The grieving parents of a 7-year-old child who died hours after being hit by a car were charged with involuntary manslaughter after allowing him and his brother, 10, to walk home unaccompanied by an adult from a nearby grocery store.
At seven I went to school and back home on foot and alone, about a mile, everyday. I did once have a close call with a car that didn’t stop for a crosswalk.
Are parents supposed to accompany their kids at all time until they are 18?
According to 'murica, until 16. Then they can drive their own car.
Yeah 2 miles here. It’s still the rule, school bus service available if you are more than 2 miles away from school OR would have to cross a dangerous road.
And no, obviously we are supposed to be precognitive and able to tell if something will happen.
That said - I would let my kids walk to the shop themselves only if there was no big road to cross. Drivers here will run kids right over. Everyone knows someone with a family member killed by a car.
with a family member killed by a car
Killed by a driver.
Yeah when I was seven my sister and I would travel laying in the backseat of the car, no seatbelts, with four adults in a car legally limited to five occupants, and they would smoke inside (rolled down the windows at least). I’m alive, and so is my sister. That doesn’t mean it was alright and we should keep on doing it.
Parents are supposed to teach their kids to navigate the world and be sure they’ve learned before letting them loose into traffic, which these people didn’t do. Also unloading the responsibility on the older sibling(s) is something that have to stop, a ten years old shouldn’t have to carry that burden, imagine the guilt and trauma of that poor child.
Yeah sure, blame the victims of horrible infrastructure. I walked myself to kindergarden, when I was around 4 or 5 years old, when I was 7, I would walk home from school.
There wasn’t some busy four-lane-road on my way in my rural town. Four fucking lanes? What the hell?
Living in a city, I wasn’t allowed to cross roads by myself when I was seven (some thirty years ago) much less four lane ones. The horrible American infrastructure make it even worse for the parents to let their kids go alone. Was the mother not aware of that road being there?
They gotta blame the people who designed the city. If these kids were a small fraction of the same age and in Japan they would be on TV for braving their first solo trip into the market to buy a vegetable for dinner. It would be a cute TV show called “Old Enough” on Netflix with English subtitles instead of a cruel reality on this side of the same planet where a kid is now dead.
That part of it isn’t the fault of the parents, but the fault of the society we have created.
Btw that TV show is a few decades old but my point is that the world is possible. We don’t need to be like Japan was in that TV show, but we do need more walkable cities.
Imagine your kid dies, your other kid being traumatized by watching his brother die, and then being charged with involuntary manslaughter.
I have three kids and this is my nightmare.
I came here to mention Old Enough. So sad that my American kid can never have this kind of experience because of how fucked our cities and society are.
A while back I watched a video about jaywalking. The idea was that, before cars were very common, people would just walk around the street and cars had to go around them. As cars became more common, car owners wanted to get rid of the people on the street, so they invented the term and offense jaywalking. Take something that poor people do (like walking instead of driving) and turn it into an offense.
This is basically the same thing. Make the parents responsible for what was a driver’s fault on a road that shouldn’t have been built the way it was in what must be a residential area - given that the kids just crossed the street from house to store. You have to turn the victim into the perpetrator, because looking at facts makes the wrong people look guilty.
My understanding is it was car lobbyists and PR folks trying to blame pedestrians for fatal car versus pedestrian crashes that invented, spread, and legislated “jay walking.”
“Jay” was slang for hobo/tramp/loser.
there is no evidence of speeding or wrongdoing on the part of the driver, therefore no charges have been filed.
He hit a pedestrian. If you cannot react to a pedestrian entering the road unexpectedly, especially at a crosswalk, you are, by definition, driving recklessly.
The article says they attempted to cross between the crosswalks. A witness said the younger child jumped into the street. There’s only so much reaction even the most alert driver can do.
Then the speed needs to be reduced.
Fair point, it was indeed between crosswalks. But from the sound of it, the kids had been waiting to cross, and the younger kid jumped out on his own.
The older kid saw the danger, meaning the car should have been able to see at least one kid too. I maintain that if you can’t react safely to kids you can see jumping unexpectedly off the curb as you drive by, you have no business driving.
Without seeing the incident, it’s hard to say whether the driver should have reasonably been able to stop in time. Given what we know, it’s entirely possible that he could not.
The only way I can see the driver not being at fault is if he 1) could not see the kids near the road, and 2) had no reason to expect people might be in blind spots near the road.
