38 ms·

The day I accidentally killed a little boy

573 points by sjcsjc 9y ago

jordanmoconnor 9y ago
I once worked a summer job at a state park in Western, NY. One of the employees there was a leather-skinned rough type that mostly kept to himself. One day, I'm not sure how it was brought up, he remarked to me that he once killed a 22 year-old man in a construction accident when he was operating a large crane. It rocked his world, and he was never the same. I can't imagine living with that amount of regret and anxiety. Trying to fix it in your head. What could I have done differently? But it never changes, and you can't undo what you did. At the same time, there is ultimately forgiveness from both parties, though there is a lot of grief. Things will never be the same, but staying in the past is the best way to never move forward.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  I was involved in a collision where the other driver crossed into my lane in front of me, so I hit the passenger side of the car. I incorrectly swerved towards the oncoming lane, so I hit the back of the vehicle. My vehicle was immobile and landed on the opposing shoulder, the oncoming vehicle ended up in the ditch on the side of the road I had been driving on. The mother of the other driver was in the front passenger seat and the driver's baby was in the back seat. The mother of the driver was shocky, but they were all okay. I'm still pretty glad I made the mistake.
  - sathis 9y ago
    Glad or sad?
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      Glad. I wasn't the cause of the collision but I responded to it incorrectly, in a way that made it much less likely for 2 people to die.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- danvasquez29 9y ago
  I really enjoyed (maybe not the best word...appreciated) the film "Manchester By the Sea" for reasons that this story reminds me of. My wife and some friends who have seen it said it was 'boring' and that 'nothing happened'. To me, the fact that 'nothing happened' was a very much the point; There was no grand character arc because for most people you just don't ever come back from an event like that. There is no major turnaround and everything is all better moment. You learn to live and maybe find some areas of your life that don't quite suck 24/7 if you can, but that may be all that's possible. I found it to be a very 'real' human story that isn't often told well.
  - sliverstorm 9y ago
    To me, the fact that 'nothing happened' was a very much the point Maybe nothing grand, but it's pretty hard to stomach movies that don't go anywhere at all. I come away wondering, what is the point? Why are you telling me this story? There is no major turnaround and everything is all better moment. You learn to live That's still 'something happened' and/or 'the movie went somewhere', and is acceptable.
  - paulcole 9y ago
    > because for most people you just don't ever come back from an event like that Is this even true? I think we tend to assume so but isn't it likely that many people simply move on with their lives? I mean Laura Bush was responsible for a fatal car accident and she seemed to do fine.
    - yannyu 9y ago
      The article above talks about how many of the author's friends had no idea that the event happened to her, even though it was one of the most important events of her life. I imagine it's similar for many people who've endured a tragedy of some sort. At some point you have to stop talking about it because it doesn't help and you think that no one wants to hear it. It doesn't change how much the event has affected the trajectory of your life.
  - mitsubishi77 9y ago
oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
You have to feel terribly sad for everyone involved here. The only place the blame can rest is humanity's desire to mix very fast, solid vehicles with very slow, squishy pedestrians in the same spaces. We're way too far down that rabbit-hole to address it, but hopefully self-driving cars (and less polluting cars, too) will start to reverse the damage done by the automobile, in the not-too distant future.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  "We're way too far down that rabbit-hole to address it" That's BS. Sweden has essentially zero pedestrian fatalities annually, and its overall traffic fatality rate is well under a quarter that of the US. There are two main components: reducing speed limits and spending money on infrastructure. Both of these are anathema in the US, but the refusal to do so is borderline criminal, IMO. http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/ http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Sweden may also have more stringent license requirements...
    - ceejayoz 9y ago
      And? If they play an important role in the difference, we should adopt them.
  - Pigo 9y ago
    You're talking about a country that is the size of a large state. I really wish there were state initiatives to work on infrastructure that makes sense for their territory and people.
    - bryanlarsen 9y ago
jackhack 9y ago
Well written - it shares a glimpse of the grief of an accidental death and the impact on two families. This is but a small glimpse of what many soldiers suffer ('shellshock') after being required to deliberately kill. A good reminder to have compassion for those around us. Everyone carries burdens. Some much greater than ours.
- 24gttghh 9y ago
  'shell-shock' is literally the aftereffects of a concussive blast rattling your brain around in your skull; itself is usually diagnosed under the broader umbrella of PTSD, which one might also end up with after having to kill another person.
  - falsedan 9y ago
    Think you'd struggle to find many people who've suffered a concussion from an accident then going on to develop PTSD.
    - 24gttghh 9y ago
      No struggle at all: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/09/26/495074707/war-studies-suggest-a-concussion-leaves-the-brain-vulnerable-to-ptsd https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/09/26/4950747...
      - falsedan 9y ago
        This seems to only be relevant to people already at risk of PSTD (troops). I think it says, having a concussion makes these troops more likely to develop PTSD. But troops are already likely to develop PTSD! This biases the control group. You're confusing 'increases the likelihood of' with 'causes'. If you could demonstrate that peple who suffer a concussion then develop PTSD when non-concussed members of their group do not develop PTSD, then I'd accept the claim that concussion causes PTSD.
        9y ago
gadders 9y ago
That article is actually the transcript of a BBC World Service Podcast. If you want to, you can listen to the lady tell her story in her own words [1]. Just a terribly sad story for all involved. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05t5z1b http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05t5z1b
Pigo 9y ago
I can barely bring myself to read stories like this now. I never really thought about it before my son was born, but there's always this dread you live with in the back of your mind. This little helpless person has your life in it's hands. The world and fate is trying to take them out, and if they succeed you'd never recover. You can learn to live with pain, but I don't believe you ever get over something like that.
- corpMaverick 9y ago
  It is really scary to think about it. But don't focus on what you might loose. Just be grateful for what you have. Try to enjoy every moment you have with them.
  - Pigo 9y ago
    I think I do. My boy is 6 now, so he's a little less vulnerable, and I've learned to see that anxiety for what it is. Honestly, I don't think it scares me as much anymore, but as soon as you read an article like this it can ruin my day. But then maybe it's good to have a dose of it once in awhile, to keep me from getting to comfortable with his safety.
  - WhitneyLand 9y ago
    The problem with that advice is that is makes too much sense. In otherwords, most people would agree with it, but then comes the hard part. Fundamentally transforming default thinking patterns that have been etched deeply through years of habit and experience. Why leave out step 2? Can advice on step 1 be helpful without a plan for step 2?
    - saturdaysaint 9y ago
      Fundamentally transforming default thinking patterns that have been etched deeply through years of habit and experience. ...and hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. We are hard wired to spend an inordinate amount of time and attention on averting losses of all kinds, often to a degree that confounds any sort of cost/benefit analysis.
friedButter 9y ago
How do you guys feel about the sort of mob justice that happens in such cases in India? She would have been lucky to get out alive since the neighbours\police would have beaten her to a pulp, but having been punished for it, likely would not have faced so much guilt through her life right?
- ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
  It's sad that people can be so stupid in India, they often end up killing the wrong person or don't know the full facts of what happened.
  - steve_adams_86 9y ago
    This happens everywhere, not just India. This happens in the United States in the prison system, for example.
    - ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
      You’re right of course, I just mentioned India because the parent poster was asking about the instant mob justice approach that sometimes occurs there in serious traffic collisions.
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  I doubt a mob made of the entire earth could assuage a good person's guilt for having - albeit inadvertently - killed an innocent child.
- upofadown 9y ago
  It would depend on any reasons for that mob justice. If the authorities (the courts?) could be expected to take no action in any case or in a corrupt way then street justice might be the only justice available.
- 0xfeba 9y ago
  > How do you guys feel about the sort of mob justice that happens in such cases in India? It's dumb. The whole point of the criminal justice/judicial/investigative systems is to prevent mob rule, which makes no attempt to reach truth, just get revenge.
dudul 9y ago
"The lead officer came and told me that they were not arresting me - there was no indication that I was negligent or distracted or impaired in any way - but he gave me a little lecture saying, "This child died, that's a terrible thing, you need to make sure that you never do this again."" Was I the only one shocked by this? I mean, a little kid died and she's not arrested at least to conduct an investigation? How did they know she wasn't going to fast? "never do this again"? What kind of BS closure is that? I'm not saying she deserved to be convicted or something based on her side of the story, but taking the time for a basic investigation would have been nice.
- dsego 9y ago
  What investigation? They measured the tire tracks. Unless there was an eyewitness, there is nothing else to do.
  - dudul 9y ago
    I guess. I'm just baffled picturing the scene. This young woman just killed a little boy and the cop is basically saying "ok, well, he's dead, just be careful next time. Ok, have a safe trip home, bye". You're right, without witnesses what can you do? But I would imagine a procedure a little more involved when somebody kills a child.
    - chris_7 9y ago
      Cops are predominantly drivers and don't want to enforce anything against other drivers, because "it could be them".
      - tragomaskhalos 9y ago
        Too true: my uncle's stepson was killed by a police car that T-boned his car as it (the cop car) jumped a red light in response to an emergency call (that later turned out to be bogus, as if the story wasn't grim enough). I imagine that the possibility of this happening to them preys very heavily on the minds of police drivers everywhere.
erik_landerholm 9y ago
I have 4 boys under the age of 12. I would say I think about one of them dying (accident, sickness, murder...so many ways it can happen...) multiple times a day. I know that sounds morbid, and it probably is, but my brain does it on its own...not a lot of control over it. Nothing on earth scares me more than the idea of having to go on living without one of them. Having 4 increases my odds that I might have to. It terrifies me on a daily basis! Yay, Parenthood! I can’t watch movies that involve kids being sick, hurt, etc. which is fine,,,,not the reason I watch movies, but I literally cannot. I will turn off the tv or leave the room. I’m a giant baby, basically!
- thriftwy 9y ago
