A 6-year-old boy is in critical condition and two adults were wounded after a 37-year-old woman plowed her minivan past baricades through a Labor Day festival in Pennsylvania Monday night.
The red minivan tore through part of the Kipona Festival in Harrisburg just as vendors were taking down their stalls and eager families were making their final purchases before the three-day celebration’s conclusion, cops said.
The driver swerved around the barricade and barreled down the street around 6 p.m., striking two adults and a young boy, Harrisburg police officials and Mayor Wanda Williams said.
The child is in critical condition, the mayor said. The two adults, a wheelchair-bound woman and a man working for the city’s traffic engineering department, were also injured, but are in stable condition.
The male victim was reportedly trying to stop the crazed woman when he was struck, according to the mayor.
The erratic motorist then sped down five whole blocks while crashing into “everything in her way,” CBS 21 News reported.
The driver, a blond woman wearing a T-shirt that read “Mom Son Team,” was arrested at the scene, officials said.
Her battered minivan, adorned with a bumper sticker that read “hella’ kids up in here,” was left at the scene with its airbags imploded and the hood dented.
Other bits of debris, including parts of vendors’ stands, were scattered around the area following the chaos.
Many witnesses were astounded at how silent the scene was while the car was approaching — unbeknownst to them all.
“This car came flying down through here fast. Not yelling or anything, but just flying down through this,” Lottie Beauverd, a vendor at the festival, told ABC27.
A reporter for the local station who was incidentally at the scene said that many fair-goers started to shriek and run for their lives as the car slammed into victim after victim at the “chaotic scene.”
It’s unclear what led the woman to drive around the barriers onto the festival grounds. Police are continuing their investigation.
The Kipona Festival has been held in Harrisburg every year since 1916. What started as a simple water carnival has since advanced into a full-blown palooza complete with merchants, performances, rides, and even a competitive puppet parade flushed with prizes for the children.
In late August, a driver rolled through a crowd at a festival in Pittsburgh and injured six people, who all managed to recover. Authorities determined the incident was “purely accidental” as the driver apparently didn’t properly park the car before exiting.
And in January, a car drove right through a crowd of football fans after the Philadelphia Eagles squashed the Washington Commanders ahead of Super Bowl LIX. Three people sustained non-life-threatening injuries, police said.
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