Bound by love: Family remembers daughter with children’s book club
Posted on Sunday, May 13, 2007
Cameron Averitt Bobbitt didn’t need toys. She had another love: Dr. Seuss. Cameron’s parents could tell she was on her way to becoming a lifelong reader, even at a young age. She especially liked fairy tales and books about princesses. Cameron was so in love with reading that she taught her dolls how to read by setting them together on a table and reading to them. “ The most important toy she ever had was her books, ” said her father, Derrick Bobbitt. Cameron read her last book when she was 5 years old. On Jan. 19, 2006, a pickup truck struck her as she made her way through in a school crosswalk. She died instantly. But her love of reading served as the inspiration for a book club founded in her memory. Cameron’s Amazing Book Club — named to coincide with her initials — collects and distributes books to needy and sick children. The effort is just beginning, and Cameron’s friends and parents plan to grow the program to help encourage reading among children.
Reading and reciting
Like most parents, Susan Averitt and Derek Bobbitt were proud of their first child, a baby girl named Cameron. Her love of reading developed at an early age. By looking at pictures in a sign language book, Cameron was able to sign the alphabet with her hands at the age of 2. She also showed an aptitude with words and letters. Bobbitt remembers driving Cameron around and asking her in jest to recite the alphabet backward.
“ Z, Y, X … ” she started, eventually ending at A. She had never been taught how to say them backward, her father said. It was something she learned on her own, and he was amazed.
There was just something about Cameron, her parents said. Averitt remembers her daughter’s effervescent smile. Her father recalls a girl who always seemed cheerful. “ Most kids have bad days, are fussy or irritable. But she never had one. It was amazing, ” Averitt said.
A routine interrupted
As one might expect of a young girl who loved words and books, Cameron was always excited about going to school. A 5-year-old kindergarten student at Frink-Chambers Elementary School in McAlester, Okla., she was on the first-semester honor role. Jan. 19, 2006, was a clear day. At 8: 04 a. m., Averitt strolled toward the school building from a parking lot near Frink Road. A lot of people parked there, and to get to the school, parents guided their children across a crosswalk without a guard. Brooklynn, then 15 months old, was tucked into Averitt’s right arm. The hand of Kennedy, then 4, was clasped in her left. Cameron, 5, walked just to Kennedy’s left. Averitt saw the large white truck approaching slowly from the east. She clearly remembers looking at the driver, a 76-year-old McAlester man who lived on Frink Road, as she and her children entered the crosswalk. It was only seconds later that Averitt realized the driver had not stopped. The truck’s sideview mirror rushed by, inches from her face, and she remembers the driver looking straight ahead. As it rolled forward, the truck narrowly missed Averitt and the two daughters she had ahold of.
But Cameron was one step, maybe even half a step, ahead of her mother and sisters. Averitt watched helplessly as both the front and rear tires rolled over her daughter’s body. She screamed for the driver to stop.
A parent quickly took Kennedy inside the school, and another clutched Brooklynn. A pediatrician, Averitt began CPR. Cameron was taken to the hospital by ambulance but was already gone, her mother said.
There were no charges filed against the driver, who, according to the accident report obtained from the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety, was distracted by other children near the crosswalk. Even at a slow rate of speed, it took the driver 56 feet to come to a stop, the report said.
The accident baffled Averitt then, and the images of that morning often play through her mind.
“ It appeared, based on his slow rate of speed, that he was decelerating in order to stop at the crosswalk, ” Averitt wrote in a statement to police in the weeks following the accident. “ He was staring straight ahead. I cannot explain his actions because we were so clearly within his line of vision. ”
“ He was like a zombie, staring straight ahead, ” she remembers now.
Averitt had not previously met the man driving the truck, and has never spoken to him. He did apologize through a member of his family, she said. “ There was nothing he could say. I was there. I saw it, ” she said.
