She was “Miss Glamorous Tiffany,” the 13-year-old budding diva with a gilded heart who lavished attention on her young nieces and volunteered distributing clothes to homeless people.
A steady trickle of friends and neighbors stopped by Tiffany Brown?s Southwest Baltimore rowhouse Thursday to hug the girl?s mother and gather in the darkened living room, still in disbelief a day after Tiffany was struck and killed by a van while walking from school.
“My daughter called me and said, ?Mom, don?t leave the hospital,? ” said Sharon Chestnut, a relative who works at the University of Maryland. An ambulance took Tiffany to the Shock Trauma Center after the accident. “They were still working on her, but I think she was already gone.”
Police said Tiffany and a 13-year-old boy were hit at about 4 p.m. Wednesday by a Ford van in the 1300 block of James Street. The boy, whom Tiffany?s family described as a friend, was taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, police spokesman Officer Troy Harris said.
Authorities declined to identify the driver, but Harris said the woman was taken in for questioning and released following the accident. The State?s Attorney?s Office will review the case, a spokesman said. In the living room at Tiffany?s house, where the Christmas tree was newly decorated with shiny tinsel this weekend by the teen and her 7-year-old sister, relatives struggled to understand how the crash happened.
“You hit one child, you should have stopped,” Chestnut said, explaining that the family heard the driver hit the boy first, and then Tiffany. Michelle Parents, Tiffany?s mother, sat quietly on a sofa with her hands clasped and looked at the floor, her cheeks streaked with tears. A school representative stopped by and said the Diggs Johnson Middle School students were devastated by the news. An 18-member crisis team was on campus Thursday and expected to return Friday to provide counseling, officials said.
Miss Glamorous Tiffany, who loved the Cheetah Girls and dancing on the sidewalk with her girlfriends, who braided her mother?s hair and wanted to work in a salon ? Chestnut said: “She was the role model.”
A funeral will be at noon on Tuesday at March Funeral Homes at 4300 Wabash Ave.