Given that there were houses less than 2 blocks from the site of the incident, 2 seems unlikely - this sounds like either a suburban or urban neighborhood (multiple crosswalks within 2 blocks for a 4 lane road). No mention was made of any obstructions, which is not evidence in itself; but it’s the rare four lane road that hasn’t had obstructions cleared from the sides of the road (partly for this reason!), particularly in a non-rural area. At a glance, Gastonia seems to generally keep their roads clear.
I can certainly be convinced otherwise with more evidence, but the burden of vehicle safety absolutely lies on the driver. If you can’t respond fast enough to a seven year old running out in front of you from a place you can’t see; you are, by definition, driving too fast - regardless of the posted speed limit. And if you can see them, and aren’t driving in such a way as to be able to keep them safe should they run in front of you, you’re driving recklessly.
Except not really. It’s a small town and from the article it sounds like the driver is an old person who has lived there for many years. They know what time kids are around, they know where kids usually hang out, and if they have half a brain they’ll drive 15 mph in those areas.
My regular commute takes me near an elementary school, and every morning when I see those kids I drop my speed very low because you never know what they’re going to do. It’s your basic moral responsibility to keep the speed down because you know that small children don’t have the experience and common sense to keep themselves out of the street.
It doesn’t matter where I’m from, you are supposed to be able to stop
45mph speed limit. No way u will stop in a dime.
Probably too high of a limit then
Double lane. Normal everywhere. We will be seeing stories like this everyday.
Also trucks these days are big. You can’t even see people 5 ft in front of the full size truck And I have a tundra. It’s massive
Only normal in America
Sounds like trucks shouldn’t be so big and should prioritize visibility then
If I’m driving in an area where pedestrians can be present and my view of a walkway is obstructed, I slow down. A speed limit isn’t an obligation nor is it a right to travel at speeds that have the potential to be unsafe. I treat every blind spot as if there’s something behind it ready to jump out at a moment’s notice and I adjust my speed to anticipate it. I do that because I believe operating within legally defined parameters doesn’t exempt me from the responsibility of my actions causing harm to another person.
We as a society are far too lenient toward drivers who take for granted the fact that they’re in control of high-velocity heavy-machinery that can and do kill people on a daily basis. Traffic deaths aren’t an inevitability, in most cases they’re caused by overconfidence.
Yep. U got this right. People here are just dumb. Kid jumps in from of the car that is going 45mph. Parents should be holding hand and not letting kids just do what the kids want to do.
Is there dash cam? We are all just doing guess work at the moment.
That would mean every driver on the highway is driving recklessly.
“yes! Now you see how carbrained society is”
counterpoint: society is to blame, not individual drivers.
Nah, highways tend have lots of visibility around them, you can see a person a long ways off. Though, if you do see a kid on the side (and don’t intend to stop), you should absolutely be slowing down and giving them a wide berth!
The 76-year-old driver will not face any charges.
This doesn’t serve justice, in any way.
Why were the children trying to walk between crosswalks? I’d bet because the only crosswalks anywhere in the area are at stoplights and way too far apart. A painted cross wall at minimum, or a HAWK light that stops vehicle traffic should have been there. But those are too expensive until multiple people are killed by traffic, it takes a lot of blood to get human-cebtric infrastructure installed in this country.
The crosswalk directly leading to the middle school near me was known by the school and the neighborhood to be dangerous due to traffic speed, and the community had been fighting for a HAWK light to be installed by the county for nearly a decade. They even widened and replaced the road during that time and still refused to install it (although they did install the underground conduit necessary when doing the roadwork). It took 4 children total being killed by vehicles outside of school hours before they finally agreed to install a HAWK light there.
Charging the parents doesn’t do any public good. I doubt they’re going to find a full jury that could convict unless there’s some underlying information about the parents trying to kill the kids or some shit like that. I can’t imagine a jury of 12 would unanimously convict.l based on the info provided.
Pedestrian crossings are potentially miles apart, but it’s illegal not to use them? Makes sense…
Laws that are almost impossible to follow are great for keeping prisons full
You’re assuming they’ll get a trial and won’t simply be held in jail until they accept a plea deal.
Edit: for those unaware of Yankee justice 90-95% of all criminal cases are resolved via plea deals
Sounds like evil inception, first the nightmare of losing your child and then the nightmare of possibly losing your job and house etc. I hope they at least don’t have to go through the nightmare of prison (which they would likely have to go through alone, since there is no couples-prison). Evil evil evil
What??? In Switzerland we walked to school by ourselves at age of 4.
