Tony-Winning Actress Loses Unborn Baby 2 Months After 5-Year-Old Daughter Killed
As humans, we like to think that there’s always a happy ending waiting in the wings, that (to paraphrase J.R.R. Tolkien) everything sad is coming untrue. Sometimes, though, real-life tales take a tragic turn, and the storm clouds turn a darker shade of gray rather than slipping toward silver.
The story of Tony Award-winner Ruthie Ann Miles is one such tragedy. On March 5, Miles was walking through Brooklyn with her 5-year-old daughter Abigail Blumenstein, friend Lauren Lew, and Lew’s 1-year-old son Joshua.
As the group stepped through a marked crosswalk, a car plowed through them, killing Lew, Joshua, and Abigail. Miles was grievously injured in the incident, but she survived.
That fact seemed even more miraculous given that she was seven months pregnant with her second child. Her child was supposed to be due this month.
However, she and her husband Jonathan Blumenstein have just announced the horrible news: The unborn baby has passed away.
“Ruthie is simply not doing well,” an unnamed friend told PEOPLE. “The only consolation she had in Abigail’s death was the fact that her unborn baby had survived.
“But now losing that baby? She’s crushed to her core.”
Another individual told the magazine that “everyone in her life is rallying around Ruthie, as we have since the accident, but both she and Jonathan are really holding one another up through this. They’re deep in the grieving process.”
Friends and strangers alike have stepped up in other ways. As of the time this article was written, a GoFundMe campaign for Miles has raised $426,420.
Meanwhile, the driver of the vehicle that ended so many lives, Dorothy Bruns, was indicted on manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide charges. Her attorney has entered a not-guilty plea, and she has maintained that she’d suffered a seizure prior to the accident.
“We believe that she had a seizure,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez recounted to the New York Daily News. “It’s a real tragedy, but we have to make sure that this woman should have been driving in the first place.”
Offering up thoughts and prayers has come under fire recently as an inadequate response to life’s horrors. Sometimes, though, it’s all that those of us who observe from a distance can offer.
So bow your heard as you consider Miles and her husband. Goodness knows it’s the least we can do.
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