A 93-year-old woman and her 60-year-old daughter were badly cut after kids rolled a car tire down a hill and it crashed into the family’s sliding-glass door, spraying them with glass.
Glass shards shot 30 feet across the living room where the two were playing cards and cut both women on the face and head. The women were treated at a hospital, said Jamie Head, spokeswoman and evidence custodian of the Delta Police Department.
Delta police are asking for help in finding the kids responsible for the July 7 accident.
“They rolled a tire to see what it would do, and when it launched, they said, ‘Uh oh,’ ” Head surmised.
Police want to talk to two kids who were seen on BMX bikes on top of a hill above the women’s home in the 1000 block of Crawford Avenue, Head said.
“I can’t see out of my left eye,” Jane Tafoya said this morning.
She said doctors removed glass shards from her eye and face but that she started bleeding from the eye again over the weekend and is in a lot of pain. Both she and her elderly mother received stitches, she said.
The kids found a tire in a yard near the Delta Municipal Cemetery, which sits on a bluff about 200 feet above homes on Crawford Avenue, Head said.
Tafoya said she and her mother were playing a card game called King in Four Corners when she saw two boys on a hill on the northeast corner of the cemetery. One boy was on a bike, and the second was standing next to him, leaning over, she said. She saw the boy pick up a tire and roll it down the hill, she said.
She was watching the tire careening down the hill, thinking it wasn’t coming toward her house when all of a sudden it hit a dirt clump and flew over her 6-foot chain link fence, bending metal, Tafoya said.
“It was in mid-air coming right at me,” she said.
The tire smashed into the the sliding glass door of her dining room, bounced off the door and flew across the yard and hit a storage shed, she said.
“The glass sprayed all over the furniture and down the hall,” Tafoya said. “Our hair was full of glass.”
Glass shards cut her mother in the nose and head and sliced into her left eye. Della Tafoya, who needs help from her daughter getting dressed each day, was bleeding and upset.
“She was crying because she saw me bleeding and pulling glass out of my eye,” Jane Tafoya said.
After hearing glass shattering next door, neighbors looked up toward the cemetery and saw two boys about 11 and 14 years old riding BMX bikes, Head said.
A neighbor ran to the Tafoya home and took the phone from Jane Tafoya to speak with the emergency dispatcher.
One of the boys had a short buzz cut and was wearing a gray shirt and blue jeans.
“The Delta Police Department would like to speak with the two young men,” Head said. “I have boys. They do things to see what would happen. As a mom, my kids would be in a lot of trouble with Mom if they did something like this.”
The kids need to know that they not only caused property damage but injured two women, she said.
“They need to know it is dangerous to do something like that,” Head said. She did not know whether the boys faced criminal charges.
Jane Tafoya said her sliding glass door is still covered with a wood panel. Her insurance company will pay to have it replaced, she said.
She can’t see out of her left eye but hopes she will be able to regain sight in it after it heals.
The boys caused a lot of misery, Jane Tafoya said.
“They’re old enough to know better,” she said. “If we didn’t get hurt, someone else in their yard could have been hurt.”
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
