Hit by a car, 10-year-old tried to crawl home. Someone found him ‘bleeding profusely’

Caden Walsh was supposed to be walking home from school on Friday.

But the 10-year-old from Austin, Texas, said he wasn’t walking that day. He was crawling.

“It hurt really, really bad, like I can’t explain it,” Walsh told Fox7. “I kind of stood like a dog and dragged my leg like I was limping.”

That’s because a car jumped the sidewalk, struck the fifth-grader and shoved him into a tree, according to KXAN. Police say the driver sped away without checking on Caden.

He tried to crawl back to his house while blood oozed from the gash in his leg.

A passerby eventually noticed the boy. The unidentified woman helped Caden get back to his family, the Austin American-Statesman reported.

His stepfather, Jay Brady, was home waiting for Caden to return from school.

Jay Brady recalled when he first saw the boy’s injuries.

“He’s down at the bottom of the stairs, his leg is just covered in blood,” he told KXAN. “He probably has a ball-peen hammer sized chunk of his leg missing, he’s just screaming blood-curdling screams.”

Caden was rushed to the hospital, where he received 10 stitches in his leg. His mother, Heather Brady, told the American-Statesman that her son’s leg was “bleeding profusely” but not broken.

The injuries could have been much worse, but Heather Brady said she’s still angry.

“It was a kid. When they left my son, for all they know he could have been dying and they just left him there without any concern,” she told Fox7. “As a parent, that’s the worst thing.”

The Austin Police Department said it is investigating the hit-and-run — but there are few leads at the moment. No nearby businesses caught the crash on surveillance footage, according to KXAN, and Caden just remembers that the car that hit him was a dark SUV.

The family doesn’t even know the name of the woman who helped guide Caden home, the American-Statesman wrote. They want to find out and thank her.

Even if the car hit him, Caden can’t help but wonder how things would have turned out if the driver got him help.

“He hit me and he ran,” the boy told Fox7. “It would be a different story if he hit me then asked me if I was okay.”

This story was originally published February 14, 2018 at 12:34 PM with the headline "Hit by a car, 10-year-old tried to crawl home. Someone found him ‘bleeding profusely’."