6-year-old hit by car on Fairview Avenue in Boise. Man cycling with him is charged

An accident in which a 6-year-old bicyclist was hit by a vehicle on Fairview Avenue in Boise has led to criminal charges against the man who was accompanying the child.

The crash took place Wednesday night just after 8 on W. Fairview near N. Cloverdale Road, according to a Boise Police Department news release. The driver whose car struck the child stopped and helped him, the release said, until Ada County paramedics arrived and transported the 6-year-old to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Meanwhile, a 47-year-old man who had been cycling with the child fled the scene, heading into a nearby gas station and into its bathroom before returning to the street, according to the release. Police said evidence also showed that the man directed the child to cross Fairview after going first, away from a crosswalk on “a heavily traveled road at night.”

Police arrested the man on suspicion of felony injury to child for placing the child “in a circumstance likely to cause great bodily harm or death,” the release said, and then leaving him “lying in the middle of the westbound lanes of travel on Fairview.” He was still in the Ada County Jail on Thursday, online records showed.

No charges were filed against the driver of the vehicle.