A 13-year-old boy was killed after being trapped underneath an overturned forklift at a Brooklyn lumber yard yesterday. The young man was Kevin Hrcka, whose father worked at the Miron Building Supply company as a fork lift operator.
The son of the business's owner and vice president, Derek Messing, said that Kevin was a frequent visitor to Miron, where he would meet his dad at the end of his workday. Messing said, “He was a great kid, I was told. He was very big into karate, and actually, the father and the son trained in karate together. They were very close. They did almost everything together.” Still, Messing, per the NY Times, "said children were not allowed in the lot, nor was anyone who was not an employee or a customer."
The boy's father was reportedly changing out of his work uniform when Kevin climbed into one of the machines that had the keys still in the ignition. When the vehicle overturned, the 13-year-old was trapped as he attempted to jump off the machine. Another worker used a separate forklift to lift the first off the boy, but he was declared dead at the scene.
Federal regulations prohibit children from operating forklifts, but skidmarks indicated that Hrcka had been driving one at a high rate of speed when he attempted a turn at the end of the Miron work lot. A graphic from the Daily News of how the accident seems to have happened.
