Why? They didn’t do it on purpose, and it will never happen again. They just lost their kid. They’re going to be miserable for life, without the sentence. What point does the punishment serve?
They are being punished for being poor. The driver is rich and someone has to pay for the death of a child and they aren’t going to put a 76 year old rich white woman in jail.
Its amazing how absolutely adamant America is to refuse to hold parents accountable for all shit they are actually responsible for with their children, but are willing to throw the book at the parents if the kid goes outside and anything happens to them as a victim.
Prevents parents from letting their children taste freedom.
Where I used to live, parents were charged with child neglect after rats came out of the walls during the night and killed their baby.
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Crazy how they don’t even name the driver, like actually crazy and intolerable. I’m very curious just who the 76 year old is, and if that played a role in how charges fell at whose feet.
“Why don’t kids ever play outside anymore?!”
Headlines:
going outside for fresh air also hasn’t been a thing in a long time. I went to abandoned farmland in europe before and there were still butterflies and grasshoppers but you dont see that in north america any more, just powdered cancer blowing around the tarmac.
U must be a city boy. Out here in the mountains of New England we have nothing but fresh air (at least since the smoke from Canada has blown away …) I have butterflies and fireflies and crickets and grasshoppers and frogs singing all the time
Kinds in the Netherlands and Japan roam in their cities safely. Its less an urban issue how rotten US mentality is.
10 years ago we had fireflies by my lake. This year I counted maybe 4 total.
My hometown was literally 14 houses in the woods with one road. 6 of them still exist in a renovated state but now there are apartment towers and paved townhouse complexes everywhere, invasive weeds at every roadside, dirt lots unused that used to be wild native plants but are just dandelions and moss. All the parks used to be connected by trail but now its streets without sidewalks on all but one side of the smallest park. If you go down the residential streets you will see enough cybertrucks that I want to cry.
So yeah its a city now but it wasn’t before.
Damn that unfortunate. I live in a “city” for this state, and one of the bigger ones at that with 15k population. The “small town” in mass I moved from had 20k population. At least up here where the city ends, there is nothing but trees and mountains. Back in mass there was no distinguishable like as near the whole state is just sprawling suburbs and towns. I think some of what makes us glorify Europe in ways is they have harder lines where cities end, so you can still get to nature. Also, there’s still some nature to get to instead of just suburbs till the next city limits
You don’t even need to be in the mountains of New England. We’re right outside one of America’s bigger cities and within an hour drive of two more, and we have butterflies, frogs, raccoons, foxes, etc.
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C t’une bonne chose mon ami(e)
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Yeah. I’m like minutes outside a major city and see these things in my backyard. I think they probably need to get their eyes checked or something…
Only 5% of the land in America is developed according to a 2015 Bloomburg report. That leaves a lot of space for grasshoppers. By comparison, 80% of European land is developed. Fortunately a lot of that is farm and pastures or else they would be in trouble. We do have a lot of ugly cities though.
Yeah you definitely do see that in North America. Just because you live in the middle of urban sprawl and suburb hell doesn’t mean everyone does.
Can we stop glamorizing Europe? For fuck sake Frankfurt Germany looks like Detriot’s heroin addict cousin and there’s villages that look like Gary Indiana threw up in a liter box.
where I grew up and some select cities from my childhood throughout canada there were all sorts of flying and jumpy grass critters. These days in the same areas there are rats, flies, and mosquitos, if anything at all. Maybe the odd sickly owl that the outsiders that took over the region dont care about. If you do see any desirable creatures they are sparse and nowhere near the look anywhere see twelve populations of the old days.
and I’m not trying to glamourize europe but when I go visit family it’s been the same year after year trying not to step on grasshoppers, bees, and butterflies while my home becomes more and more empty apart from eroded concrete and car bits.
It’s probably all the pesticides and habitat erosion.
This is patently false.
What grand jury permitted these charges? This is insane. The driver should be arrested not the parents.
- A grand jury would indict a ham sandwich.
- Many states don’t have grand juries. They are only required for federal cases by US constitution.
Ah I didn’t know the second part. I knew Texas had them but didn’t know depends on the state. Well hopefully the judge throws it out or it goes to trial or something.
