WEST JORDAN, Utah — Around 3:30 this afternoon, Belen Giarrusso was at home waiting for her daughter Alexa to come home from school, when she heard a loud boom.
“We just think something needs to be done," she said. "Because it's just happening too often.”
She ran outside to find her fence and part of her toolshed crushed; a car had rammed into the tree in her backyard.
“The first thing we thought of was the kids getting out of school," Giarrusso said. "We thought one of the kids had been hit.”
Giarusso and her family live within a thousand feet of Columbia Elementary School. She knew her daughter was walking home after dismissal right when the crash happened.
"It's just happening too often, where cars are crashing into houses, kids on the sidewalk," she said. "It's just really scary.”
Just days after two young siblings in Provo were hit and killed by a car while walking to school, Giarrusso and her neighbors want the speed limit on 7800 South to be reduced near the school.
“It's 40, but people are not going 40," she said. "They go a lot faster, and there is no 'School zone' sign on 78, so accidents are actually happening here very often.”
The driver was an older man coming East on 7800 South when he confused his brake pedal with the gas and turned down Giarrusso’s street, West Jordan Police told FOX 13.
“This is a touchy subject, but with him being older, maybe there needs to be some rules with older people still driving," she said.
This isn’t the first time an accident has happened in Giarrusso's neighborhood, but she hopes it will be the last.
