Police have issued an appeal for witnesses after a 24-year-old student suffered serious injuries after what appeared to be a hit and run collision in Shoreditch last month.
Helena Venables was knocked her off her bike leaving her with a broken elbow and shoulder in the incident in Shoreditch High Street. The driver fled the scene and remains unidentified. CCTV footage has not yet been found with a recording of the collision.
Venables, from Birminham and an undergraduate journalism student at Goldsmiths, in New Cross, said: “I was going straight across Great Eastern Street crossing on Shoreditch High Street, and like with many collisions, the car was turning left and I was going straight ahead. Maybe I didn’t look properly, I don’t know, but if you drive away when you’ve hit someone, that’s illegal.”
Venables has no recollection of the model of the car, or the driver. She said: “There were some girls who stopped at the time, and they helped me out of the road and called an ambulance.”
She was taken to hospital where doctors told her that both her elbow and shoulder were broken, leaving her with limited mobility on the right side of her body. She has been on a morphine treatment to reduce what she says is ‘excruciating’ pain. She has to wear a sling for six weeks, and then she will begin physiotherapy .
Venables has returned to her home city of Birmingham because she discovered she’d lost the ability to look after herself at her current home in Hackney. She said: “Today, I had my first unassisted bath, which was quite humanising. I was either in this state of absolutely excruciating pain, the worst pain I had ever felt, or I was on morphine which made it hard to feel normal.”
A Metropolitan Police statement said: “Police are investigating a collision involving a car and a cyclist in Shoreditch High Street, at the junction with Bethan Green Road, in Hackney at approximately 09:00hrs on Tuesday, 23 February. Anyone with information is asked to tweet @MetCC or call 101 quoting reference GD/010000238/21.”
