- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.ca
- fuckcars@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.ca
- fuckcars@lemmy.world
Not the first time this has happened either, here’s another similar case in Atlanta: https://abcnews.go.com/US/mother-boy-killed-hit-run-driver-probation-community/story?id=14158040
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I have watched children be bussed across a stroad rather than making it safe for kids to cross
@Semi_Hemi_Demigod @HiddenLayer555 And sadly many US residents including those employed as traffic engineers or school facilities planners and transportation officials don’t see that as unusual or inappropriate.
more than one place i’ve lived at had a busy road be the ‘line’ separating bus vs walk to school. where i am now some literally get bussed across the road and then another block to the school, while some who live up to a mile away on the ‘same side’ of that road as the school get to walk.
The neighborhood I grew up in let kids walk to school but now parents pick their kids up in cars just across the street from the school instead of making them walk all the way home.
(Though some may be skirting residency requirements so I’m not too mad.)
Then again, back in my day they didn’t have padlocks on the fences.
meanwhile, in Japan, they ran a TV show of toddlers running errands
Its too bad that Americans refuse to use their 2A rights to enforce normalcy and crush the crony capitalist conservatism that causes these problems
When I was 10 my parents never let me out unsupervised and we didn’t even live near a busy road
Which is honestly a travesty.
Kids need to be able to have freedom to play, explore, and be out and about.
Society making it dangerous and discouraging what is necessary for healthy development is not great for society.
I read it. I can’t believe there were even charges against her. This is the second round of court as she was given the option of an offer to retrial. Which is extremely unorthodox.
She and her kids were crossing a street at a non crosswalk at night. A driver who had been drinking hit them (her, her daughter, and her son) and her son lost his life. Driver took off. Driver served 6 mo.
The crosswalk closest to her was 1/3 mile away, her house was just across the street from the bus stop.
…I think you read a very different article, nothing you said matches the story of the article at all?
You just making shit up? Or are you just a bot hallucinating llm garbage?
Nothing you wrote matches the articles story at all, what in the disinformation bullshit is this.
Also why the fuck do you have thirteen up votes?
None of you idiots read the story and just upvoted this hallucinated garbage? What is wrong with people.
The kids weren’t with their mom, the article doesn’t mention time of day, it doesn’t say a crosswalk was 1/3 of a mile away, they were unsupervised, THE DRIVER DIDNT SERVE ANY TIME AND ISNT CHARGED, THE DRIVER DIDNT TAKE OFF, THERE WAS NO DAUGHTER, IT WAS TWO BOYS…
Seriously people, what the fuck, why are you upvoting this blatant disinformation?
The internet really is dead huh?
I realize the issue. You read the posted article and I read the link in the description. They are indeed different articles.
there is no evidence of speeding or wrongdoing on the part of the driver, therefore no charges have been filed.
I feel like Atlanta law enforcement might need a refresher on what “wrongdoing” means.
… the… the unsupervised child ran into the street
The fuck you mean?
The driver didn’t do a thing wrong, it’s a busy 4 lane road, you aren’t in the wrong if some random kid jumps onto the road in front of you.
I get that this is the FuckCars lemmy but give me a break, this is clearly a case of parents being negligent.
Don’t let your fucking seven year old child go play unsupervised on 4 lane roads, that’s not fuckin rocket science.
This was a problem before cars existed, parents in the 1600s were smart enough to not let their kids go play unsupervised under the hooves of horses too.
I mean, I guess running over a kid could be considered doing nothing wrong. I could also guess what kind of “person” you are.
… mate do you think this person did it intentionally?
Probably not. It sounds almost…involuntary.
If you’re driving down a highway and a kid jumps in front of your car and dies, yes, in every way, you’ve done nothing wrong. What was the thing the driver did wrong? Not rewrite the laws of physics?
@pixxelkick @JSocial For most of history and in most societies today, it was and is absolutely routine for parents to let 7 and 10 year old siblings walk a few blocks together. When my mom was 7, she was responsible for walking her 5 year old brother to school and that wasn’t at all unusual in their neighborhood. The problem is the number and size of cars and stroads, not a lack of helicopter parenting.
It also was routine to beat your kids and get prescribed meth to take home, and give your kids alcohol and smokes
What sort of argument is this, times change as we learn things.
