2 boys die after car plows into school
New South Wales emergency services personnel and police look at a vehicle that crashed into a primary school classroom in the Sydney suburb of Greenacre in Australia, November 7, 2017.
Two young children were killed and three seriously injured on Tuesday when a car plowed into their classroom at a Sydney school, with witnesses and emergency services describing “pandemonium” at the scene.
The tragedy occurred at the Banksia Road Public School when the car smashed into a wooden classroom building not long after lessons had started.
The licence of the 52-year-old woman driver was suspended and she was charged with two counts of dangerous driving causing death and with negligent driving.
She was reported to be dropping off a child at the time.
“The vehicle continued inside the building and tragically we have had a number of young children injured as a result,” said Stewart Smith, assistant commissioner of traffic police in New South Wales state.
“As a result of that collision, five kids were urgently conveyed to Westmead Hospital. Tragically, two of those kids, male children, are deceased.”
The children who died were boys aged 8. A further 17 children and a teacher were treated at the scene for minor injuries.
Stephanie Radnidge, the state’s ambulance superintendent, said medics arrived to a scene of carnage. “There were a number of distressed and overwhelmed children and teachers at the scene of a horrible accident,” she said.
“Obviously they were crying, they were distressed, some were asking for their parents. That’s a natural response in such a terrible set of circumstances. There was obviously pandemonium.”
One distraught father described lifting the car off a dying boy while another child screamed for his mother in the chaos after the crash.
“Three of us lifted it and one of the blokes grabbed him out from underneath,” the man, who did not want to be identified, told the Sydney Daily Telegraph.
He added that another badly injured classmate lay a few meters away.
“He was saying ‘I want my mum.’ She wouldn’t have got to see him before he died.”
Student Mariam Issmail told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that she saw a teacher faint after the crash, while others loaded children into ambulances. “They were all just covered with blood. It was very bad.”
