Now, we all know there are bad drivers out there, and I think most people have some rose-colored glasses about their own driving abilities. I mean, we all make mistakes. But this story simply takes the cake.
First, when approached by the Good Citizen™ and told they were under citizen’s arrest, the wife’s response was like something that might have come out of a Bizarro world’s SDMB: “The wife yelled, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about! I have children!’.” I’m not even going to pretend I understand the rationale behind the remark. I’m going to go out on a long limb and say the response was the verbal equivalent of what the driver chose to do.
Question:
Given the details here, it seems that the choice to hit Newcomb with the vehicle was pretty much a snap decision, not something that was thought over for some period of time (of course, that wouldn’t make it any better lest that implication come across). So, how in hell does a man live to be 40 years old and maintain freedom if these are the sort of snap decisions he makes?
Wow. Kudos to those two college kids, especially Linder. This is the kind of guy I want on my side. Not only did he carry the motorcyclist to his own car and drive him to the hospital, he then went and chased down the asshats who hit the guy, putting himself at jeopardy in the process. This Linder kid is my new hero.
Unbelieveable. Personally I’d have drug them both out of the car and beat them senseless after backing into me intentionally. Damn good thing I never became a cop.
I think that engaging in a high speed car chase on public roads is endangering the lives of other people, and I wouldn’t consider it heroic, but reckless. (Not in the case of police though, since they have lights and sirens to warn other drivers/pedestrians). I think the description of the car and the plate number would be doing your part, and since the car stopped after the accident they certainly could have gathered that information. Or at least gotten it when they later found the car driving around.
Anyway, it is nice to see people who actually give a damn and would go out of their way to help someone like that.
I was thinking about that too, though I couldn’t tell from my scan of the article if the chase mostly occurred in an industrial park (my experience with them has always been that they’re very wide open and have little to no traffic) or merely ended there. If it was speeding in an industrial park I wouldn’t have had so much concern; it would have been horrible if another accident had been caused in the push to stop that vehicle.
I’m glad to see concerned citizens, however, and hope that the kids turn out better than their parents seemingly did.
Actually, if you read the linked article a little more closely, you’ll see that the attempts to run over the Good Citizen[sup]TM[/sup] occurred after the reckless high speed pursuit. And the wording of the article also suggests that the 80mph speeds occurred on the way to the industrial park, not just in it. Given that highly trained police drivers with sirens and lights sometimes abandon or scale back a pursuit if it looks like becoming too much of a danger to the public, i think these guys let their cowboy instincts run a little wild.
Even if the car’s plates had been stolen, a call to the police along with a location where it was last seen would still have left the cops with a pretty good chance of catching them. And if they had called the cops before confronting the loser and his family, those losers would not even have known they were being followed and the high speed chase would not have been necessary at all.
Having said all that, i still applaud their public-spiritedness.