  On the other hand, having more of them decreases your odds that you will face losing all of them. Imagine how parents live who had just one child, who died.
  - erik_landerholm 9y ago
    Dude...not how it works. Read the story. They had two...totally ruined their lives. You can argue they didn’t “handle it well” (blaming her when it was an obvious accident, not moving on together, leaving the room, etc), but the point is every child you have feels like your only child in many ways. I’m going to have to disagree with you here.
    - ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
      I have two children and you're right but what he may be saying is that at least you have some comfort in your remaining child/children.
      - erik_landerholm 9y ago
        I understand what they mean. I just disagree. I think studies on it agree with me too, but I’d rather not read about it. They and I will just have to agree to disagree. On one hand having another child or more children could be comforting, but I think you are more likely to make that child’s life much harder and sadder, which would add more guilt. It’s all around *ucking awful and terrifying.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Xeoncross 9y ago
Such a sad story. > "The voice said in this very biblical, Old Testament, angry way" Is this what people consider "biblical"? An angry person? I've spent years reading the Pentateuch, writings, and new testament and I don't see this voice (I assume she means "God") as angry at all. Quite the opposite actually, as the narrative is [to the Jews] about God restoring them despite their rebellion and sin and [to the Christians] about God giving us his son despite our hatred and sin. > "Then about 10 years ago I went to Israel on a trip. I'm Jewish and I went with my rabbi and other people from the temple that I belonged to. While I was there I took a Hebrew name, Bracha, which means blessing." I assume this "voice" was the guilt that plagued her creeping into anything that mattered. It's sad the torment that we can inflict onto our own minds. It sounds like she was able to overcome it.
- phkahler 9y ago
  >> Is this what people consider "biblical"? An angry person? I've spent years reading the Pentateuch, writings, and new testament... No, it's the old testament god. The one who punished Adam and Eve, the one who decided humanity was such a disgrace he flooded the world to purge them - that angry god.
  - Xeoncross 9y ago
    Is God not able to try and judge people just as we do? If someone murders another, humanity has long believed it ok to imprison or execute them for their crimes. I fail to see how an all-knowing God is not qualified to make the same judgement. > "Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The LORD was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.. ...and the earth was filled with violence. - Genesis 6:5-11 That aside, there are more as many acts of mercy in these stories than judgement. The idea of an "Old Testament God" and "New Testament God" is rejected by all the Jews and Christians I know. The New Testament is rejected by most Jews. Yet, even without this "merciful God" of the NT, we can see from the Old Testament writings that they regard God as one whos' "Loving kindness and mercy endures forever".
thr0waway2a7 9y ago
My wife was involved in a similar accident except the victim was an elderly lady. My wife was driving very carefully, not speeding etc. One of the things that I observed whilst we endured the aftermath is the lack of support for people in this situation and what a taboo there is around it. It felt as if there was no 'right' to sympathy or support due to the asymmetry of experience for those involved. It's even difficult to find the right language without it being pejorative. 'Hit and killed' implies some kind of intent or that there was some kind of choice.
chris_7 9y ago
If someone fires a gun randomly down the street, not aiming at anyone, but happens to hit someone, they'd certainly be arrested. Drive a multi-thousand-pound projectile down the street, kill someone, and it's just an "accident". The default needs to move to charging every driver involved in a fatal crash with manslaughter. Currently the police won't even perform basic investigative work that would make any charge possible.
- maxhallinan 9y ago
  >If someone fires a gun randomly down the street, not aiming at anyone, but happens to hit someone, they'd certainly be arrested. Drive a multi-thousand-pound projectile down the street, kill someone, and it's just an "accident". That is not the correct analogy for this accident. The correct analogy is "Someone runs across a live firing range." The shooters would not be charged.
  - upofadown 9y ago
    … which probably should be further modified to "Someone runs across a live firing range in front of a row of houses where kids live".
  - swampangel 9y ago
    If this analogy is accurate, isn't it absurd that many/most of us live right next to a "live firing range" with no safety barriers? We know that kids are unpredictable, adults get distracted, and reducing vehicle speed reduces the chance of a collision being fatal: http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/publications/road_traffic/world_report/speed_en.pdf http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/publications/r... We don't need to accept that roads are deadly places for non-drivers. We should strive to make our environment more liveable - by changing road design, vehicle safety features and driver attitudes - and this includes enforcement.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > If this analogy is accurate, isn't it absurd that many/most of us live right next to a "live firing range" with no safety barriers? It's accurate from a safety perspective, but otherwise a roadway is not like a firing range.
NotCamelCase 9y ago
Wow that was a strong read. Granted that they are quite at the opposite ends of 'accidental kill' spectrum, it immediately reminded me one of my favorite movies, In Bruges {SPOILER AHEAD!} where we see a hitman who accidentally kills a little boy struggling with his life to overcome his "mistake". I get teary eyed every time I watch it..
- dnate 9y ago
  Such a great movie. You might want to put a spoiler warning on that though.
asow92 9y ago
Tragic. But how is this hacker news?
- lylejohnson 9y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - asow92 9y ago
    I'm not trying to be snarky, but I still don't see it.
    - zuppy 9y ago
      It is, because enough people upvoted it. If you don't agree, flag it. If enough people do that, it will be removed, if not, it means it belongs here.
- jordanmoconnor 9y ago
  "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."
fernandopj 9y ago
As someone who is not a parent, and reading these comments from fathers on how unbearable must be to lose a child (even the thought of it), brought me back to a story which taught me to feel, years ago, to try understand what losing a child does to a person. It was the game Heavy Rain. It is a big part of the narrative to put you on the father's shoes, to lose a child and dive down to a limbo, how your life basically just ends, emotionally. Of course, just a videogame, but that's what good fiction does, it puts you at a characther's shoes and makes you feel and think really hard about a situation unfamiliar to you.
- bargl 9y ago
  As a gamer who became a father. I played this game and felt pain, but on the flip side I couldn't even play this game now. All I'd do is picture loosing my son. I could see a lot of the repercussions playing out in my house though, aka relationship with my other son, wife, etc.
osullivj 9y ago
25ish years ago I was driving my Toyota MR2 along the Cowley Road in Oxford on a Sunday morning, heading for an out of town supermarket, to pick up some groceries. Two teenage girls ran out from behind a bus that was waiting at a stop on the other side of the road, right into my path. Those who've been in a road traffic accident will know that time slows down the instant you know things are out of control. I stood on the brakes, the anti-lock braking kicked in and I slowed rapidly enough for the first girl to evade my bumper. But not the second. She went up and over. There was an almighty thud as she hit the roof, then rolled down the back, over the spoiler and onto the road. I jumped out of the car and ran back. The girl I hit was bloodied and confused. Her unscathed friend helped her to the side of the road, and I accosted passers to find someone with a mobile phone; they were rare in those days. Someone made the 999 call, and I moved my car off the main road and on to a side street, where a bystander congratulated me on not doing a runner (1), and offered a badly needed cigarette. An ambulance and police car turned up sharpish. Fortunately the girl I hit suffered cuts, bruises and shock alone. Not one broken bone. The police breathalysed me, and found me clear. I'd had a couple of pints the night before in the local, but it hadn't been a big sesh, so I was sober as a judge. Nevertheless, I was badly shaken. I drove home instead of going to the supermarket, and headed to my local for a large Scotch and a pint to calm my nerves. Some weeks later I was summonsed: the injured girl's mother was suing me. In British civil law, the driver is always culpable in an accident involving a minor, even if sober and below the speed limit, which I was. There was no need for me to turn up in court, as no facts about the accident was disputed. Compensation was awarded, the insurer paid up, and the matter was closed. Moral of the story: there but for the grace of God, don't drink & drive. Thought: who is culpable when it's a self driving car? Lasting impression: the brief few millisecs when I knew I was going to hit a child, and there was nothing I could do about it, were terrifying.
- nogridbag 9y ago
  As someone who used to love sports cars and driving, I can't wait for the day when self driving cars become a reality. I also had an incident around the same age. At the time I was driving a slightly modified Miata/MX-5 with a loud exhaust that doubled as my weekend autocross toy. The neighborhood kids used to yell "nice car!" as I drove by every day. One day I left late at night to meet some friends and I was driving around an unlit bend in the neighborhood when my headlights lit up two children laying down in the road directly in the path of my car. I don't know what I was thinking (I didn't really have time to think), but instead of braking, I just slalomed around them as if they were a cone. They couldn't have been more than foot or so from my tires. I never stopped to ask them if they were OK. I just kept driving and thinking about that moment for several hours. "What the hell were they doing laying down in the road? Was I driving too fast? Why didn't they move out of the road when they heard my loud car coming?" To make matters worse, while I was driving the average speed everyone else drives on that road, my loud exhaust probably made it seem like I was speeding. For the next several months the neighborhood kids yelled "slow down!" every time I passed them and I just cowered down in fear. Even though no one was hit or injured, that incident has stuck with me and I sometimes remember it when these stories come up and question how different my life could have been if I hit them.
ericbrow 9y ago
I heard a neighbor kid get hit by a car. A bunch of us were outside playing tag, heard the tires screech and the thump. The kid was an impulsive type, and the lady who hit him was our lunch room monitor, a very very sweet and kind woman. The kid was shooting across the road to check the mailbox, even though his mother had just told him she already picked up the mail. Other than the screech and thump, the only other sound I remember was our lunch room lady wailing when the paramedics stopped trying to revive him. We were half a block away observing, but is was like she was right next to me. The kid was a grade or two below me, so I wasn't really friends with him. 40 years after the fact, that event still sticks with me.
- tombrossman 9y ago
