When Cars Kill Pedestrians – newyorker.com

Danyoung Kim
On the afternoon of October 8, 2013, in the last moments of his life, twelve-year-old Sammy Cohen Eckstein, of Park Slope, Brooklyn, was walking to after-school soccer practice near his apartment on Prospect Park West when he lost control of his ball. It rolled into the busy southbound street, and he went after it. The driver of a car in one lane hit the brakes. The driver of a van in the next lane did not. Later, he said he’d seen only a ball, not a boy.
“Sammy didn’t yet have his growth spurt,” his mother, Amy Cohen, said. “He was small for his age. This is why he didn’t survive.” Apart from the funeral, to which nearly a thousand people came, she spent the following days under the covers, as her husband, Gary Eckstein, took the lead in caring for Sammy’s devastated older sister, Tamar. Their son had been a popular figure in the neighborhood, game to debate climate change and Yankees pitching with all comers. A random accident—that’s what people told them.