An 8-year-old girl on her way home from a movie was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver on the South Side over the weekend–as her cousin grabbed her hand and tried to pull her from the path of the out-of-control car, police and relatives said.
Martella McArthur, an outgoing girl who was the youngest of seven, had just gotten off a city bus around 11 p.m. Friday with three siblings and an older cousin when a white car came hurtling at the group at the intersection of South Lowe Avenue and West 79th Street.
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The driver swerved and tried to regain control, but the car hit Martella. Her cousin Malcolm Black, 14, grabbed her hand and tried to pull her away, but she twisted around and went under the car’s back wheel, said her brother Maurice, 14, who was with the group.
Police are searching for the driver, who witnesses said possibly was driving a Chevrolet Impala.
Martella’s mother, Olisa McArthur, 36, had been waiting to pick them up one block away when her daughter Michelle, 13, called from the scene.
McArthur raced over and saw the little girl cradled in Maurice’s arms. She tried to calm the other children, called 911 and laid the unconscious girl on the ground.
“Martella, wake up,” she recalled saying. “She couldn’t hold my hand. She wasn’t breathing. I was just calling her name. `Martella,’ I said. `I love you. Martella!’ Nothing.”
She ran out into the street and flagged down a police car, and the ambulance came soon after. Martella was taken to Wyler Children’s Hospital and pronounced dead at 11:55 p.m.
A flock of family and friends gathered around the McArthurs’ porch in the 9900 block of South Lowe on Saturday. They spoke of Martella as a tiny but vivacious girl who loved school and read whatever she could get her hands on. “I got a void in my heart now,” her mother said, staring at the ground. “My baby is gone.”
McArthur begged for the driver to turn himself in.
“How could you just run over a child like that?” she said.