  When I was about seven I remember a boy named Simon who I used to play with, who told me how he liked to hide in the bushes beside the road near our houses and jump out in front of cars as they approached. I was too young to comprehend how messed up he was (he was one of those 'bad' kids who kept getting in trouble in school) and I went along with him to watch. He urged me to try it first but I knew better, and hid in the bushes while he did it. I didn't yet understand how completely insane the situation was. The first couple cars just swerved or honked and went past without stopping, but a lady driving a VW Beetle was slower to react and slammed on her brakes, skidding and swerving and barely missing him. I can remember seeing him run out in the road, facing her with his arms out and an excited look on his face. The lady driving was completely beside herself, screaming and crying as she ran over to him, demanding to know what was going on. Simon confessed and also told her about me hiding nearby, and I remember being terrified as she grabbed his arm and ran over to me, still shouting and sobbing all at once. She was (understandably) just completely out of control and she marched us up the road to our houses to tell our parents. I wasn't allowed to play with Simon again and I think that was the day I realized that cars and driving were deadly serious, and nothing to joke around with. For me it was mostly seeing the reaction of the lady driver and trying to comprehend why she was so upset. Looking back on it, I feel sorry for her and for Simon's parents, because they must have had a hell of a time raising him. Strange the things you remember from childhood, but fortunately most people turn out OK.
BearGoesChirp 9y ago
All the people talking about being unable to handle/comprehend the death of their child, and especially the one line of conversations about the impact of losing one child when you have many more, made me think about something. For most of human history, losing some children was expected. Child mortality rates for most of our history have been abysmal. As species, what impact did that have on us? Child abuse has a long history of being accepted, with child sacrifices in some cultures to forced marriages of children (not to say any of these events were super common, but there were cultures in which they were accepted even if not common). Look at 16th to 18th century and what happened to orphans of single mothers and it is horrible by modern standards. In some cases orphans were treated as child slave labor or worse (granted, they would grow out of it if they survived, while with actual slavery it was for life). Even into the 19th and 20th century we had children working in factories where dismemberment was all too common. But around the start of the 20th century, that started changing, and today harming a child is one of the worse things that a person can do. Many would quicker forgive an ex convict that killed a rival gang member than someone who intentionally seriously injured a child. I wonder if this is at all tied to drops in child mortality rates.
- JauntTrooper 9y ago
  I think the pain of loss was just as severe, and the past was just more miserable than we think. Someday our children and descendants will look back at our time period in horror at the atrocities we continue to allow happen globally. 300,000 children under 5 die every year of malaria. The extensiveness of the agony that causes is difficult to comprehend.
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    > I think the pain of loss was just as severe, and the past was just more miserable than we think. Why would the pain be equivalent, despite the vastly different context: life experiences and expectations, cultural details, worldviews, etc? To be clear, there are many aspects/phases to the pain of loss. I can imagine that the initial suffering may be very similar, but that the integration/processing of the event in subsequent months and years be significantly different. That's not to say that, overall, it wasn't worse back then, but I'm guessing the pain from a single loss event might be noticeably different due to the vastly different context.
notacoward 9y ago
Mailboxes on the opposite side of a street with a 45-50mph speed limit? STUPID. I feel terrible for both the victim and the author, in part because tragedies like this are avoidable. This particular scenario seems pretty egregious, but even the typical line of cars parked along the side of the road - obscuring view of the sidewalk and giving pedestrians a false sense of security - is provably bad for safety. If you want safety you need to maximize all-direction visibility. You can also add traffic-calming elements like bumps or chokepoints, but those are strictly secondary. FWIW, I live on a pretty busy street - feeder for the neighborhood, popular short cut between two state roads, 35mph speed limit. Technically parking is allowed, but nobody does so visibility is pretty good. In nearly 20 years living here, I've only seen or heard of one accident, and it was a neighbor's dog (who came out of it fine). On runs I've seen evidence of maybe two or three other collisions. We're lucky. I can't imagine the carnage if we did something as stupid as putting mailboxes on only one side of the street.
- cozzyd 9y ago
  Indeed the civil engineer who allowed such an egregious speed limit is at fault here.
  - ssharp 9y ago
    When you get into rural areas, you often times see houses that are built on roads that are 45-55 mph speed limits. They're main through ways but people build on them, often times either farms or former farms that were lotted off.
    - cozzyd 9y ago
      I have driven through such areas (mostly in Texas) and I found it very unsettling that the speed limit was so high. In other areas, it's not uncommon for the speed limit to be reduced to 25 (or maybe 35) in a residential area.
  - dm319 9y ago
    Speed limits are not speed targets. In the UK most b-roads are 'national' speed limit (i.e. 60mph or 70mph). It is expected that the driver selects the appropriate speed for the conditions, visibility, road etc etc. Of course, we're humans, which means errors are made, people are impatient, we don't balance risk very well etc etc.
lasermike026 9y ago
Cars are the 2nd greatest engineering blunder only second to nuclear weapons. Cars are inherently dangerous. Every time you drive you risk killing someone or yourself. We must work to eliminate cars from the world, at the very least cars driven by humans. I am completely serious. There are the pollution issues too.
- lolsal 9y ago
  You don't think the benefits that automobiles brought to the world are worth more than "2nd greatest engineering blunder"?
  - billmalarky 9y ago
    I imagine ambulances save more lives than automobiles take.
    - amch 9y ago
      Seems pretty easy to quantify - it looks like there are ~37K motor vehicle deaths in a given year [0] and "Approximately 6.2 million patient transport ambulance trips occur annually." [1] Ambulances would need to save their passengers' lives <1% of the time for them to "break even" so to speak. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i... [1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/nti/pdf/811677.pdf https://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/nti/pdf/811677.pdf
      - fenwick67 9y ago
        Many many ambulance trips are non-emergency. Even the emergency trips, it's difficult to say whether the person would have died if they didn't have an ambulance. Overall this would be pretty hard to quantify.
lovehashbrowns 9y ago
I was dating this girl with a very young daughter. We were gonna go out on a date, so the daughter went with my ex's brother and sister. The sister knew how to drive, the brother was 16 years old and didn't know how to drive. So he ended up driving somehow, hoping to get some practice. He lost control driving on a straight highway with no traffic in either direction, hit a light pole, and the daughter (not wearing a seatbelt) went head-first into the back of the seat. Traumatic brain injury+coma, eventually she was let go off of life support and passed away. I've always felt that, if I were capable of really hurting someone, it would be that brother. I still feel really angry about it, x years later. Anyway, I can't imagine what that brother and sister are feeling about all this, even x years later. I don't understand why it would make me happier if I knew they were suffering from it. But at least this story helps me feel guilty about feeling that way.
perfmode 9y ago
I was hit by a car when I was 7 years old. It was a hit and run. I was thrown into the air. Luckily, I only bruised my shoulder blade. It was certainly my fault I was in the road, chasing a frisbee. I can understand why the person would have run away from the scene. I wish there was more forgiveness in society.
- wffurr 9y ago
  "Chasing a frisbee" should never put one at risk of death. The fault isn't with you; it's with the driver (going too fast to stop for a running child) and the traffic engineer (built an unsafe street next to housing / parks / etc.).
  - bargl 9y ago
    I respectfully disagree. There is a reasonable requirement that as you're passing someone on the street if they aren't in front of you it's not your fault. You as a human have a blind spot at which point you can't be reasonable expected to stop. They should have definitely stopped after hitting someone. Fault could be the drivers if they were speeding, the person was standing in the road (not entering at a perpendicular), drinking, etc. This is why you should have a dashcam for your vehicle. I always ALWAYS watch side yards and such for children (my mom called them snipers). I drive down the middle of the road when people aren't around (more distance between parked cars and my bumper) but no one is perfect and the Fault isn't always the drivers.
    - wffurr 9y ago
      The driver is always the one operating the heavy, dangerous vehicle around vulnerable people. That puts the standard of care directly on the driver, as the one choosing to put everyone around them in danger for their convenience.
  - perfmode 9y ago
    This was at a busy intersection in the middle of Boston. For those who know the area: Beacon St. And Mass. Ave. across the bridge from MIT.
ataturk 9y ago
Two things: 1) When you become a parent you have to accept the possibility that you might lose your child(ren). 2) What makes us civilized is the guilt. Contrast the woman's experience with what happens EVERY DAY in Chicago and Minneapolis where people are shot and killed by random gunfire and the perpetrators of those heinous crimes walk away as though it were nothing at all.
ZeroGravitas 9y ago
This is one of the reasons I started commuting by bike. I was hit by a car as a child and I thought I'd like to reduce the chance of that happening again. From that perspective I find it weird every time bikes come up here there's someone complaing about bikes going too fast or ignoring the rules or digging out the last time someone got killed by a bike, often a years old story. Kids getting killed by cars isn't even a news story, just a part of life.
- bkor 9y ago
  > This is one of the reasons I started commuting by bike. I was hit by a car as a child and I thought I'd like to reduce the chance of that happening again. I commute by bicycle in the Netherlands (good infrastructure). I've been hit (all different occasions) by two cars, one scooter, one moped as well as another bicycle. In every single case I had right of way and didn't notice the other one doing something strange and unexpected. Unexpected as in: car making a right turn while I'm going straight (=right of way) without the car using their indicators or slowing down to make the turn. It's been quite a while since the last accident, hope it stays that way. It also sometimes happens I make a mistake without this resulting in an accident. It's good that a mistake doesn't always result in an accident.
mikgan 9y ago
That was a tough, but totally worthwhile read... deeo breaths, puts the phone down
amysox 9y ago
This reminds me so much of Genesis' "Dreaming While You Sleep." All my life, you lie silently there All my life in a world so unfair All my life and only I'll know why And it will live inside of me I will never be free all my life Trapped in her memory all my life Till the day that you open your eyes Please open your eyes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMEhTI-jko8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMEhTI-jko8
MollyR 9y ago
I'm a mother with a young child. I don't think the childless and males can ever really understand the process of being pregnant for 9 months and then giving birth. I empathize with her, but if she killed my child. I could never forgive her.
- rev_bird 9y ago
  It's true, I really can't understand that. If the person wasn't at fault, if they were just in the wrong place at the exact wrong time, you'd just hate them forever?
- larrymcp 9y ago
  In this case it sounds like it was the child's fault though? Reading the article I can't quite agree with the notion of "she killed the child". Rather, the child killed himself. He suddenly darted out into the street in front of a moving vehicle. So to me the accident sounds like the child's fault rather than the driver's.
