An angry mother whose 4-year-old son was killed by a hit-run driver outside a Brooklyn hospital said there is no hiding place for the callous motorist who mowed down her son and drove away.
“Find him,” Harmonie Wright urged police, a day after young Zachariah Padilla was killed by an SUV outside Brookdale University Hospital in Brownsville.
“God already sees you. There’s no hiding place. There’s nowhere you can go if God is in charge.”
Wright said the silence from Zachariah’s sudden absence at home is deafening
“My house is now silent,” she said. “There’s no more noise.”
Cops said the little boy was struck Thursday after breaking away from his mother along a busy stretch of Rockaway Pkwy near Linden Blvd. and darting into the street shortly after 11 a.m.
Witnesses said the Ford driver kept going, and cops, who have been scouring area surveillance footage, said he has not been caught.
Gardiner Anderson / New York Daily News
The NYPD Highway Patrol investigates after Zachariah Padilla, 4, was fatally struck by a hit-and-run driver outside Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn on Thursday. (Gardiner Anderson / New York Daily News)
Wright said she struggled to understand how someone could be so uncaring.
“I lost everything,” said outside her home.
“He just f——ng hit my kid then he ran over him,” she said bitterly.
The SUV driver hit the tot with such force that Zachariah was “knocked off his socks,” his mother said.
“They messed with his brain. That’s how hard they hit him,” she said about the driver. “Not only did he hit my child. He hit me too and I want justice for my child.”
He was my last child!” she said, choking up.
A cab driver, who only wanted to be identified as Jules, saw the panicked mom rush little Zachariah to the hospital after the tyke was hit.
“He was lying there, bleeding all around. He was slumped on the ground,” the 70-year-old cabbie told the Daily News Thursday. “His mother grabbed him and lifted him up.”
“She was screaming,” Jules recalled. “He was gone, so young. I never saw anything like it.”
Wright said she went into “mommy mode” after the tragic incident.
“I didn’t even know I was hit,” she said. “I just had to get my child out. I picked him up. Blood coming out of his ears, his nose. Everywhere.”
Courtesy of family
Zachariah Padilla, 4. (Courtesy of family)
Staffers at the medical center said that the boy and his mom had just left the Brookdale Urgent Care Center, located on the other side of Rockaway Parkway from the main hospital, moments before he was struck.
Witnesses told police the child was running across the parkway heading east when he was hit.
Wright was joined by her 7-year-old son Friday as she desperately pleaded for justice.
Zachariah’s death comes nearly 18 months after her oldest son, Elijah Johnthan Wright, was murdered in Charlotte North Carolina. Elijah was fatally shot on Rachel Freeman Way in Charlotte on July 22, 2024. Investigators arrested two teens for the killing in October.
Wright said she will bury Zachariah with his brother.
“I’m going to bury him in all white because he’s an angel,” she said.
