Thelma Brown still can't pass the wedge-shaped plot of grass where Germantown and Allegheny avenues cross without squeezing her eyes shut.

A year after an out-of-control SUV fleeing a carjacking ran aground onto that patch of grass — plowing into Brown, her friend Keisha Williams and three of Williams' children, taking life and limb with it — the flashbacks the intersection stirs in Brown's tormented memory are too much for even the tough-as-nails North Philadelphia grandmother to bear.

"At one time, I couldn't even go around that corner," said Brown, 70, as she sat on the porch of her purple-painted brick rowhouse on Hilton Street recently, motioning toward Germantown Avenue on the eastern edge of her block.

Brown, who's lived on Hilton Street since 1978, was the lucky one that day. She and Williams, 34, who also lived on Hilton, had gotten together that morning, along with three of Williams' five children, to set up a stand and sell fruit at the corner.

They hadn't been there long before the doomed white Toyota 4Runner that police say two men carjacked from a realtor at 6th and Cumberland streets barreled up Germantown Avenue, jumping the curb and careening into the group.

Williams' children, 15-year-old Keiearra Williams, 10-year-old Joseph Reed and 7-year-old Terrance Moore, were killed instantly. Williams, brain dead and broken, clung to the edge of life for two weeks before her sisters made the heart-wrenching decision to pull the plug on Aug. 7.

"It was devastating. She was never conscious," Sharmaine Williams, 33, Keisha Williams' younger sister, recalled this week. "We went in and pulled the plug, and she was dead."

Sharmaine has since taken custody of her sister's two surviving children, Charmaine, 12, and Aeisha, 14, and said she, her sister Rochelle, and the rest of the family is still struggling to come to terms with losing Keisha and her children.

"We're stressed out, depressed. We were so close. We're missing them so much," Sharmaine said. "I still have her phone number. I still have pictures of them on my phone and videos on my phone."

Rochelle Williams, 44, the oldest of the three sisters in the Williams family, wore a button with her niece and nephews' names on it on a recent afternoon as she opened up about the tragedy.

"I thought I was strong," Rochelle said, strands of her long, braided hair falling over her face. "But I wasn't strong for all that."

'I Don't Talk to Nobody About This'

Thelma Brown, after spending several months in a wheelchair, is back on the front porch of her purple rowhouse, sitting like a sentry keeping watch over Hilton Street. She still experiences pain from the injuries she suffered in the crash — including a broken ankle and congestive heart failure from a combination of stress and the impact to her sternum — but she's happy to be alive.

"I just thank God that I'm still able to sit here," Brown said on a recent afternoon as her 2-year-old great-grandson, King Savion, buzzed gleefully around her on the porch. "If I hadn't moved that second, I'd be dead. I thank God I'm still here."

She recalled how one of Williams' little boys was helping her set up her tent, and she had her back turned toward Germantown Avenue when the 4Runner sped toward them.

"Just as I was getting around, I heard the noise and stepped to the side," Brown said. "I'm glad. I would've been dead, dead, dead."

She said she can remember seeing men run from the car after they wrecked. Still, she often can't get those images out of her mind.

Since the hit-run crash, Brown has been hospitalized six times — more than she ever had before in all her 70 years. She's dropped 50 pounds, she said recently, wearing a pink-and-purple-striped watercolor dress that hung on her fragile, skin-and-bones frame.

"I went to the doctor and they can't find anything wrong," Brown said. "It must be the stress."

For weeks on end after the crash, she couldn't eat — not even half a sandwich. She's been hospitalized for problems with her heart and twice for panic attacks: once when she tried to attend a vigil for Keisha and the children at Germantown and Allegheny and again when people came to clear their belongings out of the house where Keisha and her babies had lived on Hilton Street.

"She was a friend. She sat on my porch every solitary day. It's hard. I don't have nobody to sit on the porch with," Brown said of Keisha Williams, choking up, her eyes filling with tears. "I don't talk to nobody about this, because I scream, I cry."

A Memorial Celebration

Florine Barker, 36, a good friend of Keisha Williams, is planning to throw a memorial cookout and party at Germantown and Allegheny on Saturday, July 25 — the one-year anniversary of the tragedy — in memory of Keisha and her children. She and Keisha's sisters said an uplifting event, complete with games for children, cotton candy, hot dogs and hamburgers, is how the young mother would want to be remembered.

"Just to have it not be a sad occasion for the children," Barker said. The memorial barbecue is scheduled to run from noon to 6 p.m. that Saturday.

Barker and Williams' sisters said everyone is invited to celebrate the lives lost too soon.

A colorfully decorated memorial fence, painted with pictures of Keisha, Joseph, Terrance and Keiearra, and a small teddy-bear memorial now mark the spot where they were gravely injured. The fence also memorializes a young man from Hilton Street who died in a stabbing, neighbors said.