Supervising your fucking seven year old near a 4 lane road isnt helicopter parenting lol
@pixxelkick You haven’t traveled much outside the United States of AmeriCar, have you? Building stroads through neighborhoods, making it unsafe for people of any age to walk to their nearest grocery store, is the problem. Almost all other high income countries have been steadily reducing their traffic fatalities for decades while the US does the opposite. Which system represents progress?
I never said stroads were good.
You understand two things can both be a problem at once right?
Stroads are indeed awful.
Letting your 7 year old go and play near one unsupervised is also very bad too
You don’t get to just go “roads bad” and this excuses the mothers negligent behavior. Both can be bad, at the same time.
@pixxelkick There was no negligent behavior. Why have we become a culture that criminalizes every aspect of motherhood (ignoring the father’s role as an equal co-parent) from having an abortion or even a miscarriage to not keeping your children on a leash for the entire 18 years they are minors (or at least 16, at which time if you can afford to buy them a car you can let them loose to kill people) and then bitches that women don’t make enough babies?
@pixxelkick If children can’t walk to their neighborhood grocery store safely, that’s a societal problem, not an individual one. Instead of looking for a scapegoat to punish, fix the fucking neighborhood so it doesn’t keep happening (to adults as well as children).
to not keeping your children on a leash for the entire 18 years they are minors
Hyperbole.
Theres, crazy as it sounds, a reasonable middle ground between:
- letting your SEVEN YEAR OLD play UNSUPERVISED near a fucking FOUR LANE BUSY ROAD vs
- Putting a leash on your teenager
The fact you had to reach for such insane hyperbole demonstrates how out to lunch you are. Yes, the woman was 100% legally negligent, its absolutely fucking insane to try and pretend letting a SEVEN YEAR OLD play with no adults around near a fucking busy ass four lane road. Are you genuinely insane?
God I hope you don’t have kids, lol.
This was in Gastonia North Carolina
Edit: just saw the 2nd link, I am an idiot
I’m guessing white driver black kid.
They are being real cagey with the deets about the driver. 😒
The thing is, once car-centrism is established and normalized, it’s so hard to explain to people what the real problem is. Clearly the kid did a stupid thing and ran into the road when it shouldn’t. Clearly the driver had no bad intentions.
But somehow the thought never occurs to people that kids (and adults) will always be stupid and we shouldn’t strive to make a world where nobody makes mistakes. We should strive to make a world where making mistakes doesn’t kill you.
Agreed. As I read this I pictured the four lane stroad they likely had to cross.
If the roads were safer for pedestrians they’d be able to walk around without dying.
Clearly the driver had no bad intentions.
I hate to break it to you, but:
Jerry Guy, the man who hit the family and never stopped, reportedly admitted drinking “a little” alcohol earlier in the day. He also admitted to being on painkillers and being partially blind in one eye.
Guy had been convicted of two previous hit and run accidents. He pleaded guilty to the hit and run that took A.J.'s life and served six months in jail.
In a world without cars this man wouldn’t have killed a child with his decisions. But this is still gross negligence, especially the multiple hit-and-run charges.
I do agree that if anything this is a great case for pushing public transit and eliminating car centrism. But to not stop/pull over, multiple times, is its own level of selfishness.
I agree that “intentions” is a very weak way to put it, but there’s nothing indicating this driver did anything wrong either. It’s horrendous that the parents got charged, but the child “went between crosswalks”, which I take to mean going diagonally at an intersection. It’s plausible that the driver was doing everything right by traffic law and didn’t have enough time to react.
(Note that the case Broadfern quoted is a different one, I guess to illustrate the point that “intentions” are beyond the point.)
i don’t know how you can see someone admit to drinking and driving while on painkillers end up killing someone for the third time and say “maybe no mistakes were made 🤷”. absolutely baffling conclusion. and that’s not even mentioning his impaired vision.
Like Broadfern, you clicked on the far worse Atlanta case from 2011 linked in the post body as a related case, not the 2025 NC case linked from the title.
No, that commenter is correct. I read the wrong link from the article post. My apologies
The case discussed is directly related to the child, but the driver rather than the mother. The child’s name is A.J. Newman, and his mother is Raquel Nelson.
