NORTHAMPTON — With her brightly colored yellow vest and the stop sign she carries, Audrey Moriarty is a crossing guard that warns oncoming traffic to slow down for school children at a crosswalk in front of the Bridge Street Elementary School.
In her 17 years ensuring that students safely get across the street, Moriarty, a 76-year-old Florence resident, has never had any problems at the intersection of Union and Parsons streets where she works. That is, until she was struck by a car on Jan. 2 while standing on Parsons Street as a student crossed the road.
“It’s ridiculous,” Moriarty said on Friday. “The driver said they didn’t see me, but I didn’t really know what happened because I was knocked unconscious.”
She remembers that the collision occurred around 8:30 a.m. on her first day back after winter break, and it was the first child crossing the street that day. Standing in the middle of the street, dressed for visibility and holding up her stop sign, she felt a crash behind her legs and then her memory cut out.
“I woke up in the ambulance and I said, ‘What am I doing here?’ And they said, ‘You got hit by a car,’ ” said Moriarty, who suffered a concussion from the crash. “I’m just glad the child got across the street.”
The driver was cited with a crosswalk violation, according to a police report on the crash.
The report states that as the driver was “approaching the school she stated that the sun was extremely bright and was making it difficult to see … According to one witness the vehicle was traveling at a high rate of speed on Parsons before the accident.”
According to the police crash report, one witness reported that after Moriarty was hit, she landed on the hood of the vehicle before rolling off to the side on the ground.
The following week, Moriarty was back in front of Bridge Street Elementary School after a doctor cleared her to work. During those first few days back, she said a police officer was parked there to monitor motorists.
“He got a couple of people who went through the stop sign while he was there,” she said.
Today, Moriarty is still feeling the effects of the crash.
“I’m not myself, but I’m coming along,” she said. “I feel good when I’m out there in the fresh air, it’s good for me.”
The collision is among four recent incidents in which motor vehicles struck pedestrians in crosswalks in the past two months.
On Thursday, a 15-year-old girl was walking north across the Finn Street crosswalk on the west side of King Street when she was struck by a vehicle driven by a Williamsburg resident.
Police said that the driver had a green light when he made the left turn from King Street onto Finn Street and did not see the pedestrian before striking her, according to a Facebook post on Friday.
The girl was brought to Cooley Dickenson Hospital for a hip injury and the driver was issued a crosswalk citation by police.
Moriarty said she could “sympathize” with Denise Herzog, an Easthampton resident who died in early December after being struck by a minivan in a crosswalk a short distance from One Cottage Street.
Five days after Moriarty was struck, a pedestrian crossing the intersections of Crafts Avenue and Old South Street in Northampton was also struck by a vehicle, but was not seriously injured.
Luis Fieldman can be reached at lfieldman@gazettenet.com