COLUMBUS — A mother of Ohio who tried to stop two men from stealing her car with her 6-year-old son inside was killed when she was run over by the vehicle.
The boy was unharmed, police said, and no other injuries were reported.
Alexa Stakely, 29, of Pickerington, went to an apartment complex in Columbus to pick up her son who was being cared for by a babysitter around 1:30 a.m. Thursday. Stakely, a single mother who was a speech therapist for the Canal Winchester Local School District, also worked as a waitress and had just finished a shift at that job, Columbus police said.
Stakely initially carried the sleeping boy to her car, which she had left running, and then returned to the nanny’s unit to collect the boy’s belongings, police said. As she returned to her vehicle, Stakely saw someone begin to back up into the street and ran toward the car, yelling for her son and asking the driver to pull over.
Stakely was struck by the car and fell to the pavement, suffering a head injury. She was pronounced dead at a hospital.
The two men abandoned the car a short distance from where Stakely was struck, then ran past her before jumping a fence and heading into a nearby apartment complex, police said. They remained at large Friday.
Security camera video had captured a group of men looking at apartments in another nearby complex earlier that morning, police said, adding that they matched the description of the men later seen running past Stakely.
Source: With information from AP