My point is that the driver never pulled over, which is after-the-fact negligence. Accidents absolutely happen and I blame 90% of this on the infrastructure.
My own biases lead me to believe the charges leveled against a grieving mother are primarily rooted in racism and/or misogyny, and the stark difference in trials adds insult to injury.
That said, I do agree with you on your primary point. It’s an awful, largely unavoidable mix of current circumstances that boil down to car-centrism. The only way out going forward is to completely change the infrastructure to be safer, and while it will be a fight it can be done.
EDIT: My apologies, you’re right. Different link, but from the same post.
The case you’re talking about is 2011. This article is a recent case where I see no indication of Jerry Guy’s involvement. The 2011 case is way worse since Guy did have wrongdoing and the mother was with children, but that doesn’t mean the 2025 case’s driver is at fault, which is what PotatoesFall meant to saw when they mentioned intention.
Edit: i wrote this before seeing your edit lol
I agree that we should strive to make the world as safe as possible, but people need to take some responsibility for not putting themselves in danger and teaching their kids how to do so as well. If it was not a car, it could have been a bus, a trolley, or a heavy bike (this is a small child we are talking about). The kid could have run off a cliff or fell into the stream and drowned.
As a first generation American, I have noticed that some American parents do not teach their kids enough about how to cross the street (shocking in such a car centric society).
That’s fucked up.
Sadly, though this is totally insane, it is by far, not the most insane happening in the US, right now…
@HiddenLayer555 This is a messed up era. When I was a kid from kindergarten and up I walked to school alone. It wasn’t a super long distance, about six blocks each way but it was unsupervised, and that was the norm back then. What has happened that it has become so dangerous that kids need to be bussed to school even if they’re three blocks from the school?
Have you been to an American school recently? The elementary next to my house could be confused for a prison at first glance. It hasn’t gotten bad, if anything it’s actually safer than when we went to school. They have promoted a society of individuals ruled by fear.
Our most recent school levy addressed basically nothing but turning the schools into jails by wanting to hire a bunch of cops, install metal detectors and a bunch of other “security measures” and this is a rural small district, we have zero need for that stuff, why not propose paying teachers better, buying updated textbooks or funding after school care, something but I’m not and never will vote to turn our schools into prisons
There is a pervasive ideal in this country that has been a core part of it since the Pilgrims landed: Puritanical Ethics of “punishment is Divine, to suffer is to be Holy”
Something is wrong? Punish the wrongness until it becomes righteous. If it doesn’t work then punish harder.
It’s how this country has always solved its problems. Label the other as wicked then beat them into submission.
@AngryCommieKender In my time you didn’t hear of school shootings. They just didn’t happen. So there was less need for the draconian security. My high school was open campus, and my Jr high we were at least allowed to leave during lunch. Different world today entirely. And I don’t like it because it conditions people for 15 minute cities and other forms of tyranny.
Same. I vaguely remember some shooting happening my Jr. Year of HS. I wanna say Bowling Green or Paducah, KY. This was before Columbine. Columbine was my Freshman year at Transylvania University.
… it conditions people for 15 minute cities and other forms of tyranny
Are you saying you think the idea of having all important services within 15 minutes is tyranny?
@ShrimpCurler I’m saying being restricted in your ability to travel is tyranny, and I KNOW you know this was my intent.
I was confused because it’s such a bad take… That’s not what 15 minute cities are about. That’s just the dumb conspiracy theories.
@ShrimpCurler Ok you’re obvious part of the Klaus Schwab fan club, no thanks!
Literally nobody thinks 15 minute cities should mean you’re stuck in a 15 minute radius you dork
@Xavienth That is the way they’ve been implemented thus far. Obviously this strikes a nerve else you would not resort to ad hominem attacks.
Where do you think this has been implemented? I’m curious, because you’re the first person I’ve come across who was this take, and it’s novel to me.
you grew up around a lot of lead didn’t you?
your intent is NOT clear.
restricted in your ability to travel is totally normal and not tyranny. Drivers licences are smart, Pilot license make sense, dang are speed limits tyranny?