  - rasz 9y ago
    At this age its ultimately parents fault.
- bargl 9y ago
  I don't think the childless females can ever really understand the process either... I am a dad, and I saw a change in my wife the DAY my first son was born. It's easy to forget but we were all on the other side of having children at some point (regardless of gender). It's something that changes you, your relationships, your priorities. If someone accidentally killed my child I don't know that I'd forgive them either. I know that it would tear my family apart and would ruin the rest of my life. I hope it doesn't happen to anyone.
  - MollyR 9y ago
    Sure people who aren't pregnant can never understand what it's like to carry their child inside them for 9 months. You feel their movements inside you. You just know when they aren't feeling well.They respond differently when you eat certain foods. It's an almost spiritual connection. Then to finally meet them after 9 months, I just can't describe it.
riffic 9y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/science/its-no-accident-advocates-want-to-speak-of-car-crashes-instead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/science/its-no-accident-a...
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treyfitty 9y ago
Ever since I became a father (2 months ago), I've been seeing the world as a dangerous and an ugly place. This is confounded with the fact that, a month ago, I came to find out that my brother was bullied in HS and was never the same. My brother has been out of high school for about 9 years now, but It took me 6 whole years to consider the possibility that something was wrong. I was in undergrad and focused on my studies, and then moved to NYC, so my time wasn't really spent at home with my brother, which should never be an excuse when it comes to family. But I let it be. Until my child was born. 9 years ago, my brother dropped out of high school and started seeing a therapist with the help and support of my dad. Both of them hid this from me until a month ago. The details of his high school days weren't revealed, but my brother has spent 9 full years dreading human interaction. I scolded him a year ago for not wanting to come to my wedding, and a month ago, begged him to come celebrate Christmas with my in-laws so that he can meet his nephew. He didn't end up coming, and that's when my dad finally revealed the details of the past 9 years. It doesn't have to come to death to point out our primal fears as fathers. I used to be ambitious for the sake of being ambitious, but the arrival of my son, confounded with the revelation of my brother, has lead to a change in perspective. Everything can change in an instant, and contrary to the popular opinions of HN, the largest changes in our lives are beyond our control. The utter powerlessness of not being able to rewind to 9 years ago to be there for my brother gets at me. As does my fear and uncertainty of the life my son will be subjected to.
- LordKano 9y ago
  For me, that happened when I became the father of two little girls. My radar is up whenever I am in public with my daughters. I notice if strangers look for too long in their direction or if I see someone hanging out where children are, without a child of their own. Occasionally, I'll spot another father like me. We'll lock eyes for a moment and it's clear that we recognize each other (for what we are, not necessarily who we are) and then go back to scanning the area. I'm sorry to hear about what happened to your brother. Kids can be horrible to each other. I don't say that to minimize his experience but to say that I understand. This heightened awareness that you feel, it comforts me to know that there are others out there. Obviously, there are no guarantees in life but your vigilance will give your son a better shot at safely reaching adulthood than many other boys who don't have someone looking out for them like that.
setgree 9y ago
This woman's story, and a number like it, was featured in the New Yorker recently https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-sorrow-and-the-shame-of-the-accidental-killer https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-sorrow-and...
katastic 9y ago
I know a friend of the family from decades ago when I was a child. The father of the family had some alcohol but wasn't plastered. On the way home he drive like he did thousands of times before, a girl darted out in front of him. He couldn't stop in time and she died. He went to jail for years. His family was almost destroyed. His wife had no college education and had to work multiple jobs at minimum wage to support her three kids. Once he got out, nobody would hire him and he had tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars (or more) that he owes the family of the dead daughter. At no point am I trying to argue he wasn't responsible for killing that girl. But watching a "normal" family with a completely "normal" father be completely destroyed makes me wonder if this is what justice is supposed to look like. Thousands of dollars aren't going to bring that little girl back to life, but they could have gone to not ruining his three daughters lives. Is sending them into poverty instead of college, a kind of blood debt, the solution? And shouldn't we make a distinction for "justice" between bad people who never learn from their mistakes, and good people who make one horrific mistake that 99% of us would have "lucked out of" in a near miss? I honestly don't know. All I know is that society loves to label people as monsters, and I think it's to make us feel safe about ourselves. "They're" the monsters, the outliers, so we have nothing to fear about our own actions. We're nothing like them. We have nothing in common... until we take that one road we took a thousand times before...
callesgg 9y ago
I feel like reading articles like this makes me a more careful driver for a few days or weeks.
michaelchisari 9y ago
Having been living in LA for the last few years, and as such becoming much more car dependent, stories like these make me dearly miss the days of having reliable trains and buses available at all hours to take me everywhere I needed to go.
arca_vorago 9y ago
"People thought they knew me but I didn't talk about probably the most significant event in my life." really speaks to me and my experience and isolation as a combat vet. I highly suggest two things for others with ptsd, which is what is most likely; cannabis as medicine, (self)cognitive behavorhal therapy exercises. For those who aren't away, advances in immersion c(e)bt with VR have been showing major promise for the desensitation and coping process, and is one of the reasons why I'm ready for VR to advance a generation or two. "The way of the warrior is the resolute acceptance of death" ~ Miyamoto Musashi
myaso 9y ago
The article reads like a case study on OCD from Brain Lock.
thescriptkiddie 9y ago
There is a truly sickening amount of victim blaming going on in this thread. People need to take a step back from your selfish perspectives and realize that there are real consequences when we try to make ourselves feel better by saying "it can't be helped" or "there's nothing you could have done". It's not the little boy's fault that he got hit, nor is it nobody's fault. The fault belongs with the driver who hit him, with the road engineer whose design encourages negligent driving, and the society that prioritizes convince for motorists over basic safety. There is not such thing as an accident.
- t3rmi 9y ago
  This discussion boils down to should the kid(or all kids) have been monitored a bit more? If so would it have affected him negatively in his later years? Blame game or not this discussion has a lot of merit.
jackvalentine 9y ago
When we say things like "I wish people read more widely" this is the kind of thing I imagine people should be reading. Hopefully I'll never accidentally kill someone, but I like to think that a lifetime of reading about other people's experiences good and bad has made me less quick to judge someone as a 'bad person' and take a charitable view to trying to understand why people do things.
GuB-42 9y ago
I expected some metaphor about becoming an adult. Turned out I was wrong, it is exactly as the title says, no second meaning. Maybe I see so many "interesting" titles that I tend to forget that sometimes, they really mean what they are saying.
GIFtheory 9y ago
This story reminded me of how this morning, while commuting via bike to work in the rain, I was tailgated by an SUV. If I had slipped and crashed on some wet leaves, I probably would have been crushed to death, and (in a just world) the driver would be guilty of 4th degree murder. Yet we both carried on with our day as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. This is insanity. Why does US society tolerate such casually reckless behavior on the roads?
rasz 9y ago
>"In 2003 there was an accident at Santa Monica Farmers Market. An elderly man had ploughed into a group of people with his car and lots of people had been killed and injured. It was just carnage, it was a terrible scene. People were on the TV screaming that this 86-year-old man was a murderer" 86-year-old driver crashing into people IS murder, and not an accident. Lack of vision, pretty much no reflexes, cramps, aching limbs/joints, sclerosis. We (my family) took my great-uncles car keys away before he turned 80 because it was becoming apparent he has trouble with basic tasks, like backing up/parking/or even remembering to signal. Letting person this old drive is a gross negligence.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  manslaughter ≠ murder
martin1975 9y ago
Damn...reading this was difficult. Her shame - rather than her guilt, which was absolved the minute she confessed to her being a cause for the boy's death - went on for too long. Glad she didn't take her own life. Heaven's forbid, if this ever happened to me, I'm not sure I could live with myself. It is such a punishing, harrowing ordeal for anyone to go through.... whew.
cyberferret 9y ago
My parental nightmare story - Many years ago when my youngest son was about 2 (he is 14 now), we were on family holiday and had just checked in to our hotel room which was on the 6th floor of the complex. Exhausted from the travelling, we all decided to take a nap on the huge king sized bed. To this day I don't know what it is, but something snapped me awake mid-nap, and I looked across to see that my younger son had woken up, got out of bed, ambled across to the window, climbed on the ledge, and had cranked the lever, and was pushing the window open. I leapt out of bed, and crossed the distance to the window faster than Usain Bolt, and grabbed him a split second before he plummeted out. I discovered that the window was (a) unlocked, contrary to hotel policy, and (b) the little safety bracket that would have prevented the window opening more than about 6 inches, was missing. I reported to the manager, and the moved us to another room immediately, with better window security & safety. To this day, I sometimes snap awake in my sleep with my brain screaming "OMG - I have to get [younger son's name] away from the window". In a kind of reverse blame, I keep thinking what if I had just slept through?
- cyberferret 9y ago
  On another anecdote, similar to the OP story here - A good fried whom I used to play cricket with, had a sister, whose boyfriend was driving home one afternoon when a 3 year old boy chased a ball onto the road in front of his car, and was killed by the impact. He wasn't speeding or doing anything wrong. It was a pure accident. He was distraught about it and I believe, like the lady in the story, stopped driving for many years. I look back on the episode now and realise that I had no social cues as to how to approach him about it or offer him comfort in any way. I wonder how he is doing now - we lost touch and I have no idea where he is these days.
cafard 9y ago
I spent about 10 days in the hospital when I was in 1st grade. A couple of other kids about my age shared the room for some part of that time. Both had been hit by cars when darting out into the street, one I think on a sled. Each, I think, escaped with a broken limb. Shortly before we moved to the street where we now live, a kid rode his bike down a driveway and out into the street. The car that struck him was unlikely to have been going more than 30 mph, but the kid was in a coma for a week or two. A little later, a girl came down her driveway on a skateboard, and bounced off the side of a passing sports ute. I don't drive much these days, but I've had a sense of these neighborhood streets as dangerous places.