For the last vigil held in the immediate wake of the crash, hundreds packed the intersection, the Williams sisters said.

"It just touched a lot of people because it was kids," Sharmaine Williams said.

An unwavering Rochelle Williams — who oftentimes served as a rock for her younger sisters — recalled that the overwhelming turnout at the vigil for her slain loved ones hurled her into a panic.

"I thought it would happen to other families," Rochelle said. "Not mine."

As the two surviving sisters sat on the sofa at Sharmaine's North Philadelphia rowhouse earlier this week, they flipped through a folder of dozens of photos of Keisha and the children, eventually coming to one used on the funeral pamphlet for little Terrance, Joseph and Keiearra. The three kids smiled back at their surviving aunts from the flat write paper, forever frozen in time.

"I feel alone a lot of the time," Sharmaine, who wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the children and her sister's pictures, said quietly. "We didn't get time to grieve. I'm grieving now. It seems like it was yesterday."

'God Will Judge You'

As for the men who police say are responsible for the carjacking that led to the terrible sequence of events that claimed four lives and devastated countless others, 24-year-old Cornelius Crawford and 20-year-old Jonathan Rosa, a trial is upcoming. Both are scheduled to appear for a pretrial conference hearing Tuesday morning, but their cases have been granted multiple continuances over the last several months.

Both men stand charged with murder, aggravated assault, conspiracy, kidnapping, sexual assault — for allegedly raping the 45-year-old realtor in her SUV they carjacked — and a slew of related offenses.

"I hope they pay for what they did," Rochelle Williams said.

Brown said she has faced the men in the courtroom once already, at their preliminary hearing, and though looking into the eyes of the heartless men who nearly killed her was jarring, she plans to attend all of their court appearances.

The woman said she doesn't wish physical harm on the men, like many in the neighborhood and around the city did in the wake of the carnage they allegedly caused.

"The only thing I can say to them is God will judge you. That's all I can say," Brown said. "I don't want nobody to do nothing to them, nothing at all, because I want them to live with what they did and with their regrets."

Anyone wishing to donate items or services for the July 25 memorial cookout should contact Florine Barker at 215-407-6170 or 267-808-4612.

Contact Morgan Zalot at 610.668.5574, morgan.zalot@nbcuni.com or follow @MorganZalot on Twitter.

A man was arrested in Darby Borough, Delaware County for attempting to abduct a girl. It's the second time in a week he's been arrested for the same charge, police said Friday.

Isaac Dougba, 65, drove up alongside a 10-year-old girl in his white van Thursday, rolled down the window and asked 'Do you want to come in,' according to Darby Borough Police Chief Robert Smythe. The girl ran home to her mother, who called police.

"She just started shaking and crying really bad," said Sharon Chambers, the girl's mother. "She couldn't sleep all last night at all."

Chambers had been interviewed by NBC10's George Spencer just a week ago, reacting to the first attempted abduction in the same area on July 9. In that case, police say Dougba tried to lure a 13-year-old girl into his van.

In that case, police credited a new partnership with SEPTA for tracking down Dougba. SEPTA cameras captured the suspect's graffiti-covered white van driving around the neighborhood. Within 20 minutes, police found him two blocks from the scene.

"[The 13-year old girl] had a very good description of a white van truck, that had writing on it," Smythe said. "This is typical 21st century police work. You know, if the camera's not there, we don't know where the truck is!

Investigators say Dougba confessed to the first attempted luring his initial arrest. The man's family, however, said police are lying and that he his innocent.

Chambers and Smythe are furious with Delaware County District Judge Leonard Tenaglia, who officials said, lowered Dougba's bail from $50,000 to $10,000 following the first incident.

"He should not have been on the street. We did our job, the bail office did their job, the judge didn't do his job," Smythe said.

NBC10 attempted to speak with Tenaglia, but he did not comment. The same judge set Dougba's bail at $250,000 at his arraignment Friday for the new incident.

Passengers were forced off an American Airlines flight in Philadelphia Friday after a threat was found scrawled on a bathroom mirror inside the terminal.

K9s were brought in to search Flight 672, which was bound for San Francisco.

The message was a bomg threat, according to a passenger on the plane. The airline confirmed the message was threatening, but didn't reveal what was written on the mirror of a men's bathroom near Gate 18 in Terminal A.

Nothing suspicious turned up during a search of both the plane and terminal.

After a delay of about one hour and 20 minutes, the plane was cleared to make the scheduled flight to California.

Almost 200 years after an Irish woman was murdered and buried in Philadelphia, her remains will be re-buried in her homeland of Northern Ireland.

In 1832, nearly five dozen Irish immigrants came to begin a new life in Philadelphia, hired to work on "Duffy's Cut," a stretch of railway between Philadelphia and Columbia, Pennsylvania. Within six weeks of their arrival, all 57 immigrants had died. One of those immigrants was Catherine Burns, of Clonoe in Northern Ireland.

