A 93-year-old Bronx woman walking to get food for a needy neighborhood boy was killed by a motorcycle in a hit-and-run crash Monday, cops said — as her family urged the rider to turn himself in.
Retired nurse Leonara Campbell, a great-grandmother of nine, was struck and sent flying by a biker who ran her over and chillingly stared at the carnage before speeding off on White Plains Road near East 225th Street in Olinville around 2:30 p.m., cops and relatives said.
The strong-willed matriarch had been on her way to pick up her medications, candy for the neighborhood kids — and lunch for a young boy who’d asked her for food, her family told The Post on Tuesday.
“The kid was hungry, and she was willing to go out and buy him a piece of chicken,” said Campbell’s grandson, Rolando Barrett, 40. “And just to step out and cross the street and get hit multiple times … We’re just trying to hold it together.”
“This is a sudden death that never should have happened, and the way she looked when it was over — it doesn’t look good. It doesn’t look good at all.”
Campbell, who lived about three blocks from the scene, “was always a caring person, always looking out for the kids, always willing to give treats,” Barrett said.
“If she saw you, she was willing to give you food,” he added. “Everyone in the neighborhood knew her as ‘Mama’ because she was the eldest one in the whole area. Her spirit was always uplifting.
“She was always motivating everybody, always trying to get the family together. She was just that big soul that held everybody together.”
The motorcyclist had been heading east on East 225 Street approaching White Plains Road in his 2012 Yamaha YZFR1 when he struck the senior and sped off, authorities said.
Barrett said he watched disturbing surveillance footage of the moment his grandmother was struck.
“She’s crossing, he’s flying, and he hit her. She flew up in the air, tumbled two car-lengths and stopped,” he recalled. “He then dragged her, rolled over her and continued on. And then he stopped — he looked at her for a good minute, and then he left. The guy needs to give himself up, because they still haven’t found him yet.”
Campbell’s neighbor and friend of 14 years, Freddy Williams, 80, said he was stunned over how she died — because she had just complained about reckless scooter-riding kids in the area.
“I could not believe that,” Williams said. “Me and that lady were just talking. She was telling me about these kids riding the scooters. She was telling me, ‘I hope I don’t get hit by a bike, because these people are going crazy.’
“And then a kid hit her with one of those bikes, and me and her were just talking about it,” he added. “I went that way, and she went this way, and the guys came back and told me she got hit. She was a sweet lady.”
Williams recalled that Campbell often urged him to go to church, and would offer him packs of cookies.
“‘No thanks,’ I’d say, so she’d go back inside and bring me a cup of cold water, and I’m glad she did because some days it was hot out here,” he added. “I’m going to really miss her. She was my friend.”
Campbell was taken to Jacobi Medical Center, where she succumbed to her injuries, police said.
The driver had not been caught by Tuesday.
Campbell “had all her faculties on her” and was “very mobile” and independent, according to her grandson’s fiancée, Tia Hampton, 44.
“[She] loved to nurture, to feed everyone,” Hampton said. “It’s just recklessness and no reverence for life. We need our mayor to crack down on these bikes. This is vehicular homicide.”
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