TAMPA – A 24-year-old woman and her friend are still in the hospital after a driver crashed his car into a crowd outside a busy bar in Ybor City last weekend.
Tampa police say, 22-year-old Silas Sampson, plowed into the crowd outside Bradley’s on 7th Avenue early Saturday morning.
Riley Hancock, 24, was out with her two friends in Ybor that night, and was hurt in the mayhem.
The backstory:
According to a motion for pretrial detention, Florida Highway Patrol troopers first spotted a silver Toyota Camry driven by Sampson around 12:39 a.m. on November 8. He was speeding south on I-275. When troopers tried to stop the car near Nebraska Avenue, Sampson accelerated away from them, reaching speeds of 92 to 100 miles per hour as he turned onto Seventh Avenue.
Troopers ended the chase just 10 seconds before the crash, citing the heavy pedestrian traffic in Ybor City.Â
Surveillance video captured Sampson’s car striking a Jeep, bouncing onto the sidewalk, and then slamming into people standing between The Copper Shaker and Bradley’s on 7th.
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The court motion states that at least a dozen people were hit.Â
Surveillance video showed “two individuals flying through the air, with one hitting the ceiling, another colliding with a wall” before the car came to rest inside the outdoor patio area.
The Tampa Police say four people were killed in the collision.
Sampson was charged with four counts of vehicular homicide along with multiple other charges in the case.
What they’re saying:
Riley’s mom, Kimberly Maus, says Riley and her two godsons, Connor and Brandon, were hit.
“They’re more like brothers and sisters,” Maus said.
Riley and Connor were rushed to the hospital. Maus, who doesn’t live in the Tampa area, says she woke up in the middle of the night to almost a dozen missed calls and messages from Brandon.
“These kids were doing nothing wrong,” she said. “They were being 100% responsible, Ubering, and something bad still happened. And that can happen, and life can change on a dime.”
Maus says she started frantically calling hospitals in Tampa to figure out where Riley was taken.
“And then, I started the next two and a half hours of not knowing whether they were dead or alive,” she said. “And that was horrific.”
Maus got in touch with a nurse at Tampa General Hospital and found out that Riley was alive. She and her husband got on the next plane to Tampa, and have been by Riley’s bedside ever since.
“When she would wake up just for those couple of minutes and I would tell her I’m here, and I’m holding her, and she would look at me and maybe, you know, kind of give me a little smile and say, ‘Hi mom’, that’s all I needed,” Maus said. “At that point, anything that happens from there on out, well, we’re good, we can take it. We can handle anything that happens, just by the grace of God, they’re alive.”
Maus says Riley suffered a long list of extensive injuries.
“10 fractures in her spine, a broken scapula, six broken ribs, a punctured lung, a lacerated liver,” she said.
She says Riley has started to speak and to take a few steps at a time with the help of a walker.
“She has a huge laceration that starts here, and it comes through, and it goes here, and then it wraps around the back of her head,” Maus said. “And she’s got roughly 100 stitches, and then she has staples all around the back of her head.”
Maus is grateful that her daughter is alive. She says Riley has made immense progress over the last several days.
“You just hug your kids and let them always know that you love them, and you’re there for them,” Maus said.
What’s next:
Maus says Riley has a long recovery ahead of her.
Friends of Riley have started a fundraiser to help with her recovery. You can find that here.
A fundraiser has also been started for Connor to support his recovery, as he’s still in the hospital. The fundraiser for Connor can be found here.
The Source: This story was written based on police reports from the criminal proceedings involving Silas Sampson and on interviews with family members of the victims.