Hit and run — Murder behind the wheel
DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour
Maybe it’s just the positioning of the moon that affects the tides but it seems lately there’s an abnormal amount of hit and run incidents. Outside of driving while intoxicated I think there’s no greater travesty on our roads.
Within my own metropolitan area there was some poor 11-year-old kid who was taking out the garbage as part of his chores and as he wheeled the trash container to the curb a driver of a vehicle that was speeding down the street suddenly lost control, hit the poor kid, slowed down to apparently see what he’d done…and took off!
As of this writing they still haven’t identified or caught this bastard…and the kid is dead. An entire family was destroyed because of the heartless and senseless KILLING (call it what it is) of an innocent child.
What about that drunken sot in New York who ran into the back of a cab, killing a couple who were on their way to the hospital because the wife went into labor. The couple was killed but somehow the first-responders were able to deliver the baby via a C-section…but eventually the baby too died.
Did this MURDERER stop to render assistance? Was Hugo Chavez a benevolent leader of his people? Days later this male body part lawyered up and said he was driving erratically because he was being shot at by a following motorist and he “grieves” for the death of the family whose deaths were all by his own hand. The first thing I would do is get the New York City CSI team in there and start looking for bullet fragments or shell casings. If they can do these things routinely in less than an hour on CBS then the real group can surely do it within a realistic time frame.
I can ALMOST empathize with the drivers of these vehicles to a small extent because, full disclosure, when I was a teenager I was driving back from my girlfriend’s house to go to work and was driving at, or even below the speed limit on this residential/commercial street, even though I was already late to get to my job.
Out of nowhere a dog ran in front of my car and there was nothing I could do except hit the poor animal. There’s no way he could have survived being run over by a 1956 Ford. To make matters worse a bunch of young kids were playing in their yard and the dog must have belonged to one of them because in my rearview mirror I could see them all running out to the road where the carcass of their beloved pet was laying in the middle of Indiana Route 130.
I was heartbroken but realized there was nothing I could do that would console those poor kids and also I was late for my responsibility. Ever since that long ago day I have been haunted by the memory of what I did. Usually at this point of my pieces I say, “But…I digress.” This time I DON’T digress.
If what I did to a poor dog has stayed with me that long, how in hell can anyone, no matter how despicable they may be, leave the scene of carnage they either caused or were part of and take off? The sad thing about it is that the majority of the time the people either come forward after a certain amount of time/get discovered by the police/are turned in by someone else.
But we as the public are rarely, if ever, informed about what eventually happens to them. The only thing that can be beneficial to the families of their victims is that some sort of closure was reached. However, as law-abiding, God-fearing and decent people, we should be allowed to learn whether vengeance was satisfied and the statutes and penalties applied.
It’s this last sentence that concerns me. I do not trust judges to do the right thing. Not with the buddy-buddy relationship between lawyers and magistrates. Too often there might be a clear cut case of a defendant having run over a kid crossing the street to go home after school, kills him and speeds away from the scene of the crime, only to be caught later that day by a town constable. Eventually the legal system allows the case to be pleaded down from vehicular manslaughter to something like “failure to yield.” (I’m not so sure my exaggeration is that exaggerated.) Where’s the justice in that?
Just like me feelings regarding drunk driving that results in a fatality, I believe from the bottom of my soul that anyone whose driving causes the death of another individual…and that person flees from the scene for WHATEVER reason, that person should die! Pure and simple. In an ideal world this person would die at the hands of the family member(s) of the deceased.
When I was a sophomore in high school we were taught the Code of Hammurabi, which basically carries the philosophy, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” It wouldn’t bother me one whit if the defendant is thrown into a locked room with all the deceased’s angry relatives who proceed to spend the next 10 minutes tearing this guy apart like pulled pork at a barbecue. Bottom line is, there’s NO reason to hit and run.
If the death caused was not the fault of the driver involved then he or she will be exonerated. If it is, then at least there’s not the uncertainty that will haunt the victim’s survivors for generations.
But causing the death of someone and running away from responsibility is grounds for termination…and I’m just the kind of guy who would do the firing.