If it goes to trial. The prosecutor will threaten to stack an enormous number of charges unless they agreed to to a plea bargain.
No arrest for the city planners who knowingly ignored accounting for pedestrians. Hm, shocked.
(The driver faced no charges.)
🙄
The 76 year old driving an S.U.V. faced no charges.
It doesn’t look like they should. If a kid darts out into traffic and you can’t stop in time, why would you get charged? The charge against the parents is ridiculous. If anything the rage should be against an environment that makes walking to a place so dangerous for anyone.
Even if I’m trying to tone down the fuckcars rhetoric…
If a kid darts out into traffic and you can’t stop in time, why would you get charged?
If you can’t stop in time, 90% of the time it means you were either speeding or not paying attention to your surroundings, and your negligence/incompetence caused a death.
It is absolutely absurd that the parents are being brought before the court to determine liability, but the driver is not.
The speed limit was 45 mph (72 km/h) and there was no crosswalk at that location; there are trees in the median obscuring the driver’s view. A map is helpful: Google | OSM.
From context, the kids probably lived in the neighborhood to the southeast. The driver would have been eastbound, and would have just passed the Lyon street intersection, which has traffic lights and crosswalks. There is no sidewalk on the south side of Hudson boulevard at this location, so it’s reasonable she wouldn’t have been expecting pedestrians.
I can’t see assigning criminal liability to anybody here. The infrastructure sucks.
People want to be angry at as many people as possible. Thank you for the actual information.
My father is in his mid-70s, and a better driver than many of my friends. And the hatchback he drives is often defined as an SUV.
While I find myself agreeing with the sentiment here most of the time, judging without fact is getting more and more common, unfortunately.
you just showed me a wide road with good visibility
drivers need to pay some fucking attention. they need to be looking ahead at all times, not just the 0.3 seconds that somebody was obscured behind a tree. if you watched them approach the tree, you goddamn well know that they’re still behind it if you didn’t see them leave.
I can’t see assigning criminal liability to anybody here. The infrastructure sucks.
The liability should fall on the licensed engineer who negligently approved the design. The street was literally incomplete and should never have been built that way in the first place.
The street was presumably designed to the standards adopted by the city and state. We probably shouldn’t update the street design standards by punishing engineers who follow the existing standards; a legislative or regulatory approach is suitable here.
This is also why it’s so important for adults to cross safely at crosswalks to set a good example for children in poorly designed suburban hellscapes. I cringe so hard every time I see some random idiot pushing a stroller across three lanes onto a raised median when there is a crosswalk 20m away.
Yes, we should design infrastructure better, but we also need to understand that what we have now is incredibly dangerous, and we need to set an example for children every time we interact with it.
Totally agree, the ignoring of crosswalks is terrible, I’ve seen this lead to accidents in my luckily very walkable town before. Kids do what they see.
What if they weren’t speeding and the surroundings contributed to a line of sight problem for both drivers and pedestrians. As mentioned in the article.
I can think of many places in my own area where a car could be going slower than the speed limit and someone just jumping out from a median would give no time at all to react. It’s absolutely a car-dominant infrastructure problem.
Just goes to show how deadly our streets are designed that the prosecution thought it was so completely obvious that the environment is too dangerous for a 7 and 10 year old pair of kids to navigate.
I know you’d like to prejudge the driver based on age, but you need the facts of the case to know if the driver was at fault.
Actually, I’m prejudiced against motorists.
I say it’s always the driver’s fault.
This is funny because as a motorist, the people I hate the most are other motorists
As a driver, I hate all things on the road, be they living, dead, inanimate, or my own vehicle.
Driving sucks. It doesn’t spark joy in me.
I will admit, it certainly comes across like that. But it was more an illustration of how America works. This entire event is some crazy satire political cartoon that manifested itself.
This is America. This is not Trump’s America, this is America.
Americans, when Trump is dead or when the civil war ends or how ever you get rid of his orange ass, this is America that needs fixing.
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They get kick backs from the prisons. It’s really that easy. Everything these people do, they do it for profit. Simple as.
Hold up, let me go check the parents’ race real quick
Edit: ooh, mixed race! Quite possibly the only kind of couple the US “justice” system hates more than black couples!