Most of the immigrants were buried in a mass grave and forgotten, but Burns, unlike many of her countrymen, was not buried anonymously. Her remains laid for nearly two centuries about 20 miles west of Philadelphia in Malvern.

"The people of the village have really connected with Catherine and there has been huge interest from parishioners in her story and the story of Irish emigrants," said parish priest, Father Benny Fee.

The area around Duffy's Cut has been investigated by twin brothers Bill and Frank Watson for over 12 years. Bill, a university professor, and Frank, a Lutheran minister, began to archive and research the stories of the Irish workers along with Immaculata University professor Earl Schandelmeier in 2002.

The project's mission is "to make the recovery of the rest of the Irish labourers buried there possible, and to tell the full story of those who lost their lives helping to build America."

In May, it was announced Burns' remains would return to Northern Ireland for a full funeral mass taking place Sunday, July 19 at 8 p.m. local time (3 p.m. EST).

Read the full story here.

Contacting 9-1-1 just got easier for some Pennsylvania residents. Montgomery County is adding "text to 911" capabilities to its 9-1-1 system.

The service, which will launch at a press conference July 20, will allow those who are hearing or speaking impaired to contact 9-1-1 in a more productive way.

The service also gives people a silent and covert way to communicate with authorities, which could prove useful during break-ins, among other scenarios.

Montgomery County Commissioners will demonstrate the system at 10 a.m. Monday at a press conference at the county's Department of Public Safety headquarters in Eagleville. 

"Texting during an emergency could be helpful if you are deaf, hard of hearing, or have a speech disability, or if a voice call to 9-1-1 might otherwise be dangerous or impossible, but if you are able to make a voice call to 9-1-1, and if it is safe to do so, you should always make a voice call to 9-1-1," the Federal Communications Commission said on their website.

The commissioners will be joined by a representative from an advocate organization for the deaf and by representatives of organizations who work with victims of domestic abuse, according to a press release.

The weekend will feature huge jumps in both temperature and humidity. We’ve certainly seen hotter days in the past than I’m predicting for this weekend — but maybe not this summer.

I’m predicting 96 for the high Sunday in Philadelphia, and with the high humidity, a heat index of about 103. The highest temperature this summer has been 95, and the hottest this month was only 91.

Where to Find Relief

The beaches will be the best place to find relief from the heat, especially at the Jersey Shore Saturday. The sea breeze should kick in before noon, limiting the temperature rise. The ocean temperature is still above average, so the cooling won’t be as dramatic as it would be in June.

On Sunday, more of a west wind should prevent the sea breeze from coming in until afternoon, allowing the beaches to heat up. In Delaware, even the beaches should get to 90+ Sunday.

Thunderstorm Relief? And Complications?

Thunderstorms often accompany hot and humid days, and Saturday could be no exception. In fact, any clouds and showers could limit the temperature, perhaps keeping it shy of 90 degrees. But drier air will move in at higher levels of the atmosphere Sunday, and most, if not all of the day should be rain-free.

The Forecast

SATURDAY

• Philadelphia-area: Partly to mostly cloudy. Chance of T’storms. High 91. Heat index 95. Chance of rain 30% at any one spot.
   
• NJ Shore: Partly sunny. High near 80. Ocean temperature: 73. Chance of rain 20% at any one spot. Wind S 10-20 mph
   
• Del. Beaches: Partly sunny. High 84. Chance of rain 20% at any one spot. Wind S 10-20 mph.
   
• The Poconos: Partly to mostly cloudy. Some T’storms likely. High 82. Chance of rain 60% at any one spot.

SUNDAY

• Philadelphia-area: Mostly sunny, very hot and humid. High 96. Heat index up to 103. Chance of rain 10% at any one spot.
   
• NJ Shore: Mostly sunny, warm, and humid. High 86. Heat index 92. Chance of rain 10% at any one spot. Wind SW 5-10 mph
   
• Del. Beaches: Mostly sunny, hot and humid. High 92. Heat index 100. Chance of rain 10% at any one spot. Wind SW 5-10 mph.
   
• The Poconos: Mostly sunny and very warm. High 87. Chance of rain 10% at any one spot.

The day has finally arrived. Ben & Jerry’s will soon release a new ice-cream flavor named after and inspired by the City of Brotherly Love.

West Philadelphia musician Chill Moody teamed up with Ben & Jerry’s to create a Philadelphia flavor called "CHILLadelphia."

Moody wants the flavor to represent his hometown, he said: "It's got to be Philly, something synonymous with Philadelphia."

Local Ben & Jerry’s locations are tasting different flavors before the official selection is previewed during the Made in America festival in September.

Proceeds from "CHILLadelphia" sales will go toward a scholarship.

