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player ready...A Joliet mother has turned to social media for help finding the motorist she believes hit her 13-year-old son and left him by the side of the road.
Colleen Stueckrad said her son, Adam, was testing his new skateboard last month, then staggered home with a series of injuries and no memory of how he got them. He suffered a concussion, bleeding in the brain, a broken elbow, injured shoulder and cuts and abrasions on both sides of his body, she said.
She turned to Facebook at the suggestion of Joliet police investigators, who have been unable to find witnesses, security video or car parts at the site of the incident and don’t have a description of what happened because the boy doesn’t remember it.
In her online post, Stueckrad wrote about her overwhelming helplessness and lack of answers in the case.
On Thursday, Al Roechner, deputy chief of investigations for the Joliet Police Department, praised Stueckrad “for trying to find the person.”
Roechner suggested that anyone who saw or heard anything in the area of Hosmer Street and Cleary Avenue between noon and 1:40 p.m. Sept. 27 to contact authorities at 815-724-3020 or 815-724-3010.
In the meantime, the case is classified as a “suspicious incident involving a child” because police can’t rule out the possibility the Hufford Junior High School student simply fell.
Two doctors identified Adam’s injuries as consistent with injuries from a motor vehicle-pedestrian collision, Stueckrad said.
Stueckrad said she followed her son’s blood trail for about a block to the four-way-stop intersection with curved corners and no sidewalks. She finds it difficult to believe her son simply fell.
There was blood on a utility pole, “where he probably hit his head,” and there were skid marks on the asphalt, she said.
“You could tell where they did a 360; you could tell where they sped off,” she said. “They had to know.”
Roechner said investigators found skid marks at the scene, but “they couldn’t say how old they were.”
Stueckrad said she distributed 150 fliers in the area, hoping to find a witness.
Her son had surgery Tuesday at Advocate Children’s Hospital in Oak Lawn to deal with an infection in his arm.