased from my mind," he testified.
The next court listing date for Cradock and Rodriguez is April 13.