The driver who fatally mowed down a 3-year-old boy in Brooklyn Thursday blamed the child’s mother for the crash, blasting her for leaving him “unattended.”
“I can’t understand why the mother left that little kid unattended on a scooter and he attempted to cross where there is active traffic,” Juanchi Seda, 61, told The Post as he walked out of the 62nd Police Precinct Thursday night, after being charged with failure to yield and failure to exercise due care.
Police said earlier that the driver, who sometimes goes by the name Johnny and who cops identified as Johnny Gonzalez, 61, rammed into little Emur Shavkator around 12:45 p.m. near Bay 25 Street and Benson Avenue in Bath Beach, when the toddler, who’d been riding a lime green scooter, dashed a tad ahead of his mother and into the crosswalk.
“I don’t know where he came from… He came into my blind spot from somewhere because he wasn’t at the crosswalk,” said the driver.
Seda didn’t realize he’d run over the child until he heard the 25-year-old mother screaming and hitting his van.
“I started saying ‘what’s wrong, what’s wrong?'” Seda recalled. “She just kept screaming. So I followed her around the van. Then I saw the little boy with the scooter under the right tire.”
“When I saw his lifeless body. He look injured really bad…” Seda continued. “I turned pale. I thought I was going to faint.”
Witnesses said they saw the boy’s mother, identified by police sources as Nigora Khabibova, cradling her son’s body in the street while screaming, “My son! My son!”
When asked if he had any words for the distraught woman, Seda said: “May God continue to stay in her heart and bless her. I hope she can move on from the pain.”
“It’s hard for me to find words to describe the grief and pain that I feel for her because I love children. Children are a blessing and a gift,” Seda said, adding that he is a father and grandfather himself.
Seda said he will never forget the incident.
“This is going to be with me for the rest of my life,” Seda said. “Every May 2nd, I’m going to be doing a lot of crying. I gonna light a candle. I’m going to go to church now and pray.”