Middle School Student in Critical Condition After Auto Accident

A Long Beach Middle School student is in critical condition after a car struck him while he was ridding his skateboard to school in Lido Beach Tuesday morning.

According to Nassau County police, a 14-year-old boy was skateboarding eastbound on Lido Boulevard, just west of Greenway Road, at about 7:55 a.m. when a 44-year-old motorist driving westbound in a 2011 Mercedes Benz hit him. The vehicle was traveling westbound on Lido Boulevard.

"He was riding his skateboard in the street and he was struck by an auto," a public information officer told Patch.

The boy, Abdul Bird, was transported to Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow, where he was listed in critical condition. “He was evaluated in NUMC’s emergency department in critical condition,” said Shelly Lotenberg, an NUMC spokesperson. Lotenberg said he was later transferred to a second hospital.

Superintendent of Long Beach School District, David Weiss, said that the eighth-grade student suffered “serious head injuries,” and was treated for head trauma at NUMC.

“The 14-year-old was on his way to the middle school for rehearsal for tomorrow’s moving-up ceremony when the accident took place at the intersection of Lido Boulevard at Greenway,” Weiss said in a statement. “ … There are reports that he was not wearing a helmet.”

Robert Herbst, a City of Long Beach bus driver, said he was the first on the accident scene. He was driving his bus eastbound on Lido Boulevard and had just stopped to let a passenger exit when he looked to his left and noticed a boy lying in the street near the northwest corner of the Lido-Greenway intersection. Herbst, who is also a volunteer firefighter with the Long Beach Fire Department, said he left his bus to tend to the boy.

“I wanted to make sure he was breathing,” Herbst said. “So he was breathing; he was actually snoring. So I stayed there and waiting for the police to arrive.”

Brian Guerin, the chief of Point Lookout-Lido Fire Department, said Nassau County emergency units were the primary medics on the scene and transferred Bird by ambulance to NUMC.

Bird’s schoolmates, who did not witness the accident but believe he was likely skateboarding northbound across Lido Boulevard on his way to school, said they found him lying bloodied in the street. “He was lying in the road and he had blood all over his face and he was unconscious,” said Owen Sculley, a fellow Middle School student.

Another student, Max French, said he noticed the driver of the vehicle involved in the accident was visibly upset.

Herbst said that as a firefighter he goes to many auto accident scenes, but this one particularly disturbed him. “This hurts me much because it’s a child,” he said. “It breaks my heart. I was almost ready to cry when I called my dispatcher.”

Said Weiss: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the student and his family and friends; we hope for a full and quick recovery."

* Patch will have more information about this accident as it become available. This story was updated at 3:06 p.m. on 6.19.12.