Police have confirmed that two men, a driver and passenger, fled the scene of a crash in Margate that left a postman needing hospital treatment and a mum and her two children jammed inside a second car.
The incident in King Street on Thursday (March 29) involved two cars and the postman, who was on foot.
Police, fire and ambulance were called to the scene at 4.16pm.
The postman suffered two broken arms after he was struck and rammed into the side of a building. He was helped at the scene by bystanders before being taken to the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford.
Mum Leela Denton was in the other vehicle with her seven-year-old daughter and five-month-old son when the car was struck and sent into a spin.
‘The door was jammed’
She said: “I heard the car coming and then it hit my side and everything went white as the airbag was deployed. We were spinning and I turned around to check my kids and the rear of the car was hit again on my daughter’s side.
“My daughter was screaming. We stopped spinning but the door was jammed and the car was starting to smoke, it took me three tries to get out.
“I got my son out and asked a gentlemen to take my baby and another gentlemen helped get my daughter out.”
Leela then put in a call to the ambulance service to help the postman but says police arrived on the scene in minutes, before she even got through to the call centre.
The traumatic incident has left Leela with severe bruising and pain in her arms, legs and neck. Her daughter also suffered bruising. The aftermath has also left the mum terrified to drive and unable to sleep.
She said: “I can’t get the images and sound of my daughter screaming out of my head. It is all still very vivid. It was the scariest thing I have ever experienced because the children were with me.
A split second
“I am thankful that it wasn’t worse, the paramedics and trauma team said if it had been a split second sooner I would have got the full brunt of it and I think if it had been that split second sooner the postman would have been pinned to the house.
“If I had been trapped, or cut out of the car, my kids would have had to see that.”
Leela says she is grateful to the couple living in one of the nearby homes who took her and her children in while they waited to be checked over.
‘Do the right thing’
But she added that the two men who ran off need to find the courage to hand themselves in.
She said: “It’s just awful that they ran off. The ripple effect of this could have affected so many lives but they just ran off, all they thought about was themselves. They are cowards.
“I just hope they have the courage to do the right thing.”
No arrests have yet been made but police say enquires are ongoing. Anyone with information can call police on 101 and quote reference number 29-0914.