Mother Killed Crossing Parkway After Car Crash

A 25-year-old woman escaped a serious car accident only to be killed minutes later while trying to retrieve her belongings from the wreck, Newsday reports. Police say Brittany Leith was driving on the Southern State Parkway in Long Island, New York, shortly before 4am Sunday when she hit a median and flipped over. The single mother of a 3-year-old girl crawled out a broken window and made it across three lanes of traffic to the shoulder, where a number of other drivers stopped to help her. Ignoring her fellow drivers, Leith went back to her car to get some things. That's when police say she was hit by another driver, who was attempting to give space to the people stopped along the shoulder.

Leith's grandmother blames the Good Samaritans who stopped to help for not doing more to keep Leith from returning to her car, the New York Post reports. “Somebody should have held on to her and not let her run back into the street," she says. "This should not have happened." She says Leith was on the way home from a friend's place at the time of the crash. According to Newsday, a state trooper was hospitalized after he stopped his car to block Leith's body and was immediately hit by another car. (More New York stories.)