A life gone, lives changed
One week after the accident, nurses from the McAlester Regional Health Center who worked with Averitt held a candlelight vigil in Cameron’s honor. But Cameron’s family wasn’t there. Bobbitt, Averitt, their two girls and several other family members had already departed for a monthlong trip to Little Rock and Florida to get away from McAlester for a time. Kennedy was removed from Frink-Chambers school to attend pre-kindergarten elsewhere, and the family began to search for a way to leave McAlester. “ There were too many reminders. It facilitated us moving, ” Bobbitt said. But Averitt was under contract with the hospital for several more months, so the family stayed until her three-year commitment to McAlester’s Warren Clinic ended. Averitt’s parents live in Rogers, and Bobbitt said the family had planned to move to Northwest Arkansas eventually. The Averitt-Bobbitt family relocated to Fayetteville in August, but not before Bobbitt placed several teddy bears along the chain-link fence near the accident site. The couple has resumed a busy life. Averitt now works at the Children’s Clinic at Willow Creek in Johnson and Bobbitt is a stay-athome dad who spends his days taking care of Kennedy, Brooklynn and the family’s newest member, 3-monthold Carington. Even with a busy professional life and three young daughters, no day passes without thoughts about the daughter who isn’t there. “ The hardest thing is getting up every day and going to work, ” Averitt said. Some days, such as Cameron’s birthday, Mother’s Day, holidays and the anniversary of the accident, are especially tough. Averitt copes by keeping an online diary, listening to Christian music, praying, crying in her car and writing poems in her daughter’s honor.
Books galore
Averitt’s mother, Ann Averitt, knew that the first Christmas without Cameron was going to be emotional. It would be impossible to open presents and not think of her, her grandmother said. So Ann Averitt and her daughter-in-law Catherine devised a plan: They would collect books in Cameron’s honor and donate them to the clinic where Susan Averitt works. What started as a small idea grew by volumes, Ann said, as they received more books than they ever expected. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, more than 200 books were collected from donors in 10 states, all by word-of-mouth.
At a family gathering a few days before Christmas, Averitt and Bobbitt were asked to leave a room in their own home. While they were gone, family members filled it with children’s books. When the two were permitted back in, they were surprised to discover what had taken place as a form of remembrance for Cameron.
There were too many books to take to her clinic, so Averitt decided to form Cameron’s Amazing Book Club, a charitable organization that would share her daughter’s love of reading by giving books to needy children who might not otherwise have access to them.
Averitt knew exactly when to start the club, too. After finding locations for all 200 books, she decided to distribute them on Jan. 19, the one-year anniversary of the accident that took Cameron’s life. Some books were mailed off, and others were delivered in person to hospitals and charitable organizations such as Butterfield Trail Elementary School, Central United Methodist Church in Rogers and the church by the same name in Fayetteville, and Northwest Medical Center.
“ I needed a project to work on, ” Averitt said. “ I anticipated it was going to be a hard day. ”
Since then, about 100 more books have been collected, each bearing a sticker on the inside front cover bearing Cameron’s name and the name and hometown of the book’s donor. Not all have been distributed, but they will be. Books can be requested from or donated to the family via the club’s Web site, www. cameronsamazingbooks. com.
Averitt knows of a vaguely similar program at Vanderbilt University, where she spent her medical school residency. There may not be any other book club like Cameron’s in the world, but it wouldn’t surprise Averitt if there was.
“ I think that most people, when a child dies, do something to channel their energies into remembering their child, ” she said. In addition to the book club, the family hopes to establish an endowed fund. Approximately $ 7, 000 — the majority of which was donated by friends, family members and residents of McAlester immediately following the accident — has been given to the Fayetteville Community Foundation. The family is hoping a recent fundraising drive will push the total over $ 10, 000 to create an endowment. When the fund is endowed, Cameron’s parents will use it for projects that will help children. The family will decide on a year-to-year basis what programs or causes will receive funds. “ It would give us a sense of peace if we could donate money to help children in Cameron’s name, ” Averitt said.
Never forgetting
Others have done their best to remember Cameron, too. At Frink-Chambers Elementary School, a new walking trail, complete with flowers, rocks and a bench, has been created in her memory. The family has yet to see the memorial, but Averitt has already made a concrete stepping stone that will decorate the site. The family traveled to McAlester this weekend, and today will be the first time Averitt has visited the accident site since moving to Northwest Arkansas. The family will gather with 20 or 30 friends to launch balloons with messages to Cameron. The messages will be simple, Bobbitt said, but will pass on what they wish to say to her: that she is loved and missed. “ I don’t know if [the balloons ] go to heaven, but it’s what I hope, and what I tell our kids, ” Averitt said. There is a sense of sadness, Averitt said, but she does want to visit the site again. Today, on Mother’s Day, Averitt will remember her four girls, the three who are with her and the one who Averitt expects to see again in heaven some day. “ It makes it hard, but it makes it special, too, ” she said. And there is another reason why this day will be a special … and especially difficult. Today, Cameron would have turned 7 years old.
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