573 points by sjcsjc 9y ago

I once worked a summer job at a state park in Western, NY. One of the employees there was a leather-skinned rough type that mostly kept to himself. One day, I'm not sure how it was brought up, he remarked to me that he once killed a 22 year-old man in a construction accident when he was operating a large crane. It rocked his world, and he was never the same. I can't imagine living with that amount of regret and anxiety. Trying to fix it in your head. What could I have done differently? But it never changes, and you can't undo what you did. At the same time, there is ultimately forgiveness from both parties, though there is a lot of grief. Things will never be the same, but staying in the past is the best way to never move forward.

maxerickson 9y ago
I was involved in a collision where the other driver crossed into my lane in front of me, so I hit the passenger side of the car. I incorrectly swerved towards the oncoming lane, so I hit the back of the vehicle. My vehicle was immobile and landed on the opposing shoulder, the oncoming vehicle ended up in the ditch on the side of the road I had been driving on. The mother of the other driver was in the front passenger seat and the driver's baby was in the back seat. The mother of the driver was shocky, but they were all okay. I'm still pretty glad I made the mistake.
- sathis 9y ago
  Glad or sad?
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Glad. I wasn't the cause of the collision but I responded to it incorrectly, in a way that made it much less likely for 2 people to die.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
danvasquez29 9y ago
I really enjoyed (maybe not the best word...appreciated) the film "Manchester By the Sea" for reasons that this story reminds me of. My wife and some friends who have seen it said it was 'boring' and that 'nothing happened'. To me, the fact that 'nothing happened' was a very much the point; There was no grand character arc because for most people you just don't ever come back from an event like that. There is no major turnaround and everything is all better moment. You learn to live and maybe find some areas of your life that don't quite suck 24/7 if you can, but that may be all that's possible. I found it to be a very 'real' human story that isn't often told well.
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  To me, the fact that 'nothing happened' was a very much the point Maybe nothing grand, but it's pretty hard to stomach movies that don't go anywhere at all. I come away wondering, what is the point? Why are you telling me this story? There is no major turnaround and everything is all better moment. You learn to live That's still 'something happened' and/or 'the movie went somewhere', and is acceptable.
- paulcole 9y ago
  > because for most people you just don't ever come back from an event like that Is this even true? I think we tend to assume so but isn't it likely that many people simply move on with their lives? I mean Laura Bush was responsible for a fatal car accident and she seemed to do fine.
  - yannyu 9y ago
    The article above talks about how many of the author's friends had no idea that the event happened to her, even though it was one of the most important events of her life. I imagine it's similar for many people who've endured a tragedy of some sort. At some point you have to stop talking about it because it doesn't help and you think that no one wants to hear it. It doesn't change how much the event has affected the trajectory of your life.
- mitsubishi77 9y ago

oneeyedpigeon 9y ago

You have to feel terribly sad for everyone involved here. The only place the blame can rest is humanity's desire to mix very fast, solid vehicles with very slow, squishy pedestrians in the same spaces. We're way too far down that rabbit-hole to address it, but hopefully self-driving cars (and less polluting cars, too) will start to reverse the damage done by the automobile, in the not-too distant future.

deleted 9y ago
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bryanlarsen 9y ago
"We're way too far down that rabbit-hole to address it" That's BS. Sweden has essentially zero pedestrian fatalities annually, and its overall traffic fatality rate is well under a quarter that of the US. There are two main components: reducing speed limits and spending money on infrastructure. Both of these are anathema in the US, but the refusal to do so is borderline criminal, IMO. http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/ http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Sweden may also have more stringent license requirements...
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    And? If they play an important role in the difference, we should adopt them.
- Pigo 9y ago
  You're talking about a country that is the size of a large state. I really wish there were state initiatives to work on infrastructure that makes sense for their territory and people.
  - bryanlarsen 9y ago

jackhack 9y ago

Well written - it shares a glimpse of the grief of an accidental death and the impact on two families. This is but a small glimpse of what many soldiers suffer ('shellshock') after being required to deliberately kill. A good reminder to have compassion for those around us. Everyone carries burdens. Some much greater than ours.

24gttghh 9y ago
'shell-shock' is literally the aftereffects of a concussive blast rattling your brain around in your skull; itself is usually diagnosed under the broader umbrella of PTSD, which one might also end up with after having to kill another person.
- falsedan 9y ago
  Think you'd struggle to find many people who've suffered a concussion from an accident then going on to develop PTSD.
  - 24gttghh 9y ago
    No struggle at all: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/09/26/495074707/war-studies-suggest-a-concussion-leaves-the-brain-vulnerable-to-ptsd https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/09/26/4950747...
    - falsedan 9y ago
      This seems to only be relevant to people already at risk of PSTD (troops). I think it says, having a concussion makes these troops more likely to develop PTSD. But troops are already likely to develop PTSD! This biases the control group. You're confusing 'increases the likelihood of' with 'causes'. If you could demonstrate that peple who suffer a concussion then develop PTSD when non-concussed members of their group do not develop PTSD, then I'd accept the claim that concussion causes PTSD.
      - 9y ago

gadders 9y ago

That article is actually the transcript of a BBC World Service Podcast. If you want to, you can listen to the lady tell her story in her own words [1]. Just a terribly sad story for all involved. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05t5z1b http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05t5z1b

Pigo 9y ago

I can barely bring myself to read stories like this now. I never really thought about it before my son was born, but there's always this dread you live with in the back of your mind. This little helpless person has your life in it's hands. The world and fate is trying to take them out, and if they succeed you'd never recover. You can learn to live with pain, but I don't believe you ever get over something like that.

corpMaverick 9y ago
It is really scary to think about it. But don't focus on what you might loose. Just be grateful for what you have. Try to enjoy every moment you have with them.
- Pigo 9y ago
  I think I do. My boy is 6 now, so he's a little less vulnerable, and I've learned to see that anxiety for what it is. Honestly, I don't think it scares me as much anymore, but as soon as you read an article like this it can ruin my day. But then maybe it's good to have a dose of it once in awhile, to keep me from getting to comfortable with his safety.
- WhitneyLand 9y ago
  The problem with that advice is that is makes too much sense. In otherwords, most people would agree with it, but then comes the hard part. Fundamentally transforming default thinking patterns that have been etched deeply through years of habit and experience. Why leave out step 2? Can advice on step 1 be helpful without a plan for step 2?
  - saturdaysaint 9y ago
    Fundamentally transforming default thinking patterns that have been etched deeply through years of habit and experience. ...and hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. We are hard wired to spend an inordinate amount of time and attention on averting losses of all kinds, often to a degree that confounds any sort of cost/benefit analysis.

friedButter 9y ago

How do you guys feel about the sort of mob justice that happens in such cases in India? She would have been lucky to get out alive since the neighbours\police would have beaten her to a pulp, but having been punished for it, likely would not have faced so much guilt through her life right?

ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
It's sad that people can be so stupid in India, they often end up killing the wrong person or don't know the full facts of what happened.
- steve_adams_86 9y ago
  This happens everywhere, not just India. This happens in the United States in the prison system, for example.
  - ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
    You’re right of course, I just mentioned India because the parent poster was asking about the instant mob justice approach that sometimes occurs there in serious traffic collisions.
lr4444lr 9y ago
I doubt a mob made of the entire earth could assuage a good person's guilt for having - albeit inadvertently - killed an innocent child.
upofadown 9y ago
It would depend on any reasons for that mob justice. If the authorities (the courts?) could be expected to take no action in any case or in a corrupt way then street justice might be the only justice available.
0xfeba 9y ago
> How do you guys feel about the sort of mob justice that happens in such cases in India? It's dumb. The whole point of the criminal justice/judicial/investigative systems is to prevent mob rule, which makes no attempt to reach truth, just get revenge.

dudul 9y ago

"The lead officer came and told me that they were not arresting me - there was no indication that I was negligent or distracted or impaired in any way - but he gave me a little lecture saying, "This child died, that's a terrible thing, you need to make sure that you never do this again."" Was I the only one shocked by this? I mean, a little kid died and she's not arrested at least to conduct an investigation? How did they know she wasn't going to fast? "never do this again"? What kind of BS closure is that? I'm not saying she deserved to be convicted or something based on her side of the story, but taking the time for a basic investigation would have been nice.

dsego 9y ago
What investigation? They measured the tire tracks. Unless there was an eyewitness, there is nothing else to do.
- dudul 9y ago
  I guess. I'm just baffled picturing the scene. This young woman just killed a little boy and the cop is basically saying "ok, well, he's dead, just be careful next time. Ok, have a safe trip home, bye". You're right, without witnesses what can you do? But I would imagine a procedure a little more involved when somebody kills a child.
  - chris_7 9y ago
    Cops are predominantly drivers and don't want to enforce anything against other drivers, because "it could be them".
    - tragomaskhalos 9y ago
      Too true: my uncle's stepson was killed by a police car that T-boned his car as it (the cop car) jumped a red light in response to an emergency call (that later turned out to be bogus, as if the story wasn't grim enough). I imagine that the possibility of this happening to them preys very heavily on the minds of police drivers everywhere.

erik_landerholm 9y ago

I have 4 boys under the age of 12. I would say I think about one of them dying (accident, sickness, murder...so many ways it can happen...) multiple times a day. I know that sounds morbid, and it probably is, but my brain does it on its own...not a lot of control over it. Nothing on earth scares me more than the idea of having to go on living without one of them. Having 4 increases my odds that I might have to. It terrifies me on a daily basis! Yay, Parenthood! I can’t watch movies that involve kids being sick, hurt, etc. which is fine,,,,not the reason I watch movies, but I literally cannot. I will turn off the tv or leave the room. I’m a giant baby, basically!

