GRAND RAPIDS, MI – A woman who ran over her 9-year-old son in a school parking lot said she would have to live with guilt of causing her son’s disabling injuries.

Tiffany Kosakowski, 36, had dropped off her son, Julian, at school. She told him to go back when he ran to her car.

As she drove off, he held to the door handle nearly 50 yards before he lost his grip and fell under a back tire. He suffered multiple skull fractures.

“I just want to express that I am remorseful,” she said Thursday, April 18, in Kent County Circuit Court.

“I’ll have to live with this for the rest of my life.”

The boy’s father, John Rodriguez, told Judge Curt Benson that “something is not right” with Kosakowski.

She had pleaded guilty to reckless driving causing serious impairment. A charge of second-degree child abuse was dismissed in a plea agreement.

Benson sentenced the mother to 6 months in jail, with all but 30 days suspended. She can serve the term on weekends if jail officials approve.

Benson said he did not doubt Kosakowski felt remorse or would have to live with the nightmare of harming her child. But, he said the crime was “simply inexcusable. It is simply inexcusable. Forty-seven yards … .”

The incident happened at the start of the school day on Dec. 11, 2018, at Chandler Woods Charter Academy on Samrick Avenue NE in Belmont. Child Protective Services said the boy followed his mother out of school after she dropped him off.

She backed up the car, stopped, then told him to go back inside. Instead, he held to the passenger-side door handle before he fell and was run over.

Benson said it was a difficult case. While a custody case is pending before a Family Court judge, Kosakowski still cares for her son – who has a twin sister - and takes him to get treatment.

A video of the incident was hard to watch, Benson said.

The boy was running alongside the car before he fell. The rear wheel went over his “full body, full head,” the judge said.

“Your little boy has suffered terribly,” Benson said.

He said that her son would know she caused the harm. The judge didn’t want to compound the boy’s tragedy by taking his mother away for a significant amount of time.

Advisory sentencing guidelines called for a minimum ranging from no jail to 11 months.

“He’s still your little boy and he still loves his mother,” Benson said.

The boy’s father said he has been out of his children’s lives for five years. He did not say why but said there was a “history” of problems with their mother. He remembered taking his son to a birthday party five years earlier and the “next time I see him he’s lying in a coma.”

Doctors were surprised that the boy survived, he said.

He was in a coma for a week and required around-the-clocking nursing while at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital. He had tubes and wires connected from his body to machines and monitors during his hospital stay.

“He’s only 9 years old,” his father told the judge.

He said Kosakowski’s acts were “unstable, irrational, reckless.”

He said police reports showed Kosakowski drove 47 yards with her son next to the car while she drove “left and right to shake him off.”

His son was found on the pavement, in a pool of blood, he said. He suffered a traumatic brain injury, and while he is recovering, he will never be the same.

“Doctor’s words: ‘You son is forever changed.’ He must grow into his disability.”

Kosakowski’s attorney, Anna Rapa, said she is the “only stability” her children have. She described her client as a “loving parent” whose biggest concern is her son’s recovery.

The judge received about 30 letters from family and friends. Most of them supported Kosakowski. Letters from the boy’s father and an aunt and uncle did not, the judge said.