Nurse Recovering After Hit-and-Run

AKRON, OHIO – An Akron nurse who was critically injured by a hit-and-run driver as she was crossing a street, is making a plea for information leading to the driver’s capture.

Tera Miller, 23, was working as a nurse, caring for her two children and looking forward to a bright future when everything changed in the early morning hours of Sept. 12.

“I was hit by a car while I was trying to cross the street, but I really don’t remember. I wish I do remember now, since the person is still out there,” Miller said.

Witnesses said Miller was crossing E. Market St. in downtown Akron when one car stopped for her, but the other car did not.

“And I heard somebody say ‘She got hit! She got hit,” Miller’s fiancee, Preston Fleming, said.

Miller was in the intensive care unit for five days with a ruptured kidney, a fractured pelvis and swelling on her brain.

She still has a cantaloupe-sized hematoma on her right hip.

“I had to have a blood transfusion, surgery on my left eye, my eye socket broke so they had to repair that,” Miller said.

Her front teeth were also knocked out.

Police have only a vague description of the car that hit Miller: a dark, four-door, mid-sized car with dark tinted windows.

There would have been significant damage to the windshield and front end in mid-September.

“I’m in pain physically and emotionally. I’m kind frustrated, backed into a wall, and there’s nothing I can do about it,” Miller said.

So far, her hospital bills are more than $139,000.

Miller has no health insurance.

While she was working, she could only afford to buy health insurance for her children, not for herself.

Miller and her family are hoping someone who knows who the driver is will come forward with information.

“Painful to know a person that hit somebody like that can still be out there and not really care,” Fleming said.

“I feel like I went from taking care of people to taking care of myself now,” Miller said.

“I want to appeal to this person’s decency and ask them to do the right thing and turn themselves in,” Tera’s father, Robert Miller said.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Akron Police Department at (330) 375-2181 or the Traffic Division at (330) 375-2508.

A fund has been set up to help Miller with her medical bills. Donations can be made at any First Merit Bank under the name “Tera Miller.”