thriftwy 9y ago
On the other hand, having more of them decreases your odds that you will face losing all of them. Imagine how parents live who had just one child, who died.
- erik_landerholm 9y ago
  Dude...not how it works. Read the story. They had two...totally ruined their lives. You can argue they didn’t “handle it well” (blaming her when it was an obvious accident, not moving on together, leaving the room, etc), but the point is every child you have feels like your only child in many ways. I’m going to have to disagree with you here.
  - ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
    I have two children and you're right but what he may be saying is that at least you have some comfort in your remaining child/children.
    - erik_landerholm 9y ago
      I understand what they mean. I just disagree. I think studies on it agree with me too, but I’d rather not read about it. They and I will just have to agree to disagree. On one hand having another child or more children could be comforting, but I think you are more likely to make that child’s life much harder and sadder, which would add more guilt. It’s all around *ucking awful and terrifying.

deleted 9y ago

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Xeoncross 9y ago

Such a sad story. > "The voice said in this very biblical, Old Testament, angry way" Is this what people consider "biblical"? An angry person? I've spent years reading the Pentateuch, writings, and new testament and I don't see this voice (I assume she means "God") as angry at all. Quite the opposite actually, as the narrative is [to the Jews] about God restoring them despite their rebellion and sin and [to the Christians] about God giving us his son despite our hatred and sin. > "Then about 10 years ago I went to Israel on a trip. I'm Jewish and I went with my rabbi and other people from the temple that I belonged to. While I was there I took a Hebrew name, Bracha, which means blessing." I assume this "voice" was the guilt that plagued her creeping into anything that mattered. It's sad the torment that we can inflict onto our own minds. It sounds like she was able to overcome it.

phkahler 9y ago
>> Is this what people consider "biblical"? An angry person? I've spent years reading the Pentateuch, writings, and new testament... No, it's the old testament god. The one who punished Adam and Eve, the one who decided humanity was such a disgrace he flooded the world to purge them - that angry god.
- Xeoncross 9y ago
  Is God not able to try and judge people just as we do? If someone murders another, humanity has long believed it ok to imprison or execute them for their crimes. I fail to see how an all-knowing God is not qualified to make the same judgement. > "Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The LORD was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.. ...and the earth was filled with violence. - Genesis 6:5-11 That aside, there are more as many acts of mercy in these stories than judgement. The idea of an "Old Testament God" and "New Testament God" is rejected by all the Jews and Christians I know. The New Testament is rejected by most Jews. Yet, even without this "merciful God" of the NT, we can see from the Old Testament writings that they regard God as one whos' "Loving kindness and mercy endures forever".

thr0waway2a7 9y ago

My wife was involved in a similar accident except the victim was an elderly lady. My wife was driving very carefully, not speeding etc. One of the things that I observed whilst we endured the aftermath is the lack of support for people in this situation and what a taboo there is around it. It felt as if there was no 'right' to sympathy or support due to the asymmetry of experience for those involved. It's even difficult to find the right language without it being pejorative. 'Hit and killed' implies some kind of intent or that there was some kind of choice.

chris_7 9y ago

If someone fires a gun randomly down the street, not aiming at anyone, but happens to hit someone, they'd certainly be arrested. Drive a multi-thousand-pound projectile down the street, kill someone, and it's just an "accident". The default needs to move to charging every driver involved in a fatal crash with manslaughter. Currently the police won't even perform basic investigative work that would make any charge possible.

maxhallinan 9y ago
>If someone fires a gun randomly down the street, not aiming at anyone, but happens to hit someone, they'd certainly be arrested. Drive a multi-thousand-pound projectile down the street, kill someone, and it's just an "accident". That is not the correct analogy for this accident. The correct analogy is "Someone runs across a live firing range." The shooters would not be charged.
- upofadown 9y ago
  … which probably should be further modified to "Someone runs across a live firing range in front of a row of houses where kids live".
- swampangel 9y ago
  If this analogy is accurate, isn't it absurd that many/most of us live right next to a "live firing range" with no safety barriers? We know that kids are unpredictable, adults get distracted, and reducing vehicle speed reduces the chance of a collision being fatal: http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/publications/road_traffic/world_report/speed_en.pdf http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/publications/r... We don't need to accept that roads are deadly places for non-drivers. We should strive to make our environment more liveable - by changing road design, vehicle safety features and driver attitudes - and this includes enforcement.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > If this analogy is accurate, isn't it absurd that many/most of us live right next to a "live firing range" with no safety barriers? It's accurate from a safety perspective, but otherwise a roadway is not like a firing range.

NotCamelCase 9y ago

Wow that was a strong read. Granted that they are quite at the opposite ends of 'accidental kill' spectrum, it immediately reminded me one of my favorite movies, In Bruges {SPOILER AHEAD!} where we see a hitman who accidentally kills a little boy struggling with his life to overcome his "mistake". I get teary eyed every time I watch it..

dnate 9y ago
Such a great movie. You might want to put a spoiler warning on that though.

asow92 9y ago

Tragic. But how is this hacker news?

lylejohnson 9y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- asow92 9y ago
  I'm not trying to be snarky, but I still don't see it.
  - zuppy 9y ago
    It is, because enough people upvoted it. If you don't agree, flag it. If enough people do that, it will be removed, if not, it means it belongs here.
jordanmoconnor 9y ago
"Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

fernandopj 9y ago

As someone who is not a parent, and reading these comments from fathers on how unbearable must be to lose a child (even the thought of it), brought me back to a story which taught me to feel, years ago, to try understand what losing a child does to a person. It was the game Heavy Rain. It is a big part of the narrative to put you on the father's shoes, to lose a child and dive down to a limbo, how your life basically just ends, emotionally. Of course, just a videogame, but that's what good fiction does, it puts you at a characther's shoes and makes you feel and think really hard about a situation unfamiliar to you.

bargl 9y ago
As a gamer who became a father. I played this game and felt pain, but on the flip side I couldn't even play this game now. All I'd do is picture loosing my son. I could see a lot of the repercussions playing out in my house though, aka relationship with my other son, wife, etc.

osullivj 9y ago

25ish years ago I was driving my Toyota MR2 along the Cowley Road in Oxford on a Sunday morning, heading for an out of town supermarket, to pick up some groceries. Two teenage girls ran out from behind a bus that was waiting at a stop on the other side of the road, right into my path. Those who've been in a road traffic accident will know that time slows down the instant you know things are out of control. I stood on the brakes, the anti-lock braking kicked in and I slowed rapidly enough for the first girl to evade my bumper. But not the second. She went up and over. There was an almighty thud as she hit the roof, then rolled down the back, over the spoiler and onto the road. I jumped out of the car and ran back. The girl I hit was bloodied and confused. Her unscathed friend helped her to the side of the road, and I accosted passers to find someone with a mobile phone; they were rare in those days. Someone made the 999 call, and I moved my car off the main road and on to a side street, where a bystander congratulated me on not doing a runner (1), and offered a badly needed cigarette. An ambulance and police car turned up sharpish. Fortunately the girl I hit suffered cuts, bruises and shock alone. Not one broken bone. The police breathalysed me, and found me clear. I'd had a couple of pints the night before in the local, but it hadn't been a big sesh, so I was sober as a judge. Nevertheless, I was badly shaken. I drove home instead of going to the supermarket, and headed to my local for a large Scotch and a pint to calm my nerves. Some weeks later I was summonsed: the injured girl's mother was suing me. In British civil law, the driver is always culpable in an accident involving a minor, even if sober and below the speed limit, which I was. There was no need for me to turn up in court, as no facts about the accident was disputed. Compensation was awarded, the insurer paid up, and the matter was closed. Moral of the story: there but for the grace of God, don't drink & drive. Thought: who is culpable when it's a self driving car? Lasting impression: the brief few millisecs when I knew I was going to hit a child, and there was nothing I could do about it, were terrifying.

nogridbag 9y ago
As someone who used to love sports cars and driving, I can't wait for the day when self driving cars become a reality. I also had an incident around the same age. At the time I was driving a slightly modified Miata/MX-5 with a loud exhaust that doubled as my weekend autocross toy. The neighborhood kids used to yell "nice car!" as I drove by every day. One day I left late at night to meet some friends and I was driving around an unlit bend in the neighborhood when my headlights lit up two children laying down in the road directly in the path of my car. I don't know what I was thinking (I didn't really have time to think), but instead of braking, I just slalomed around them as if they were a cone. They couldn't have been more than foot or so from my tires. I never stopped to ask them if they were OK. I just kept driving and thinking about that moment for several hours. "What the hell were they doing laying down in the road? Was I driving too fast? Why didn't they move out of the road when they heard my loud car coming?" To make matters worse, while I was driving the average speed everyone else drives on that road, my loud exhaust probably made it seem like I was speeding. For the next several months the neighborhood kids yelled "slow down!" every time I passed them and I just cowered down in fear. Even though no one was hit or injured, that incident has stuck with me and I sometimes remember it when these stories come up and question how different my life could have been if I hit them.

ericbrow 9y ago

I heard a neighbor kid get hit by a car. A bunch of us were outside playing tag, heard the tires screech and the thump. The kid was an impulsive type, and the lady who hit him was our lunch room monitor, a very very sweet and kind woman. The kid was shooting across the road to check the mailbox, even though his mother had just told him she already picked up the mail. Other than the screech and thump, the only other sound I remember was our lunch room lady wailing when the paramedics stopped trying to revive him. We were half a block away observing, but is was like she was right next to me. The kid was a grade or two below me, so I wasn't really friends with him. 40 years after the fact, that event still sticks with me.

tombrossman 9y ago
When I was about seven I remember a boy named Simon who I used to play with, who told me how he liked to hide in the bushes beside the road near our houses and jump out in front of cars as they approached. I was too young to comprehend how messed up he was (he was one of those 'bad' kids who kept getting in trouble in school) and I went along with him to watch. He urged me to try it first but I knew better, and hid in the bushes while he did it. I didn't yet understand how completely insane the situation was. The first couple cars just swerved or honked and went past without stopping, but a lady driving a VW Beetle was slower to react and slammed on her brakes, skidding and swerving and barely missing him. I can remember seeing him run out in the road, facing her with his arms out and an excited look on his face. The lady driving was completely beside herself, screaming and crying as she ran over to him, demanding to know what was going on. Simon confessed and also told her about me hiding nearby, and I remember being terrified as she grabbed his arm and ran over to me, still shouting and sobbing all at once. She was (understandably) just completely out of control and she marched us up the road to our houses to tell our parents. I wasn't allowed to play with Simon again and I think that was the day I realized that cars and driving were deadly serious, and nothing to joke around with. For me it was mostly seeing the reaction of the lady driver and trying to comprehend why she was so upset. Looking back on it, I feel sorry for her and for Simon's parents, because they must have had a hell of a time raising him. Strange the things you remember from childhood, but fortunately most people turn out OK.

