Yes, the old ladies behavior is odd. If you watch the video, you can see exactly what I mean. Most of the crowd is moving, not standing in place. But after the car begins moving forward, horn blowing, things become interesting. If you watch the two older woman, one who was the injured woman, at :15 they are looking at the car, which is blowing the horn, at :19 they actually turn away from the car, still standing directly in front of the car, talking, while at least three men jump on the hood of the car. At :24 she looks at the scene again, the car is covered by people sitting on it. The car started moving towards them at :08, blowing the horn.
So we have two older women, standing in a street, for at least 17 second, with a car, blowing it’s horn, moving towards them. That isn’t normal behavior. With out the mob, it would not happen.
It is at :26, when asshole number one punches the windshield, that the car speeds up, before that it was slowly moving. While writing this I checked for an update, and lo and behold, a cite
The annotated video is already gone, but that page does have the three main videos on it.
My opinion would generally be “fuck you, go around,” or photograph the asshole trying to break the parade. Why are the old ladies more odd than the guy running people over?
First off, in no way am I defending or claiming any car is OK to run into a crowd of people, even if they are blocking a street. Certainly honking and forcing your vehicle into a crowd isn’t right, safe or prudent.
Nobody said that. I’m noticing that their behavior is odd, if they were the only ones doing it. Hence the “mob behavior”, where somehow they felt invulnerable because there were many people standing in the middle of the goddamn street, while a car was obviously honking, then threatening to move forward.
They would never do that in an ordinary situation. It’s exactly what happens with a mob.
Well yes, I should hope he was frightened. Confusion alone isn’t really an excuse, is it? I mean, if you’re driving, you’re supposed to be able to cope with such novel dilemmas as “person in road - continue?” with a minimum of wide-eyed head-scratching. However, the claim that he was frightened is the obvious part of the question that I didn’t think needed to be stated.
So what did he think would happen? What sane conclusion could he have drawn about these people that made him fear for the safety of himself and his family? Did he think he had inadvertently driven into the bad side of town and stumbled across the world’s most populous, deadly, audacious and middle-class gang?
I have no idea what the driver was thinking. And I don’t condone his actions.
Confusion and fear could be mitigating factors in the drivers sentencing.
There appears to be bad-judgment-a-plenty during this situation. Generally-speaking, it’s illegal for pedestrians to block streets/traffic and it’s illegal for vehicles to enter an intersection unless they can proceed thru the intersection safely. YMMV.
(I suspect that some asshole will sue the city for “creating” an unsafe environment by not having a police office directing traffic at the intersection.)
The ZombieWalk organizers say they warned and expected their participants to obey traffic laws. They also say that “these” people weren’t part of the initial group of ZombieWalkers (aka Don’t sue us.). And future ZombieWalks have been cancelled.
This is a clear-cut-case of assholes vs assholes and the assholes lost.