Most afternoons, Paisley Brodie calls her mother when she gets to the public library four blocks from her middle school on Capitol Hill. On Sept. 9, the call came when Deirdre Allen expected it, but her 12-year-old daughter was crying. “Mommy,” she said, “I just got hit by a car.”
“I had the light,” Paisley immediately told her, referring to the walk signal. “There was numbers on the light; I saw it.”
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Lower-level traffic violations, up to aggravated reckless driving, can be prosecuted by the city’s attorney general. A spokeswoman for the attorney general said that office often picks up cases after federal prosecutors decline to pursue more serious charges.
Paisley spent a night in a hospital and was released with a boot on her right foot. Two of her toes were fractured; the tire went over the bone that holds them together. She will be on crutches for at least three weeks and will miss two school trips, her mother said.
“It’s God’s grace she’s still here and she’s okay and her foot can heal,” Deirdre Allen said. But she doesn’t know when Paisley can go back to cheerleading or whether she’ll have lingering pain when she does.
She appreciates that staff members from Paisley’s middle school, Stuart-Hobson, came and stayed with her daughter after the crash, and that neighbors around the intersection kept checking in with her even though she doesn’t live nearby. Charles Allen, the council member, called. After he posted about the crash on X on Wednesday, a police sergeant got in touch with Deirdre Allen and said he was investigating. The police report was issued Friday.
“It’s a good community around there, good people. They care about the kids, they really do,” Deirdre Allen said. It’s why she kept Paisley at Stuart-Hobson. Until a few months ago, they lived closer to the school, just outside the Arboretum at Maryland Avenue and 21st Street NE. But in April, a bullet went through their window in a shooting that left one man dead and five injured, including two children. Paisley was in the bathroom of the apartment she shared with her mother, older sister and niece. One of the victims was in the apartment above them.
“She was scared to stay there after that,” Allen said. “I wanted them to be in a better place.”
Now, she said, Paisley is scared to walk her regular path to school.
Susie Webb contributed to this report.
correction
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of pedestrians who have been injured in traffic incidents in the District so far this year. It is 473. The article has been corrected.
