TAMPA - The lady tried to cheat a drug dealer, people said.

King Frederick back-handed her. She punched the gas and careened around the corner, her station wagon sliding wildly up 22nd Street.

Nothing stopped her, not even the four College Hill preschoolers who crossed the street, holding adult hands.

Little legs broke.

Driver Mary Jane Schuman paused, then raced away.

``The lady seen babies laying in the road,'' mother Teresa Green says. ``She could have parked her car and waited until the police came around. She ran and kept running.''

Bawling babies and scared kids don't carry much weight when drivers decide to run from trouble.

In April 1997, BMW driver Ira B. Green of Largo abandoned 13-year-old Valerie Schadow, leaving playmates to shoulder the horror.

In December, Pedro Senteno Jr. walked away from 4-year-old Michael McCall, buckled beside his dying mother.

Valerie and Michael later died.

``In the Schadow case, it was just so tragic because these were children,'' says prosecutor Mary Handsel. ``He left the little girl with a bunch of children. That was so cruel.''

Schuman, who plowed into the toddlers on 22nd Street, drew a 142-month prison sentence and a one-year-jail term for culpable negligence and leaving the scene. Hillsborough Circuit Judge William Fuente suspended the sentences and ordered her into drug treatment.

She's on probation.

The night of the crash, Jan. 26, 1997, Tequila Owens was a typical 2-year-old.

Now, one leg is longer.

``They think that when she gets older she won't be able to hold no baby because her pelvic bone is lopsided,'' says mother Zeneta Owens.

Crystal Lawrence, now 5, limps a little. Teresa Green, who is Crystal's mother, walks with screws and a plate in one leg. Crystal's grandmother wound up with two broken bones and a skid mark in her skin.

They were still mending that summer, when another hit-and-run crash summoned yet another family to Tampa General Hospital.

A driver veered off Nebraska Avenue in east Tampa and struck Donald McCormick.

Donald, at 15, had ambitions of high school sports.

The impact broke his neck and left him comatose for days.

``All we could do was pray and ask God to bring him around,'' says his mother, Brenda McCormick.

He lived.

Little survivors carry big scars, inside and out.

Nightmares break their sleep.

They sense in parents a new kind of rage, born of helplessness: A stranger can hurt a child and be unmoved by the cries and still escape justice.

It happened on a rainy August afternoon on Causeway Boulevard. A crash pinned 6-year-old Brandi Anderson beside her bleeding, dying grandmother.

Driver Gary William Peterson - who ran a stop sign and pushed one truck into another - fled on foot.

He left three children and six adults in the wreckage.

Now he's on probation.

``My dad told me my little niece screamed from the time the truck hit until the time they pulled the seats off her,'' says Cindy Byrd, Brandi's aunt.

``That Gary Peterson landed right by it.

``There's no way he could not have heard her screaming.''