Six Lindenwold Kids Were Walking Home From School. A Town Is Holding Its Breath.

LINDENWOLD — It was a little after two in the afternoon, the ordinary hour when the sidewalks near a high school fill up with kids heading home — backpacks, earbuds, the slow shuffle of a Tuesday that’s almost over. On the 400 block of East Gibbsboro Road last Tuesday, that ordinary afternoon came apart in a matter of seconds.

What police say happened

According to Lindenwold police, a 16-year-old driving an SUV left the roadway and drove onto the sidewalk near Lindenwold High School, striking six teenagers who were walking there. When officers arrived around 2:10 p.m., they found one young person trapped beneath the vehicle and five others who had been hit. The teen pinned under the SUV was flown by medical helicopter to Cooper University Hospital in Camden. The other five were taken to local hospitals. All six, police said in a statement the following day, are between 14 and 16 years old, and all of them continue to recover.

Read that last part again, because in a story this frightening it’s the line that matters most: all of them are recovering. In a town like Lindenwold, where the high school sits at the center of the map and of the day, there is no such thing as a stranger’s child. The six kids on that sidewalk are somebody’s neighbor, somebody’s teammate, somebody down the street. The whole borough has spent the week waiting on the same news, refreshing the same updates, saying the same quiet thing to each other in grocery-store aisles and church parking lots: how are they doing?

The charges

The driver, who has not been publicly identified because he is a juvenile, is being held at the Camden County Juvenile Detention Center. Police say he faces one count of second-degree aggravated assault, six counts of third-degree aggravated assault, and one count of joyriding. Those are allegations, and the law will do its careful, deliberate work in the weeks ahead. Investigators also said two occupants of the vehicle were detained at the scene the day it happened; police have not said whether they face any charges. The department described the investigation as ongoing, which is the honest answer, and the one that should make the rest of us slow down before we fill the silence with conclusions.

The safe place

What I keep thinking about is the sidewalk itself — the most taken-for-granted few feet of concrete in any town. We build them so our kids can walk to school, to a friend’s house, to the corner store, without us hovering. We tell them the sidewalk is the safe place, the place that isn’t the road. For six families in Lindenwold, that promise broke on an afternoon in October, and the work of putting it back together — the hospital visits, the recovery, the return to a normal that will feel different for a while — is just beginning.

We tell them the sidewalk is the safe place, the place that isn’t the road.Max Cedar

There will be time, and there should be, for the harder conversations this raises: about young drivers, about the stretch of Gibbsboro Road where it happened, about how a walk home turns into a helicopter ride. The Gazette will follow them. But today, a week out, the only thing that needs saying is the thing the whole town already feels. Six kids are healing. Their families are carrying something no family should have to carry. And a borough that knows every one of those kids by a first name is holding its breath, and holding them close, until every last one of them is all the way home.

Based on reporting from The Philadelphia Inquirer and statements from the Lindenwold Police Department.