A 10-year-old boy has relived the terrifying moment he was struck by a police car that was responding to an emergency call.
Shane Sarkodie Nana-Kena was walking home from Five Elms Primary School when he was hit by a marked silver car as he crossed Heathway, Dagenham, just a few hundred metres from his home in Oxlow Lane.
A month later he still has a plaster cast on his broken lower left leg, along with a sizeable scar on the upper left of his forehead – both injuries resulting from the collision at about 4pm on Thursday, February 14.
Speaking exclusively to the Post, the keen football and basketball player said: “I pressed the button and after it went green and all the cars were stopped I walked straight across.
“I went across one side of the road and then I was hit. I didn’t go in the air. It hit me and then my head hit the floor and I rolled into the middle of the road.”
“It was painful straight away,” added Shane, who claims not to have heard the approaching police sirens. He said a female officer was the first to rush to him following the collision and ask him whether he was hurt.
Speaking of the first time officers broke the news to her about the accident, Shane’s mum, Charlotte Yeboah, 41, originally from Ghana, said: “I felt like I had a headache. I felt very uncomfortable.”
Shane’s plumber father Nti Sarkodie, 47, said: “I was really worried when I heard a police car was involved, I thought, ‘This is something serious’.”
He said in the few weeks since the incident Shane’s incapacity has placed an extra burden on the family, adding: “It has involved all the family and family members. It is a lot of hardship.”
Regarding the police officers involved in the accident, he said that he was “not angry about them at all,” although he had yet to be given a contact number for any possible compensation claims.
Shane, who is in good spirits and has had a number of friends sign his cast, simply said of the police: “They never said sorry. I want them to say sorry to me.”
The officer involved has been taken off driving duties while an investigation is carried out.
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