The outlook for Marion Salmon Hedges, the Upper West Side mother who was crushed by a tossed Target shopping cart on Sunday while buying candy for needy children, does not seem great. "She’s going to be, in the best of all cases, in rehabilitation for months," her husband, Michael Hedges, told reporters yesterday on his way to Harlem Hospital. "She’s under sedation. She’s intubated. She has a thousand machines hooked up to her. It’s very disturbing." Meanwhile, stories about her alleged 12-year-old assailants have gone from them being described as "good kids" to being total "terrors."
"That boy is the baddest boy in the building,” a former babysitter said of one of the pre-teens. "His mom used to say, 'He’s gonna be my problem, that kid right there.'" And a neighbor described the other child as "a terror" saying that "he's always outside. Truthfully, he's a bad ass kid. He's very disrespectful. He's got a bad mouth for a kid 12-years old."
When WCBS 2 got ahold of one of the boy's family last night, this is what they were told: "We feel real bad for the whole situation and the family and what she’s going through. I can’t imagine what her family and kids are going through, but we’re also going through something, too."
Meanwhile, friends and family are distraught that this could happen to Hedges, a Spence and Barnard graduate with a penchant for volunteering. "She is the kind of woman," her husband told the Times, "who gives her life to her family and the people around her." And what makes this even harder for Hedges' husband (who works in finance in Spain) and her children (who he says are "holding up. They're really very strong kids.") is the fact that depending on the length of her recovery there is a good chance Hedges' children will soon be living in a home with three incapacitated people. 10 years ago Hedges took in her sister who was left brain-damaged from a car accident and her father recently came to stay after undergoing heart surgery.
Still, Michael Hedges isn't out for blood when it comes to the tweens said to have dropped a shopping cart four stories onto his wife. "They’re not adults," he said last night. "They’re children, and children who have been left on their own without supervision. Right now my focus is on my wife’s well being."
