Victim, 12, hit by car for second time in three weeks
A 12-year-old girl who authorities say was struck Saturday by a repeat drunken driver in South Boston had just begun to recover from a car accident that happened only three weeks ago, her mother said.
This time, her mom added, she is “not going to be the same.”
Shalynn Bobbitt had been going through physical therapy for injuries she sustained in an accident on her way to a Brockton fair last month, Kelly Bobbitt said. And then on Saturday, only a month away from entering seventh grade at James Condon Elementary School, she was struck again, this time moments after she left Joe Moakley Park.
“Shalynn’s not going to be the same,” her mother said before leaving for Tufts Medical Center, where her daughter is being treated for multiple fractures and a lacerated liver and is scheduled to undergo surgery on her pelvis today. “She was a happy kid. She just remembers coming from the park. She woke up (in the hospital) and said, ‘Who did this to me?’ ... I couldn’t even protect her from this.”
Yesterday, Kelly Bobbitt wept in South Boston Municipal Court as Richard M. Higgins, the man accused of hitting her daughter, was arraigned on eight counts, including operating under the influence of liquor, a fifth offense; operating under influence of drugs; driving with a license suspended for drunken driving; speeding; and leaving the scene of a personal injury crash.
Judge Michael Bolden ordered Higgins, 78, of Attleboro, to be held until a hearing Thursday to determine whether he is too dangerous to be released under any conditions.
Witnesses to Saturday’s crash told officers Higgins was driving about 60 mph in a 30-mph zone on Old Colony Avenue shortly before 4:30 p.m. when he lost control of his Ford Explorer and hit two cars before striking the victim in a crosswalk, a police report said. His SUV continued another 50 feet before it hit another vehicle, police said, and finally stopped about 500 yards later.
Officers said Higgins smelled of alcohol, appeared to be unsteady and had glassy, bloodshot eyes. He admitted to consuming alcohol and Vicodin earlier in the day, and to discarding beer cans from his SUV before officers arrived, police said.
Higgins was previously convicted of operating under the influence of alcohol in 1962, 1996, 1998 and 2007, prosecutors said. But his lawyer, William E. Gens, said two of those cases actually involved the defendant’s deceased brother.
Higgins’ Registry of Motor Vehicles record, which goes back to only 1985, shows that since then, his license has been revoked twice — once in 1998 for 60 days for driving to endanger and once in 2008 for eight years for driving while intoxicated — as well as eight suspensions — four of them for refusing to take a chemical test.