‘Like a coward’: Kansas City woman saw deadly hit-and-run wreck involving mail carrier, later learned it was her brother
By JoBeth Davis, Andy Alcock
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KANSAS CITY, Missouri (KMBC) — Avia Ramsey came outside Wednesday night to go pick up her daughter from school and saw the wreckage.
“By the time I came outside, there were police cars, fire trucks and ambulances everywhere. The streets were blocked off,” she said.
That wreck, at 30th and Benton, involved a USPS van and a gray Chevy Equinox SUV. Police said the USPS van was driving down Benton when the Equinox entered the intersection, hitting it. That van overturned, partially throwing the driver from the vehicle and killing him.
Ramsey was concerned at the time. She works for the postal service as a mail handler. She thought their usual mailman had been hurt. She later found out it was much worse.
“I had no idea that it was my little brother out here. I didn’t find out that it was him until later on that evening,” Ramsey said.
Her brother, a mail carrier, was filling in along her street.
The driver that struck him ditched the SUV and ran from the scene on foot.
“Like a coward,” Ramsey said. “You couldn’t even face what you did, face your consequences.”
Ramsey picked her daughter up, came home, and said a prayer for the driver of the van who died.
“We sat here all night praying for him, praying for him regardless of who it was. But it hurts me even more to know that it was my little brother.”
Family members have identified the victim as 34-year-old Gerald Nevels.
Nevels’s family was proud of him, a long time USPS employee and a public servant.
“He didn’t do nothing to nobody,” she said. “He do his work. He don’t bother nobody. He don’t mess with nobody. He is a hardworking young man that did not deserve to go out like that…he was loved. Y’all took somebody that was loved out here.”
Now a makeshift memorial sits at the intersection where he was killed, a fence still showing damage from the crash.
“I hate that this is so close to my house without me knowing,” she said. She’s hoping someone will come forward.
“This happened right across the street from a church. They have camera footage. There is footage of the vehicle. People know who this is…we are in the middle of the inner city. Somebody knows something. They know exactly who did it. They know whose car it is. So we just need the person to man up. Let’s let you come and be a man about the situation before somebody finds you.”
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