Girl, 7, walking to NE city school dies in hit-run
Mother, 2 children hurt; Judge denies bail to woman held as drunken driver
By Del Quentin Wilber and Erika Niedowski
Sun Staff
Originally published December 21, 2001, 4:05 PM EST

A 7-year-old girl was killed and her mother, baby brother and another child were injured yesterday as they walked to school and were struck by a car operated by a drunken driver who ran a red light and ignored a crossing guard in Northeast Baltimore, police said.

Debra A. Chafin, 45, was arrested at her home and faces 10 charges, including negligent homicide, driving while under the influence of alcohol and fleeing the scene of an accident.

A breath test revealed that Chafin had a blood alcohol level of 0.27 percent, well above the legal limit of 0.08, police said. She is being held at the city jail after a judge denied bail this afternoon.

District Court Judge Tim Murphy ordered an evaluation of Chafin to determine whether she's at risk of killing herself.

Chafin's next court date is set for Jan. 24.

Investigators recovered physical evidence, including bits of fabric, from the maroon 1990 Lincoln Continental. A child's winter cap was found in one of Chafin's trash cans, police said.

Chafin had been charged before with drunken driving, in April in Baltimore County, and has a January court date.

The accident took the life of a second-grader at Furley Elementary School who enjoyed school and playing with Barbie dolls, according to friends and neighbors.

Brijae D. Harris was walking to school with her mother, Monique Glover, 27, who was holding her infant son, Jae. Monique Sandy-Bell, 6, a first-grader at Furley and a neighbor, joined them for the trip.

It was 8:14 a.m. A red light had just stopped traffic on Moravia Road at Sipple Avenue, and a crossing guard waved at the group to cross Moravia, police said.

The driver was heading into the bright sun, police said, and went through the red light and past the crossing guard. Glover tried to push the girls out of the way.

The car slammed into the group. Brijae died almost instantly, becoming the city's 52nd traffic fatality of the year. The mother suffered minor injuries and her son sustained facial injuries, police said. Monique Sandy-Bell's leg was broken.

Sam Hicks, 53, lives a few hundred yards from the accident scene. He was just getting ready to leave the house to go for a walk when he heard "unbearable screaming" from the street.

He said he raced down Sipple Avenue and found Monique lying on the ground in shock, so he wrapped her in his fleece jacket.

"I talked to her until she came around," Hicks said.

Ambulances took the three injured to Johns Hopkins Hospital; they were treated and released.

After the accident, a witness in another car followed the Lincoln and jotted down its tag number before losing sight of it on a side street, police said.

Three people were in the Lincoln, including Chafin's neighbor, Rose Newsome, 40, and one of Newsome's friends, Sarah R. Goods, 41, police said.

Goods said she was sitting in the back seat of the Lincoln when the accident happened and saw Glover walk into the street with a baby in her arms. Goods saw and heard the collision.

"I'm like, oh, my goodness, you just hit a lady and a child and a baby," Goods said in an interview. "I told her to stop the car. Go back and see."

But Chafin refused, Goods said: "She told us that we had to take this to our grave. I said something to make her feel good, 'All right, we're not going to say anything.'"

Chafin drove the three back to her house in the 4300 block of Seidel Ave., about a half-mile from the accident scene, Goods said.

There, Chafin took a child's hat wedged in the car's grille "and threw it in the trash," Goods said.

"She was hysterical," she said.

A few minutes later, Goods said, she and the other passenger, Newsome, left. They visited their mothers and asked for advice, then called police. "I have grandkids of my own," she said. "I couldn't deal with that."

About 10 a.m., investigators found Chafin lying in her bed at home, the back door of the house open, police said. As they led her out in handcuffs, she said she had not struck anybody with her car.

"They woke me up out of bed and I'm really tired of this," Chafin said.

Chafin told police that she had stopped drinking at 9 p.m. Wednesday and went to sleep, police said. She did not awaken until police showed up at her house, she told investigators.

Goods and Newsome identified Chafin as the driver of the Lincoln, police said.

Earlier traffic arrest

On April 7, Chafin was pulled over by a state trooper on the eastbound ramp from Interstate 70 onto Interstate 695, court records show.

She had been "weaving," the trooper wrote in his report. After Chafin was pulled over, she began speaking in a "slurring mushmouth manner," the trooper wrote.

Chafin told the trooper she was "trying to drive home," the trooper wrote. She failed a sobriety test and has a January trial date, records show.

In 1999, Chafin pleaded guilty to driving under the influence in Anne Arundel County. Court records show Chafin has been found guilty twice of driving under the influence of alcohol in North Carolina, in 1993 and 1996, the Associated Press reported.

Yesterday's accident occurred during what had become a routine half-mile walk for Glover and her children.

"The three of them were always together - mother, daughter, son," said Dan Blevins, a maintenance worker at Glover's apartment complex in the 4400 block of Chalet Court.

Nesha Myers, 24, a neighbor, said Glover loved and cared for her children and was raising them on her own.

Brijae often came over to her house to play with dolls with her 4-year-old daughter. "They are always just going, like Energizers," Myers said.

Counselors at school

After the accident, school officials dispatched a team of 10 counselors, psychologists and social workers to Furley Elementary - and will again today - to talk with the children.

The counselors are paying special attention to about eight pupils who witnessed the accident, said Vanessa Pyatt, a school system spokeswoman.

Some parents were clearly worried about how their children would take news about the death of their classmate.

Sheila Watkins, 44, picked up her son, a fourth-grader, and grandson, who's in kindergarten, about noon yesterday. "I just feel better about them being at home," Watkins said.

"It's devastating," she said. "How can you hit someone and leave?"

Shirl Cheeseboro picked up her 6-year-old son, Kevin Brown, at Furley yesterday afternoon. She said her first-grader witnessed the accident. He was in tears yesterday afternoon after safely crossing Moravia and landing in her arms for the trip home.

"I thought it was safe, because of the crossing guard and because they are in the crosswalk," said Cheeseboro, who usually lets Kevin's sister pick him up because she has to work. "Now, it does worry me because it doesn't make a difference if they're doing everything right. Someone still hit them."

Worries about speed

Some parents and neighbors complained that cars speed down Moravia and Sipple.

Talibah Saboor and Candie Ingram, both 12, cross Moravia every day going to and from nearby Northeast Middle School, where they are in sixth grade. After school yesterday, a crossing guard directed them back onto the sidewalk when they took a step into the road to wait for the light to change.

"Some cars be zooming when it's a yellow light," said Candie. "They don't slow down or nothing. Doesn't yellow mean slow down?"

Several children crossed Moravia against the light anyway yesterday afternoon.

This article was updated by SunSpot staff with information from the Associated Press. Sun staff writers Michael Scarcella and Gerard Shields contributed to this article.

Copyright � 2001, The Baltimore Sun