Criminal and motor vehicle charges are being considered against a Surrey woman suspected of hitting two flaggers in Burnaby Wednesday before going on to allegedly assault two children.
An online video of one of the hit-and-runs shows an SUV stopped in front of a female flagger, trying to merge into single lane traffic on 10th Avenue near Kingsway. A female flagger steps in the way to stop the SUV and is then knocked down and run over.
The suspect vehicle fled the scene without stopping, according to Burnaby RCMP, who got the call at about 11:30 a.m.
When police arrived, they found two flaggers had actually been hit in the same construction zone.
The first was sent to hospital with a head injury and bruising, according to police, while the other escaped with minor injuries.
Shortly after arriving at the scene, police got a call about a woman assaulting two children, according to Burnaby RCMP Staff Sgt. Maj. John Buis.
“It was learned that the female assault suspect was the driver of the suspect vehicle in the hit and run,” Buis said.
The children were related to the suspect, Buis said, and the Ministry of Children and Family Development were called in and the woman taken into custody.
Both criminal and motor vehicle charges are being considered, according to Buis.
The online video of the hit-and-run sparked outrage on the B.C. Flagging Association Facebook page, with many calling for attempted murder or assault with a deadly weapon charges.
“They’re threatening to shut bridges down during rush hour,” group co-founder Diane Herback told CBC’s Early Edition. “The flaggers have had enough.”
Traffic control workers are vulnerable, especially when drivers who are in a hurry unexpectedly run into a construction zone, according to Sarina Hanschke of the B.C. Construction Safety Alliance Traffic Control Program.
“You really don’t have too much more to protect you than a couple of orange cones and small traffic signs,” she told the NOW.
One way to avoid volatile encounters is to reroute traffic entirely.
“We noticed that when we put a detour in place that traffic is continuously moving, so you’re getting less of those responses out of the drivers because they’re just forced to take a different route versus someone that would be dead set on going through the job site area. … Then you just start getting those behaviours.”
