Taking time for our grief in a city of mean streets
By MARY JO MELONE
Published April 2, 2004
A couple of young men piled into an old brown car near 22nd Street and 142nd Avenue and drove off. They were chasing a rumor - baseless, according to the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office - about who was responsible for the accident that left two children dead and two of their siblings injured in the hideous hit-and-run that occurred Wednesday just after dusk.
At the corner, strangers kept stopping by. A poster that held a picture of one of the dead children, 13-year-old Bryant Wilkins, was tacked onto a utility pole that had become a community's sympathy card. "May God bless you," the strangers wrote. "God knows what's best." "We love you."
A pile of flowers, candles and toys spread at the base of the pole. White lilies. Pink roses. An inflated Tigger. A fuzzy white bear held a sign made out of a shoe box top. "From the people of Shady Oaks," the sign read.
It's hard to comprehend the moral constitution of a driver who, after running down a pedestrian - no, four of them - would floor the gas and speed away.
The odds that there would be not one driver this craven, but two and perhaps three, must be just this side of astronomical.
A $1,000 reward has been offered for information leading to the drivers' arrests. Tips were coming in Thursday. But not the tip.
Surely it wouldn't take long to find them, I thought. You can't keep something this big and awful secret.
Surely somebody knew the drivers. Somebody in a body shop given the job of fixing the busted front grilles of three vehicles, a white Toyota van, dark Honda sedan or a Toyota Echo - the vehicles investigators believe were involved - would surely get an attack of conscience.
Tampa has a well-deserved national reputation for our mean, pedestrian-hostile streets. The stretch of 22nd Street where Bryant Wilkins and his brothers and sister were mowed down is a fine, frightening example.
People love to speed here. It's a straight shot from this section of 22nd Street to University Mall a mile to the south. Deputies say they are out here six to seven days a week.
Yet the obvious was overlooked. The children were hit as they crossed 22nd Street, heading home from the neighborhood's community center. It's a popular place, but no traffic light marks the crosswalk. The basketball courts at the center are well lit, but several street lights don't work.
At the corner Thursday, you could still hear astonishment and anger. Nobody could talk of what might come next, when the drivers are caught. Disbelief seemed to leave everyone still frozen in the moment when witnesses heard the screeching tires, the sickening thuds of bodies hitting metal and pavement, the roar of the vehicles as they picked up speed again.
The University Area where the accident occurred is chock full of apartments, supposedly packed with transients. But the dead and injured children were known in this neighborhood. They were not faceless strangers. The accident hit home with force.
I ran into a street vendor, Mallon Taylor. "We're all family when something like this happens," he said.
And I met Gloria Hickmon, a cousin to the dead and injured children's mother, Lisa Wilkins. They live a few blocks apart.
Hickmon was in the hospital with Lisa Wilkins Wednesday night. "How am I gonna live without these children?" Hickmon heard her cousin say. Hickmon said she couldn't get the words out of her head. They'll be with her until the end of her days.
I don't know what you do with such unmitigated sadness. Where do you put it? How do you make peace and go on?
You pray, I suppose. You listen to the preacher at the graveside. You let yourself be held up by the embrace of relatives and friends. You go to court to see the people responsible brought to justice. Then you wait - for a lifetime - for a miracle to repair the hole in your heart.
