Orleans boy Moses Elliott, 5, may be too young to realize it but he may just be lucky to be alive.
Moses and his little brother Knox, 2, were the victims of a horrific cycling crash on Tuesday July 22, 2014.
“The bike came zooming down and he just banged right into me”, Moses told CTV News, “I got bleeding everywhere.”
Moses and Knox were with their mother Sonia and her friend on Tuesday when they took a ride on an Ottawa River cruise liner. After the boat tour the group was walking up the pathway along the waterway where the Ottawa River meets the Rideau Canal, that’s when Sonia says she saw a cyclist speeding towards the boys. She screamed to warn the boys, but the cyclist didn’t stop before slamming into them, “to watch them both fly through the air like that, limp, as if we’re watching a car accident on the road, it was high impact and that was devastating.”
Sonia says shocked, she immediately ran to help her boys. She says the youngest Knox, seemed okay, but not Moses “all I saw was all the blood pouring out of his shoulder. I was afraid to see what was left.”
Someone then called 9-1-1 and paramedics arrived, treating the boys and rushing them to the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO).
Moses suffered severe cuts and bruises. Sonia says doctors were so concerned about the swelling on his brain they ordered a CT-scan. The boy is now recovering at home from his injuries.
“Watching the kids fly through the air and land on that metal railing on the other side, I didn’t think they’d be alive”, said a shaking Sonia Elliott.
Elliott says after the crash the cyclist, a young man, stopped and apologized profusely, but admitted his bike had no brakes.
Elliott says more needs to be done to protect people on the paths that are used by pedestrians, cyclists and other outdoor enthusiasts, “do we have to have cyclists dismount, do we have to ask cyclists to not use the path, I don’t know but the two together is a disaster waiting to happen.”
Ottawa police say they have no jurisdiction to investigate the path because it happened on an NCC property. An NCC spokesperson believes the incident actually occurred on Parks Canada property. Still, the NCC spokesperson says there are signs listing a 20km/h speed limit on the pathways. They tell CTV Tuesday’s incident was never reported to them. They encourage anyone who has a concern about safety on the paths to file a complaint.
Sonia Elliott says cyclists need to be held more accountable. She says if the driver of a car was speeding, had no working brakes, and hit children they would be criminally charged. She says cyclists should face the same fate, “that young man (the cyclist) is lucky because if they would have died that young man’s life would have changed like ours would have changed forever.”
