‘It still doesn’t feel real’: Woman witnessed crash that hurt seven-year-old

It’s a disturbing sight that you would never want to see: A little seven-year-old boy, slumped against your fence after getting hit by a truck.

That’s exactly what Tandy Totossi-White saw from her home in Regina’s Walsh Acres neighbourhood.

On Tuesday morning, police said that a man driving a truck crashed into a yard, seriously hurting the child and damaging three vehicles and some other property.

Totossi-White lives in the home on Dunsmore Drive where it happened.

“I was standing in my living room just about to leave for work and I heard a really horrendous crash. I looked out my front window, and my SUV looked like it was about to roll,” she recalled.

“At first, I didn’t realize what happened. It took me a couple of seconds to get my faculties about me, and then I realized, ‘OK, there’s been an accident.'”

She ran and grabbed the phone to call 9-1-1.

Looking outside, it was easy to see that there was some serious damage.

“(The truck) had hit the neighbours’ vehicle. It crashed through the fence, and then it crashed through our side fence. You can see the debris everywhere. And then it rested against — I think the SUV basically … stopped it from continuing further. But the SUV’s a total writeoff. The impact was so strong,” Totossi-White said.

But the damage to her property is far from the worst thing she saw that day.

“That’s all stuff that insurance will cover,” she said.

What she saw while on the phone with 9-1-1 was hard for her to talk about.

“She asked me if the driver was still breathing. At this point, more people had come to help. When I went outside to check … I think it was my SUV, the horn was going off, and the man that was trying to help the driver of the truck couldn’t hear me. I was staying in my house, and my daughter was having a major panic attack, and it just happened so fast,” she started.

“So I went outside to go see, and then I realized that there was a little boy that was hit and he was laying against my fence and people were tending to him,” she said with a pained sigh.

She paused.

“And then I just let 9-1-1 …. All I could do was just tell them what was happening and let them know he was breathing,” she continued tearfully. “That was all I could do.”

While she’ll have to deal with the damage to her vehicle, fence and even a little bit to her home, there’s one thing at the top of her mind.

“Our biggest concern here … is that little boy and his family. That’s our biggest concern,” she struggled to say, fighting back tears.

“That’s what kept us up last night. That’s what continues to be on our minds today. It was just a horrible … It just felt like a bad dream. It still doesn’t feel real, honestly.”