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Boy, 4, playing in car is run over

 
Published Jan. 20, 1994|Updated Oct. 6, 2005

Lillian Wyatt was in the bathroom of her son's home when she heard the chilling screams of her 7-year-old granddaughter.

"Daniel's dead," the girl cried. "Daniel's dead."

Wyatt rushed outside to a horrifying sight. Her 4-year-old grandson was lying face-down in the grass, trapped under a tire of the family's Ford LTD.

Daniel King was hit and seriously injured about 7:08 a.m. Wednesday after he climbed into the running car, put it in reverse and tried to jump out of the moving auto, according to the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office.

Minutes earlier, Wyatt had started the car, which was parked on the grass, to warm it up for the children's ride to school. She returned to the house to use the bathroom, she said, while both children were still inside the home. Daniel was sitting in the living room, and he asked his grandmother if they would be leaving soon.

But when Wyatt went into the bathroom, Daniel slipped out the back door. He climbed in the car and put it in reverse. Daniel's sister, Amanda, saw her brother at the wheel of the moving car.

"I told him to jump out," Amanda said. "He tried to, but he fell, and the car ran over him.

"His eyes were closed, and he had stuff all over him."

Daniel's mother, Lucy King, also heard her daughter's cries. She jumped into the car and drove it off her screaming son. The boy was rushed to Tampa General Hospital, where he was in serious condition late Wednesday.

Wyatt said doctors found a small hole in the boy's lung, but otherwise he was doing okay.

"For now, he's laughing and talking," she said. "He begged me for Pepsi."

Wyatt said Daniel loves riding in the car and will sometimes stand at the wheel, pretending to drive. As she looked at the tire tracks in the back yard Wednesday, the grandmother thought about how much worse the accident could have been.

"The car ran from his leg to the middle of his back," she said. "If I had parked it out on the cement, and he had done that, he would have been dead."