15 minutes cities is just a concept that all or most of the typically important services citizens need to survive and thrive should be within a 15 minutes of where they live without REQUIRING a car. Modern car dependent culture is the tyranny if anything, and 15 minute cities idea is a response to that
@aeischeid For anyone capable of basic logic it would have been. Obviously having services readily available is not tyrannical, being unable to travel is, what other significant aspects of 15 minute cities are there? Do you really want your life controlled to this degree?
@nanook @aeischeid No one capable of basic logic thinks 15 minute cities have anything to do with restricting travel. Either you’re being disingenuous, or you’re sorely lacking in the logic you think you possess.
I have literally never seen the idea of a 15 minute city being restrictive anywhere other than the ravings of Alex Jones tier wingnuts. Everybody who actually pushes the concept just thinks you should have a grocery store, a doctor’s office, a library etc. near your house.
Edit: and don’t get it twisted, nobody is saying you should be forced to relocate either, it’s a guideline for urban planning.
Has anyone ever actually said, “I think we should have all services within a zone of 15-minute travel, and we should restrict people from leaving their zone, and this is called 15 Minute Cities and I support that idea”?
“Having services readily available” is the entire idea. “You’re not allowed to go to another area” is nonsense that someone else tacked on to the concept to make people hate it.
if anything it’s actually safer than when we went to school
Gun violence is the #1 cause of child mortality in the US.
In the home, mostly, yep. Outside the home is statistically safer now than almost any other time. Overall crime is down to historic lows.
Ironically, at this point, and for the last 30 years in the US, owning a gun makes you more susceptible to gun violence. That may be changing, but I seriously doubt it since the cops are now public enemy #1, and have been since the mid '90s.
Oh and before you try to defend the thugs with badges, they were declaring war on the public all throughout the '80s and '90s, by using yellow journalism and Hollywood to manufacture a “war on cops,” because people were rightfully questioning qualified immunity. It didn’t exist until Harlow V Fitzgerald in 1982. It shouldn’t exist at all according to the law as written and recorded in The Congressional Record.
US cops have always been nothing more than glorified slave hunters. It seems that nothing changes in that criminal organization. The DOJ is still reporting that cops commit far more crime than all of the arraigned, but not convicted, potential criminals in the US.
Car-centric society has made it damn near impossible to walk.
Those six blocks you used to walk have all had their lanes widened into stroads, one converted into a thoroughfare, and no attention was given to pedestrian infrastructure so crosswalks, sidewalks or bike paths are almost non-existent unless you’re within 2 blocks of the school.
We have literally built most of our cities, or redesigned older cities that used to be pedestrian friendly and walkable, into a wasteland of asphalt and concrete designed exclusively for personal vehicles.
@Crankenstein Obviously you don’t live in Shoreline where we spend millions on unused bike lanes where the roads narrow and potted.
If people aren’t using the bike lanes it’s usually because they’re shit bike lanes.
@ebolapie They are at least six feet wide made from concrete that is porous so water doesn’t accumulate on top.
That sounds expensive. How many roads have such bike lanes? Hypothetically, if you wanted to replace a trip to the grocery store, how useful would they be?
@ebolapie They aren’t. It’s hard carrying six bags of groceries on a bicycle and not going to waste time and energy going daily. Hypothetically it would get me within half a mile of a grocery store I don’t like, the one I do like is seven miles away.
Given the right bicycle it’s pretty easy, but that’s beside the point. The question is why don’t people use bike lanes that seem pretty nice on the surface of it, right? There has to be a reason other than “bikes suck and nobody wants to ride them,” because in some places people go everywhere on bicycles and they love it.
So what, really, is the main difference between those places and your town, if it’s not the quality of the bike lanes?
Cool story bud
A vicious cycle happened. 24 hour news reports every child abduction basically in the country, making parents feel that they’re more common than they are. Kids freedom starts getting restricted. There’s less kids outside, so parents are less comfortable letting their own kids out, and kids have less incentive to go out. At the same time, the number of indoor entertainment options explodes. As they stop being seen outside, the world adjusts to life without them… Less crosswalks, less bikeable areas, less parks. With so few kids being outside the house, the parents who still encourage their kids to play outside or go do things become the minority and law enforcement fucks with them accordingly, as in this story, making parents even more reluctant to let their kids out of their sight.
There’s some resistance to this. Free Range Kids comes to mind. People see the problem and want to do something. But as you can see even in this thread, people have so accepted “kids should stay inside supervised at all times” as the norm that it’s an uphill battle.