A 42-year-old man is dead after being killed execution-style and an innocent bystander was hurt in a shooting outside an Overbrook recreation center packed with children and parents Friday evening, Philadelphia Police said.

Gunfire rang out just before 7 p.m. outside the Tustin Recreation Center at 60th Street and Columbia Avenue as two masked men ambushed the victim, police said.

He was shot once in the body and then in the head at close-range, detectives said. He died at the scene.

"It does appear the male was executed," Philadelphia Police Capt. Drew Techner told NBC10.

The other victim was hit in the thumb after bullets traveled into the nearby playground, according to investigators. That victim was taken to a nearby hospital.

The recreation center was packed with more than 100 children when the shooting happened. Techner said he's amazed no children were shot.

"Next thing you know, we hear gunshots, pop, pop, pop. Next thing you know, we're turning around, we have our kids out here, so we're frantic, we rush over, make sure the kids are alright," said parent Alex Nash, who witnessed the shooting.

Homicide detectives tracked down one suspect and arrested him along the 2600 block of Shields Street in Southwest Philadelphia a few hours later. A gun was recovered and his Infinity SUV was taken into evidence. The second suspect remains at large.

Investigators are reviewing surveillance recordings from the recreation center. A motive was not immediately known.

Authorities believe a string of pick pocket thefts at popular shopping and eating areas in King of Prussia are linked to a national professional pick pocketing ring.

Upper Merion Police have investigated 20 pick pocket incidents since January in stores and restaurants in the township, police said. Eleven of the thefts took place since June.

In many cases, the victims left their purses unattended hanging on the back of chairs at eateries or on counters.

Detectives identified three people and issued warrants for their arrest. Two of them, police said, are linked to a pick pocketing ring traveling around the United States committing thefts.

Police released photos of the suspects in hopes they will be recognized. Anyone with information is asked to call 610.265.3232.

A motorcyclist is dead after his bike collided with another cycle along a busy Northeast Philadelphia road Friday evening, police said.

The crash happened along Woodhaven Road near Knights around 7 p.m., police said. After colliding, one of the drivers was hit by another vehicle.

Both victims were taken to a nearby hospital. One driver died while there, another underwent surgery for a compound fracture, police said.

Detectives from Philadelphia Police's Accident Investigation Division is looking the crash.

A Philadelphia Police officer shot a man in the chest after authorities say he tried to pull a handgun on the officer.

The shooting happened a minute before 7 p.m. at 8th Street and Fairmount Avenue in the Spring Garden section of the city.

The officer was responding to a 911 call for a person with a handgun and was met with the shooting victim when he arrived at the scene, police said.

Investigators said the man, in his 30s, refused to show his hands after repeated demands by the officer. Then, police say, the man started to pull a loaded Bersa semi-automatic handgun from his waistband.

The officer opened fire hitting the man once in the chest, police said. He was rushed to Hahnemann University Hospital in critical condition.

The suspect's gun was recovered with a full clip, police said. Internal Affairs is investigating, as is procedure.

A Burlington County, New Jersey police officer is recovering after his marked police SUV was flipped onto its side after being hit by another SUV that then fled the scene.

Waterford Township Police said a black GMC SUV crashed into Officer Darren Carrero's truck at 3rd and Raritan Avenue around 5:40 p.m. Friday.

The impact caused the police SUV to flip over. The driver of the striking vehicle, which had heavy front-end damage, then fled the scene, police said.

Carrero was taken to a nearby hospital with bumps and bruises and was released Friday night.

Police are asking anyone with information to call 856.767.2134.

Federal agents are questioning a man in connection with two robberies at TD Banks in Center City Philadelphia this week, law enforcement sources tell NBC10.

A man wearing a Philadelphia Phillies baseball hat walked into the TD branch at 4th and Market streets Friday morning just before 8 and handed a teller a note demanding money, the FBI said.

The teller complied and the suspect put the cash into a messenger bag before fleeing on foot.

Two days earlier, around 6:45 p.m. Wednesday, agents believe the same man robbed the TD Bank at 111 S. 11th Street. This time he wore a Philadelphia Flyers cap and carried a red tote bag, officials said.

In each case, the suspect made off with an undisclosed amount of cash.

Police tracked down the person of interest late Friday and brought him in for questioning, sources said.

An employee of an adult novelty store in downtown Philadelphia was shot in the back during an apparent attempted robbery.

The shooting happened at 3:20 a.m. Saturday at Danny's Midnight Confessions located at 13th and Sansom Streets in Center City.

Investigators say the suspect initially entered the store, looked around for several minutes and then left. A short time later, he re-entered the store and became involved in an altercation with an employee.

During the scuffle, the 31-year-old employee was shot in the back. He was taken to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital where he is listed in stable condition.

The suspect remains on the loose.

Investigators believe the incident may have been a robbery attempt.

The shooting remains under investigation.