New videos of the San Diego Zombie Walk reveal a different account of what happened when a deaf family drove into a crowd near Comic-Con. NBC 7’s Liberty Zabala has the video and spoke with witnesses at the scene.
Passersby were hit by a car Saturday evening while the annual Comic-Con Zombie Walk took over downtown San Diego, the San Diego Police Department confirmed, and the whole incident was caught on cell phone video.
Police said a deaf family with small children in the black Honda Accord was stopped near 2nd and Island avenues just after 5:30 p.m., waiting for participants of the Zombie Walk to cross.
After several minutes the 48-year-old father slowly rolled forward, trying to get out of the area.
According to the SDPD, several people from the crowd of zombies allegedly surrounded the car and began punching it. Police said the car windshield was shattered by the crowd.
The family was frightened, police said, so the father drove forward again. As he drove, he struck a 64-year-old woman with the side of his car.
In a video posted to YouTube, you can see the woman in a pink shirt -- who was not part of the zombie march -- falling under the car and sustaining a serious arm injury.
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The zombie crowd then chased the driver on foot as the family drove toward a police officer down the street, officials said. The driver stopped when he arrived at the location of the police officers.
Officials said the victim was taken to a local hospital with non-life threatening injuries. She’s expected to recover.
Two other people were also left with minor injuries.
The car's driver has been cited, but he will not be criminally charged. The incident remains under investigation by police.
However, witnesses in the crowd give a very different account.
After watching the scene, Sean Foley told NBC 7 the Honda driver started honking incessantly as he was stuck behind the several pedicabs and vehicles leading up to the parade on 2nd Avenue.
When he started inching forward, a parade watcher sat on his hood, Foley said. As the driver continued to accelerate, others stood in front of the car.
"People began shouting for him to stop so as not to run through a parade that included [sic] children and babies in strollers at which point he floored his car through the crowd," Foley wrote in an email.
Diana Jackson, who said she was about 10 people away, told NBC 7 on Facebook that the driver took off with such aggression "that his tires squealed."
Counter to police information, Foley said the driver's window was broken after he hit people in the crowd, not before.
"The only reason he was surrounded by a crowd who was angry was because he was pushing his car through a crowd that was trying to watch the parade," said Foley.
Foley said the woman who suffered the arm injury was run over by both the front and back wheels.
Jen Foley, a physician who was in the crowd, rushed to help the victim, whose arm had been flayed, she said.
Foley believes the whole incident could have been avoided if the Honda driver had followed the example of other drivers and made a U-turn away.
"So if his children were scared by traffic and his honking, he could've turned around and driven away," said Jen. "He did not need to literally floor his engine through a crowd of people."
According to the Twitter page for the SDZombieWalk, participants of the event had nothing to do with the incident. Many tweeted that they were stunned by the turn of events at the walk and wished a speedy recovery to woman injured in the incident.
Organizers released another video that shows "no zombies touching the car that we can see" and nobody beating the car, according to Zombie Walk's post on its Facebook page.