Same here in Germany. Imagine getting killed right around the corner.
And then the parents getting blamed instead of driver??
Victim blaming is basically the rule here.
They’ve written vague laws about leaving children unaccompanied unreasonably. If you leave your 13 year old alone for a week then that’s child abuse probably. So this is the outcome of those laws.
I’m SO mad at this story. There is no reason to charge the parents. As others have stated, helicoptering kiddos is detrimental, and they need to be allowed to roam their environment – That can come at the cost of danger, but we cannot be expected to grow with 0 risk.
Sure, as a parent, you can state: ‘don’t go there’, and ‘always look both ways’, but kids are kids and there’s only so much you can enforce without being overbearing. In this scenario, without video evidence, there’s no clear conclusion about fault for either the driver or the child.
I’m okay with letting the driver off (criminally, let insurance pay the family but don’t put the driver in jail) and acknowledging this as an accidental death, especially since he stuck around and is complying. Charging the parents for negligence, though, is just fucking brutal when they are suffering the loss of a child, not to mention the impact on the older son, who probably is feeling an unreasonable amount unreasonable of guilt: “I could have held his hand; I could have reminded him of the road…” (not his quotes, my presumed internal dialog). Again, as others have stated, this is a city planning problem, not a parental one: If there was a way to walk to a grocery store that didn’t cross a 4-lane road, that’d be a better option, but there are plenty of places where that is not possible.
These parents do NOT need the extra burden of being held legally liable for an accident and anyone blaming them for this without knowing them personally and being able to describe other aspects of their parent as negligent is just an asshole.
it’s ghoulish.
They got it backwards. I will hold the road planners, the city government, the driving license issuer, and the driver responsible. It start with poorly designed roads and ends with poor driver training. The parents are the victims here.
It’s the parents fault for birthing a child into this hellscape into the first place. We’ve built this inherently violent landscape and your letting your spawns roam free? /s
but they want people to have more kids. lolwtf
If you watch the video in THIS report, it’s clear that planners should bare some responsibility here.
They designed no logical, safe crossing where people need to cross. Even during the report, you can see other pedestrians walking across.
The only “sidewalk” is a tiny strip on only one side, and it’s right against the curb. You might as well be walking in a shoulder!
And the speed in an area like that is too damn fast.
That road was designed to be anti-pedestrian. Not the parent’s fault.
Speaking of planners, i follow
on Mastodon (a transportation expert who cycles and cycles with her kid) and she put me onto this book
https://bookwyrm.social/book/1907724/s/killed-by-a-traffic-engineer
This is absolute bullshit, just because the US is incapable of making good walkable neighbourhoods doesn’t mean the parents are at fault of letting their childeren be normal.
Explain normal? If this was a street inside a subdivision, I would totally understand. Speed limit on that road is 45mph
- Either come up with engineering to stop from 45mph to 0mph in a dime
- Take care of your kids, watch the surrounding, be vigilant else don’t have kids
You should have learned in driver’s ed that the speed limit is the maximum possible speed you should ever go under ideal driving conditions. If there are children on the side of the road, anyone with half a brain knows that the speed limit is probably far too fast, and you should slow the hell down.
It’s all good to say that you’re following the law, but if you don’t use basic common sense, then it is your fault when you kill a small child. The driver isn’t going to be charged, but that doesn’t mean what they did is okay, and it’s really sad that you think it is.
City makes walking on foot a death sentence, offloads responsibility on people foolish enough to produce life in a world that wants us to die.
Can we start labeling if something is US. Cause this feels very US. Have you guys tried sidewalks?
NC is a hellscape of stroads and highways. Walking anywhere there is a stressful situation. I’d walk down to the local park and needed to cross 2 lanes of traffic at a crosswalk. The speed limit was 35 yet people flew through doing 50 and this is with medians and a crosswalk. The only way to cross was to begin walking out and hopefully they brake for you.
That’s never the way to cross a street. You look ahead for a gap, then start moving the moment the car in front of the gap passes you. If you’ve gotta run, run, but what you’ve described is nothing short of suicide. Never trust drivers.
Here’s the road
Curbwalk
So on this road with no line of sight obstructions at all the driver failed to notice two kids impatiently waiting to cross and failed to slow down a little in case the kid actually jumped in front of the car? That guy is obviously not fit for driving.
More strode than road
Nice, how’d you come by that? Posted article didn’t have anything but the town name.
