By PAUL YANDALL
It should have been a simple walk to school, the kind of journey that parents and their children make every day.
Amina Musa and her five children left home at 8.50 am yesterday.
As usual, they walked in single file. As usual, Mrs Musa led the way. And as usual, her eldest daughter, Rahma Mohamed, aged 10, brought up the rear to ensure that her younger siblings did not wander off on the 500m walk to Avondale Primary School. It was a duty she took very seriously.
But five minutes into the journey, the ordinary turned into tragedy. Just 30m from the intersection of New North and Blockhouse Bay Rds, the boom of a cherry picker being towed by a station wagon broke free and swung out across the footpath, hitting Rahma and flinging her into the air.
She landed on the edge of the kerb.
Rahma was taken to the Starship children's hospital in a critical condition but died of head injuries four hours later.
Mrs Musa said she saw the car approaching. A wheel on the trailer unit hit the kerb before the boom swung loose and hit Rahma.
"It was going so fast. It happened and there was just ... just craziness," she said.
While the other children screamed and cried, Mrs Musa rushed to her daughter's aid but Rahma did not recover consciousness.
Mrs Musa said the driver of the station wagon stopped to help. A passerby also pulled her car over to help and an ambulance arrived about 15 minutes later.
The children's father, Abdulahi Farah, was alerted and he helped to escort the rest of the children to school while Rahma was being attended.
Mrs Musa said her daughter was the family's favourite. "She was smart and happy, always happy."
The family, Somali refugees who immigrated here in 1995, moved into their New North Rd home two years ago. Three of the children, including Rahma, attended the local primary school but the two youngest always made the daily trek with their mother.
Mr Farah, a sickness beneficiary, said the family's Muslim faith required Rahma to be buried within a day of the accident and she is expected to be laid to rest this morning.
Sergeant Sandy Beckett, of the police crash investigations unit, said the cherry picker had been collected from a building site in New Lynn before the accident.
He said it was too early to say what had caused the boom to come loose and whether charges would be laid. "We don't know if we are dealing with a mechanical or human failure at this point. All we do know is that something failed and we have someone deceased."
Sergeant Beckett said numerous witnesses had been spoken to but police wanted to hear from anyone else who had seen the accident.
Police said the cherry picker, owned by Go Hire Access Platforms, had been impounded.
Investigators would try to determine today how the boom had come loose from its cradle.
Go Hire's owner, Glenn Eddleston, of Browns Bay, did not return Herald calls last night.
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