BearGoesChirp 9y ago

All the people talking about being unable to handle/comprehend the death of their child, and especially the one line of conversations about the impact of losing one child when you have many more, made me think about something. For most of human history, losing some children was expected. Child mortality rates for most of our history have been abysmal. As species, what impact did that have on us? Child abuse has a long history of being accepted, with child sacrifices in some cultures to forced marriages of children (not to say any of these events were super common, but there were cultures in which they were accepted even if not common). Look at 16th to 18th century and what happened to orphans of single mothers and it is horrible by modern standards. In some cases orphans were treated as child slave labor or worse (granted, they would grow out of it if they survived, while with actual slavery it was for life). Even into the 19th and 20th century we had children working in factories where dismemberment was all too common. But around the start of the 20th century, that started changing, and today harming a child is one of the worse things that a person can do. Many would quicker forgive an ex convict that killed a rival gang member than someone who intentionally seriously injured a child. I wonder if this is at all tied to drops in child mortality rates.

JauntTrooper 9y ago
I think the pain of loss was just as severe, and the past was just more miserable than we think. Someday our children and descendants will look back at our time period in horror at the atrocities we continue to allow happen globally. 300,000 children under 5 die every year of malaria. The extensiveness of the agony that causes is difficult to comprehend.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  > I think the pain of loss was just as severe, and the past was just more miserable than we think. Why would the pain be equivalent, despite the vastly different context: life experiences and expectations, cultural details, worldviews, etc? To be clear, there are many aspects/phases to the pain of loss. I can imagine that the initial suffering may be very similar, but that the integration/processing of the event in subsequent months and years be significantly different. That's not to say that, overall, it wasn't worse back then, but I'm guessing the pain from a single loss event might be noticeably different due to the vastly different context.

notacoward 9y ago

Mailboxes on the opposite side of a street with a 45-50mph speed limit? STUPID. I feel terrible for both the victim and the author, in part because tragedies like this are avoidable. This particular scenario seems pretty egregious, but even the typical line of cars parked along the side of the road - obscuring view of the sidewalk and giving pedestrians a false sense of security - is provably bad for safety. If you want safety you need to maximize all-direction visibility. You can also add traffic-calming elements like bumps or chokepoints, but those are strictly secondary. FWIW, I live on a pretty busy street - feeder for the neighborhood, popular short cut between two state roads, 35mph speed limit. Technically parking is allowed, but nobody does so visibility is pretty good. In nearly 20 years living here, I've only seen or heard of one accident, and it was a neighbor's dog (who came out of it fine). On runs I've seen evidence of maybe two or three other collisions. We're lucky. I can't imagine the carnage if we did something as stupid as putting mailboxes on only one side of the street.

cozzyd 9y ago
Indeed the civil engineer who allowed such an egregious speed limit is at fault here.
- ssharp 9y ago
  When you get into rural areas, you often times see houses that are built on roads that are 45-55 mph speed limits. They're main through ways but people build on them, often times either farms or former farms that were lotted off.
  - cozzyd 9y ago
    I have driven through such areas (mostly in Texas) and I found it very unsettling that the speed limit was so high. In other areas, it's not uncommon for the speed limit to be reduced to 25 (or maybe 35) in a residential area.
- dm319 9y ago
  Speed limits are not speed targets. In the UK most b-roads are 'national' speed limit (i.e. 60mph or 70mph). It is expected that the driver selects the appropriate speed for the conditions, visibility, road etc etc. Of course, we're humans, which means errors are made, people are impatient, we don't balance risk very well etc etc.

lasermike026 9y ago

Cars are the 2nd greatest engineering blunder only second to nuclear weapons. Cars are inherently dangerous. Every time you drive you risk killing someone or yourself. We must work to eliminate cars from the world, at the very least cars driven by humans. I am completely serious. There are the pollution issues too.

lolsal 9y ago
You don't think the benefits that automobiles brought to the world are worth more than "2nd greatest engineering blunder"?
- billmalarky 9y ago
  I imagine ambulances save more lives than automobiles take.
  - amch 9y ago
    Seems pretty easy to quantify - it looks like there are ~37K motor vehicle deaths in a given year [0] and "Approximately 6.2 million patient transport ambulance trips occur annually." [1] Ambulances would need to save their passengers' lives <1% of the time for them to "break even" so to speak. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i... [1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/nti/pdf/811677.pdf https://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/nti/pdf/811677.pdf
    - fenwick67 9y ago
      Many many ambulance trips are non-emergency. Even the emergency trips, it's difficult to say whether the person would have died if they didn't have an ambulance. Overall this would be pretty hard to quantify.

lovehashbrowns 9y ago

I was dating this girl with a very young daughter. We were gonna go out on a date, so the daughter went with my ex's brother and sister. The sister knew how to drive, the brother was 16 years old and didn't know how to drive. So he ended up driving somehow, hoping to get some practice. He lost control driving on a straight highway with no traffic in either direction, hit a light pole, and the daughter (not wearing a seatbelt) went head-first into the back of the seat. Traumatic brain injury+coma, eventually she was let go off of life support and passed away. I've always felt that, if I were capable of really hurting someone, it would be that brother. I still feel really angry about it, x years later. Anyway, I can't imagine what that brother and sister are feeling about all this, even x years later. I don't understand why it would make me happier if I knew they were suffering from it. But at least this story helps me feel guilty about feeling that way.

perfmode 9y ago

I was hit by a car when I was 7 years old. It was a hit and run. I was thrown into the air. Luckily, I only bruised my shoulder blade. It was certainly my fault I was in the road, chasing a frisbee. I can understand why the person would have run away from the scene. I wish there was more forgiveness in society.

wffurr 9y ago
"Chasing a frisbee" should never put one at risk of death. The fault isn't with you; it's with the driver (going too fast to stop for a running child) and the traffic engineer (built an unsafe street next to housing / parks / etc.).
- bargl 9y ago
  I respectfully disagree. There is a reasonable requirement that as you're passing someone on the street if they aren't in front of you it's not your fault. You as a human have a blind spot at which point you can't be reasonable expected to stop. They should have definitely stopped after hitting someone. Fault could be the drivers if they were speeding, the person was standing in the road (not entering at a perpendicular), drinking, etc. This is why you should have a dashcam for your vehicle. I always ALWAYS watch side yards and such for children (my mom called them snipers). I drive down the middle of the road when people aren't around (more distance between parked cars and my bumper) but no one is perfect and the Fault isn't always the drivers.
  - wffurr 9y ago
    The driver is always the one operating the heavy, dangerous vehicle around vulnerable people. That puts the standard of care directly on the driver, as the one choosing to put everyone around them in danger for their convenience.
- perfmode 9y ago
  This was at a busy intersection in the middle of Boston. For those who know the area: Beacon St. And Mass. Ave. across the bridge from MIT.

ataturk 9y ago

Two things: 1) When you become a parent you have to accept the possibility that you might lose your child(ren). 2) What makes us civilized is the guilt. Contrast the woman's experience with what happens EVERY DAY in Chicago and Minneapolis where people are shot and killed by random gunfire and the perpetrators of those heinous crimes walk away as though it were nothing at all.

ZeroGravitas 9y ago

This is one of the reasons I started commuting by bike. I was hit by a car as a child and I thought I'd like to reduce the chance of that happening again. From that perspective I find it weird every time bikes come up here there's someone complaing about bikes going too fast or ignoring the rules or digging out the last time someone got killed by a bike, often a years old story. Kids getting killed by cars isn't even a news story, just a part of life.

bkor 9y ago
> This is one of the reasons I started commuting by bike. I was hit by a car as a child and I thought I'd like to reduce the chance of that happening again. I commute by bicycle in the Netherlands (good infrastructure). I've been hit (all different occasions) by two cars, one scooter, one moped as well as another bicycle. In every single case I had right of way and didn't notice the other one doing something strange and unexpected. Unexpected as in: car making a right turn while I'm going straight (=right of way) without the car using their indicators or slowing down to make the turn. It's been quite a while since the last accident, hope it stays that way. It also sometimes happens I make a mistake without this resulting in an accident. It's good that a mistake doesn't always result in an accident.

mikgan 9y ago

That was a tough, but totally worthwhile read... deeo breaths, puts the phone down

amysox 9y ago

This reminds me so much of Genesis' "Dreaming While You Sleep." All my life, you lie silently there All my life in a world so unfair All my life and only I'll know why And it will live inside of me I will never be free all my life Trapped in her memory all my life Till the day that you open your eyes Please open your eyes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMEhTI-jko8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMEhTI-jko8

MollyR 9y ago

I'm a mother with a young child. I don't think the childless and males can ever really understand the process of being pregnant for 9 months and then giving birth. I empathize with her, but if she killed my child. I could never forgive her.