@psivchaz I suspect this has something to do with the obesity epidemic.
the traffic light was a third of a mile away.
I’m having trouble visualizing this. Does this mean that at a walking speed of 3km/h it would take ten entire minutes to get to a cross walk? Because that’s insane.
In Sweden we have crosswalks very regularly, usually like a couple minutes of walking at most. For bus stops farther between intersections there are markers indicating that people will cross, even without a normal crossing marker. For areas which can’t have a crossing (you may need to walk around a ways to get under or over four lanes) they put up barriers to prevent walking across.
No there were crosswalks, but the kids decided to “jaywalk” or cross outside a crossing, hence the reason the driver’s not being charged. Drivers should be aware yes but it’s not expected that children will dart out onto the road, frogger-style trying to cross outside crosswalks, much the reason I am afraid of my dumb dog doing it.
But if the crosswalks are unreasonably far apart then pedestrians are being encouraged by the state to engage in unsafe behavior. As I said, they could erect a small fence to prevent unsafe crossings. This is a failure of the state to serve its people.
I’m not sure how to feel about the driver not being charged, but one should drive with the expectation that unforeseen hazards will pop up at any moment, especially children. I would not be shocked to learn that he was driving one of those enormous American cars that makes it impossible to see short adults, another failure of the state. Or that the speed limit was too high. These things would make me feel the fault is more on the state than on the driver. (But it definitely isn’t on the parents.)
As for your dog, just keep it on a lead. It’s the safest thing for everyone if all dogs are secured properly while going about town.
e: Also his age. How good is the vision and reaction time of this 76-year-old man? How often are they re-testing drivers?
@stray @turtlesareneat erecting fences to prevent unsafe crossings is usually done way before adequate crossing options are given.
Yes, hostile architecture does sound exactly like the “solution” they’d go for. I hope I didn’t imply the wrong thing; I think fences in conjunction with adequate crossings is the answer.
Thinking more about it, I don’t think we actually have jaywalking laws here, or at least they aren’t enforced in town. I should hope there’s some kind of rules about being a hazard in busy traffic, but everyone walks in the street in town when cars and bikes aren’t coming, right in front of police even, and I think that’s very reasonable. Many streets are only open to buses, taxis, and delivery vehicles, so it’s quiet and safe.
Jaywalking should not be a law on low speed roads. And highways rarely have crosswalks.
Jaywalking laws, like most laws, vary by State. In Illinois, for example, the pedestrian ALWAYS has the right of way. I think jaywalking can still be a local-level crime, but even if it is, the driver is always at fault for hitting a pedestrian.
When Americans complain about everything being car-centric, this is exactly the kind of shit they’re complaining about.
My grocery store is a mile away, but I can’t legally walk there. There are no crosswalks to get to the store. If I’m going to fully obey the law as written, I must use a car just to go to the store.
You know who should be charged over this? It’s not the parents. It’s not even the driver. And it’s not even necessarily the city board responsible for the shitty car-centric design. It’s the fucking psychopaths in charge of car & oil companies who lobbied this and forced car-centrism on an entire continent. They need to be on the dock for every preventable pedestrian & cyclist death in city limits. All of them are mass murderers.
I’m pretty confident this lemmy is overrun with bots spouting hallucinated LLM garbage.
Several posters here are citing shit not remotely true about this case, and somehow you all are just eating it up and upvoting them like crazy, clearly having not read the article yourselves or you’d realize how out to lunch the posts are.
Literally making up random facts that are extremely wrong. One talks about daughters, despite there being zero daughters mentioned, only sons. Others bringing up some random dude from 2011
And when called out they backpedal with more random garbage that doesn’t even make sense.
Yall, you get the fact these are obviously bots, right? Read the fucking article and stop upvoting obviously wrong statements, what us wrong with you?
The second article linked in the body of the post is about an incident in 2011 wherein a mother, one of her daughters, and her son were hit.
the ever wonderful irony of people losing their mind about bots when in fact they missed something obvious
sure sounds like something a bot would do
.world users never beating the low reading comprehension allegations
Hello friend, I think the confusion may be that there are two articles in this post that are about two separate incidents.
