Woodlawn resident Keith Hill saw a baby stroller on the side of the road ? and thought the body inside must be doll, not a human.
Edgewood resident Reggie Ward happened upon a woman lying in the street, crying for her grandson, and feared the worst.
Driving on Loch Raven Boulevard, Crystal Douglass saw a child being dragged beneath a truck and screamed.
“I was blowing my horn,” Douglass recalled Monday. “I was yelling for her to stop. She never paid me any attention. ? I will never forget it. It just haunts me.”
As Lazara Arellano de Hogue dragged 3-year-old Elijah Cozart and his stroller beneath her truck for about a mile Dec. 1, 2006, she left traumatic images seared in the minds of those in Towson that day.
Five witnesses testified Monday, the opening day of Arellano de Hogue?s vehicular manslaughter trial in Baltimore County Circuit, to the troubling events they witnessed.
Arellano de Hogue, 41, admitted to police that she was in a hurry to get home Dec. 1, 2006, when she slammed her pickup into 55-year-old Marjorie Thomas and a baby stroller holding her grandson Cozart at a busy Goucher Boulevard intersection, dragging the child as she drove to her apartment. Thomas was injured but survived.
“It looked like her legs were broken,” Ward said of Thomas? injuries. “She was bleeding. She couldn?t get up at all. She kept saying, ?My grandson, my grandson. Where is my grandson?”
Cozart?s family turned out to the packed courtroom wearing buttons bearing the child?s picture. The trial is expected to last through Thursday.
From the witness stand, Hill said he unknowingly watched as Cozart was dragged beneath the truck.
“I thought it was a baby doll,” he said. “? How could they not know? It was making so much noise.”
But by the next morning, he had learned the truth.
“I woke up crying,” he said.
Examiner staff writer Jaime Malarkey contributed to this story.