rev_bird 9y ago
It's true, I really can't understand that. If the person wasn't at fault, if they were just in the wrong place at the exact wrong time, you'd just hate them forever?
larrymcp 9y ago
In this case it sounds like it was the child's fault though? Reading the article I can't quite agree with the notion of "she killed the child". Rather, the child killed himself. He suddenly darted out into the street in front of a moving vehicle. So to me the accident sounds like the child's fault rather than the driver's.
- rasz 9y ago
  At this age its ultimately parents fault.
bargl 9y ago
I don't think the childless females can ever really understand the process either... I am a dad, and I saw a change in my wife the DAY my first son was born. It's easy to forget but we were all on the other side of having children at some point (regardless of gender). It's something that changes you, your relationships, your priorities. If someone accidentally killed my child I don't know that I'd forgive them either. I know that it would tear my family apart and would ruin the rest of my life. I hope it doesn't happen to anyone.
- MollyR 9y ago
  Sure people who aren't pregnant can never understand what it's like to carry their child inside them for 9 months. You feel their movements inside you. You just know when they aren't feeling well.They respond differently when you eat certain foods. It's an almost spiritual connection. Then to finally meet them after 9 months, I just can't describe it.

riffic 9y ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/science/its-no-accident-advocates-want-to-speak-of-car-crashes-instead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/science/its-no-accident-a...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

treyfitty 9y ago

Ever since I became a father (2 months ago), I've been seeing the world as a dangerous and an ugly place. This is confounded with the fact that, a month ago, I came to find out that my brother was bullied in HS and was never the same. My brother has been out of high school for about 9 years now, but It took me 6 whole years to consider the possibility that something was wrong. I was in undergrad and focused on my studies, and then moved to NYC, so my time wasn't really spent at home with my brother, which should never be an excuse when it comes to family. But I let it be. Until my child was born. 9 years ago, my brother dropped out of high school and started seeing a therapist with the help and support of my dad. Both of them hid this from me until a month ago. The details of his high school days weren't revealed, but my brother has spent 9 full years dreading human interaction. I scolded him a year ago for not wanting to come to my wedding, and a month ago, begged him to come celebrate Christmas with my in-laws so that he can meet his nephew. He didn't end up coming, and that's when my dad finally revealed the details of the past 9 years. It doesn't have to come to death to point out our primal fears as fathers. I used to be ambitious for the sake of being ambitious, but the arrival of my son, confounded with the revelation of my brother, has lead to a change in perspective. Everything can change in an instant, and contrary to the popular opinions of HN, the largest changes in our lives are beyond our control. The utter powerlessness of not being able to rewind to 9 years ago to be there for my brother gets at me. As does my fear and uncertainty of the life my son will be subjected to.

LordKano 9y ago
For me, that happened when I became the father of two little girls. My radar is up whenever I am in public with my daughters. I notice if strangers look for too long in their direction or if I see someone hanging out where children are, without a child of their own. Occasionally, I'll spot another father like me. We'll lock eyes for a moment and it's clear that we recognize each other (for what we are, not necessarily who we are) and then go back to scanning the area. I'm sorry to hear about what happened to your brother. Kids can be horrible to each other. I don't say that to minimize his experience but to say that I understand. This heightened awareness that you feel, it comforts me to know that there are others out there. Obviously, there are no guarantees in life but your vigilance will give your son a better shot at safely reaching adulthood than many other boys who don't have someone looking out for them like that.

setgree 9y ago

This woman's story, and a number like it, was featured in the New Yorker recently https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-sorrow-and-the-shame-of-the-accidental-killer https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-sorrow-and...

katastic 9y ago

I know a friend of the family from decades ago when I was a child. The father of the family had some alcohol but wasn't plastered. On the way home he drive like he did thousands of times before, a girl darted out in front of him. He couldn't stop in time and she died. He went to jail for years. His family was almost destroyed. His wife had no college education and had to work multiple jobs at minimum wage to support her three kids. Once he got out, nobody would hire him and he had tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars (or more) that he owes the family of the dead daughter. At no point am I trying to argue he wasn't responsible for killing that girl. But watching a "normal" family with a completely "normal" father be completely destroyed makes me wonder if this is what justice is supposed to look like. Thousands of dollars aren't going to bring that little girl back to life, but they could have gone to not ruining his three daughters lives. Is sending them into poverty instead of college, a kind of blood debt, the solution? And shouldn't we make a distinction for "justice" between bad people who never learn from their mistakes, and good people who make one horrific mistake that 99% of us would have "lucked out of" in a near miss? I honestly don't know. All I know is that society loves to label people as monsters, and I think it's to make us feel safe about ourselves. "They're" the monsters, the outliers, so we have nothing to fear about our own actions. We're nothing like them. We have nothing in common... until we take that one road we took a thousand times before...

callesgg 9y ago

I feel like reading articles like this makes me a more careful driver for a few days or weeks.

michaelchisari 9y ago

Having been living in LA for the last few years, and as such becoming much more car dependent, stories like these make me dearly miss the days of having reliable trains and buses available at all hours to take me everywhere I needed to go.

arca_vorago 9y ago

"People thought they knew me but I didn't talk about probably the most significant event in my life." really speaks to me and my experience and isolation as a combat vet. I highly suggest two things for others with ptsd, which is what is most likely; cannabis as medicine, (self)cognitive behavorhal therapy exercises. For those who aren't away, advances in immersion c(e)bt with VR have been showing major promise for the desensitation and coping process, and is one of the reasons why I'm ready for VR to advance a generation or two. "The way of the warrior is the resolute acceptance of death" ~ Miyamoto Musashi

myaso 9y ago

The article reads like a case study on OCD from Brain Lock.

thescriptkiddie 9y ago

There is a truly sickening amount of victim blaming going on in this thread. People need to take a step back from your selfish perspectives and realize that there are real consequences when we try to make ourselves feel better by saying "it can't be helped" or "there's nothing you could have done". It's not the little boy's fault that he got hit, nor is it nobody's fault. The fault belongs with the driver who hit him, with the road engineer whose design encourages negligent driving, and the society that prioritizes convince for motorists over basic safety. There is not such thing as an accident.

t3rmi 9y ago
This discussion boils down to should the kid(or all kids) have been monitored a bit more? If so would it have affected him negatively in his later years? Blame game or not this discussion has a lot of merit.

jackvalentine 9y ago

When we say things like "I wish people read more widely" this is the kind of thing I imagine people should be reading. Hopefully I'll never accidentally kill someone, but I like to think that a lifetime of reading about other people's experiences good and bad has made me less quick to judge someone as a 'bad person' and take a charitable view to trying to understand why people do things.

GuB-42 9y ago

I expected some metaphor about becoming an adult. Turned out I was wrong, it is exactly as the title says, no second meaning. Maybe I see so many "interesting" titles that I tend to forget that sometimes, they really mean what they are saying.

GIFtheory 9y ago

This story reminded me of how this morning, while commuting via bike to work in the rain, I was tailgated by an SUV. If I had slipped and crashed on some wet leaves, I probably would have been crushed to death, and (in a just world) the driver would be guilty of 4th degree murder. Yet we both carried on with our day as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. This is insanity. Why does US society tolerate such casually reckless behavior on the roads?

rasz 9y ago

>"In 2003 there was an accident at Santa Monica Farmers Market. An elderly man had ploughed into a group of people with his car and lots of people had been killed and injured. It was just carnage, it was a terrible scene. People were on the TV screaming that this 86-year-old man was a murderer" 86-year-old driver crashing into people IS murder, and not an accident. Lack of vision, pretty much no reflexes, cramps, aching limbs/joints, sclerosis. We (my family) took my great-uncles car keys away before he turned 80 because it was becoming apparent he has trouble with basic tasks, like backing up/parking/or even remembering to signal. Letting person this old drive is a gross negligence.

quadrangle 9y ago
manslaughter ≠ murder

martin1975 9y ago

Damn...reading this was difficult. Her shame - rather than her guilt, which was absolved the minute she confessed to her being a cause for the boy's death - went on for too long. Glad she didn't take her own life. Heaven's forbid, if this ever happened to me, I'm not sure I could live with myself. It is such a punishing, harrowing ordeal for anyone to go through.... whew.

cyberferret 9y ago

My parental nightmare story - Many years ago when my youngest son was about 2 (he is 14 now), we were on family holiday and had just checked in to our hotel room which was on the 6th floor of the complex. Exhausted from the travelling, we all decided to take a nap on the huge king sized bed. To this day I don't know what it is, but something snapped me awake mid-nap, and I looked across to see that my younger son had woken up, got out of bed, ambled across to the window, climbed on the ledge, and had cranked the lever, and was pushing the window open. I leapt out of bed, and crossed the distance to the window faster than Usain Bolt, and grabbed him a split second before he plummeted out. I discovered that the window was (a) unlocked, contrary to hotel policy, and (b) the little safety bracket that would have prevented the window opening more than about 6 inches, was missing. I reported to the manager, and the moved us to another room immediately, with better window security & safety. To this day, I sometimes snap awake in my sleep with my brain screaming "OMG - I have to get [younger son's name] away from the window". In a kind of reverse blame, I keep thinking what if I had just slept through?

cyberferret 9y ago
On another anecdote, similar to the OP story here - A good fried whom I used to play cricket with, had a sister, whose boyfriend was driving home one afternoon when a 3 year old boy chased a ball onto the road in front of his car, and was killed by the impact. He wasn't speeding or doing anything wrong. It was a pure accident. He was distraught about it and I believe, like the lady in the story, stopped driving for many years. I look back on the episode now and realise that I had no social cues as to how to approach him about it or offer him comfort in any way. I wonder how he is doing now - we lost touch and I have no idea where he is these days.

cafard 9y ago

I spent about 10 days in the hospital when I was in 1st grade. A couple of other kids about my age shared the room for some part of that time. Both had been hit by cars when darting out into the street, one I think on a sled. Each, I think, escaped with a broken limb. Shortly before we moved to the street where we now live, a kid rode his bike down a driveway and out into the street. The car that struck him was unlikely to have been going more than 30 mph, but the kid was in a coma for a week or two. A little later, a girl came down her driveway on a skateboard, and bounced off the side of a passing sports ute. I don't drive much these days, but I've had a sense of these neighborhood streets as dangerous places.