In addition to the other guy mentioning private prisons and kickbacks, you have prosecutors with win quotas and you have police who all too frequently see everything in black-and-white in their application of the law. After reading the article it sounds like the former reason.
Let’s play the colors game.
What color is the child? You guessed correctly!!
What color is the DA? You guessed correctly!!
The same DA did not press felony charges for a man who left his gun out for two kids to play with, one of them ending up dead.
Been shown a lot lately because it’s been relevant a lot lately.
Yeah this is some DA bullshit, nothing to do with the story.
Throw all the charges at people and get them to plead to a lesser crime they also didn’t do. If you can make headlines with it, why you’re in line to be a judge or governor or whatever your shriveled evil heart desires.
The father’s black, the mother’s white, the prosecutor is a Republican, and this is North Carolina. And this is The New York Times, so the parents’ race isn’t even mentioned. Wouldn’t know it’s a mixed marriage if the paper hadn’t included a photo, but you can bet District Attorney Travis Page knows.
But they did show several photographs of the parents throughout the article.
And the article is written to highlight the ridiculousness of the charges and even highlights another situation where much more leniency was provided, showing a double standard.
I felt pretty strongly the subtext was screaming racism. That can be much more effective then focusing on it.
They would certainly get more people to read it and question the situation than starting out as “Racist DA uses his role to imprison parents, blaming them for gerting hit by SUV.”
You and I both know, people would stop caring once they learned the races of the child and parents.
But that way, maybe more people read a bit further, and maybe, just fucking maybe, empathized a bit before using the excuse that empathy is toxic.
Sheesh when I was 10 me and my little sister would sometimes miss a bus and walk home from school in ft worth from riverside to bluff street by ourselves across three lane highways and bridges
Fuck anyone (and there’s a lot of them) who think kids shouldn’t be allowed to walk and ride bikes or scooters or play outside. That the parents should get anything but condolences from this is absurd.
jesus christ. what kind of of dystopian times are we living in? I’m only in my 40s and this would never have happened when I was growing up. in fact the opposite was more the norm. kids being monitored 24/7 was just not a thing like it is now.
how could such a dramatic change happen so quickly? and why?
The main change that comes to mind is that cars are designed to be less safe for pedestrians. SUVs have some of the worst frontal visibility of any vehicle, ranking below tanks. There are also more of those varities of vehicle on the road than before. In addition, those vehicle weight classes make these accidents more lethal. Whenever commercials advertise a car as being “The safest pickup of the year”, that is ranking safety for its occupants, not the people outside it.
That said, I’m inclined to believe there are more reasons than just that - but with crime rates falling and street fatalities going down, it’s hard to pin one thing.
We are also taught to be more fearful through media and our politicians, because scared people are more than willing to give up all kinds of rights. In spite of violent crime and car deaths going down, people are more worried about those things than before. The same holds true for child abductions. The rate of stranger abductions has gone down, but the fear of it happening has gone up.
I’m not saying these things aren’t problems or shouldn’t be addressed, but they are still less of a risk than previously.
Because your (our) generation has some horrifying groupthink going on. We invented the helicopter parent, even if we personally think it’s stupid.
Gotta get 'em used to the police state young.
“North Carolina is about average for national pedestrian deaths. But in the United States, that average is bleak, three times that of the rest of the developed world. The death toll of Americans on foot rose by 58 percent in the decade leading up to 2022…”
“A common response to the death of a jaywalker — whether an adult or a child — is to blame the victim: Why didn’t the boys cross at a traffic light, less than five minutes away?”
23 months ago a unhoused pedestrian was killed in hit-and-run just around the corner from me in a place I walk for exercise multiple times a week. It blew my mind when I fully considered how few people (especially officials) care when a pedestrian is killed. Sure enough when talking about it with family one of the first things I heard was “What was she even doing near the road” I mentioned the bus stop was only a couple yards away.
I was hit at a crosswalk a year before that by a lady pulling out from stop sign in traffic but at least she was coming from a dead-stop. I watched another guy one or two years ago roll off of some college kids hood because he was crossing at a crosswalk and the kid just made a left turn directly into him… -I’m beginning to think pedestrians need better protections from careless drivers, and I reside in what’s supposed to be a more pedestrian friendly town already.
