Tony Foltz, 25, remains badly injured after the accident on 22nd Street and the Parkway.
Brian Bond and Tony Foltz, both 25, were friends since attending kindergarten at Presentation B.V.M. school in Lower Merion. They planned to ride in the American Diabetes Association’s Tour de Cure at the end of May.
But after a tragic hit-and-run accident around 2:30 a.m. Saturday, Foltz, a third-year Temple Law student set to graduate next month, was left badly injured. He was walking home toward the Fairmount section after hanging out with friends and crossing at 22nd Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway when a car police describe as a 1990s model white Ford Escort or Mercury Topaz with front-end damage struck him. The driver fled the scene.
At press time, police said a car possibly involved in the accident was impounded, but released no other details.
Foltz is now in the Intensive Care Unit at Hahnemann University Hospital in an induced coma. Doctors are treating him for severe head trauma, which includes a fractured skull, along with a broken leg and arm.
An officer from the Philadelphia Police Department’s Accident Investigation Unit said several people witnessed the accident and gave similar descriptions of the car, but no one was able to read the tags or plate number. The officer said Foltz was hit while crossing the Parkway headed north.
“Part of the issue is there’s no cameras in that area to help us locate,” the officer said.
He said no description of the driver or other details of the accident have been released.
Bond, who graduated from Temple with a degree in kinesiology in 2008, spent Sunday visiting Foltz, whom he calls his “longest best friend,” and his family members in the hospital.
“He hasn’t talked,” Bond said. “At one point, it was pretty amazing actually, he opened his eyes for a second.”
Bond said Foltz did squeeze his hand and the hands of his family members – he is the oldest of four siblings, with two younger sisters and a younger brother – but he was unsure whether Foltz was responding to their voices or moving as a reaction to the trauma he suffered.
“We just always hung out together when we were younger,” Bond said of his two-decade friendship with Foltz, adding that their eighth-grade graduating class had only 15 students. “We’d ride bikes together all the time. We just did the MS 150 ride together in October. We always had dreams of maybe starting a business together and stuff. We’ve just always been close friends.”
At press time, Foltz’s condition remained critical, and Bond said what would happen in the next 48 hours was unsure.
Morgan Zalot can be reached at morgan.zalot@temple.edu.
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