I saw a pedestrian get hit by a car today

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m still pretty freaked out about this :eek:

(this is also in my journal)

So I was on my way to CVS to drop off a prescription. I’m the only person in the left turn lane at the intersection, and my light is red. I’m sitting there waiting, not really paying attention to anything in particular. I half notice that on the other side of the intersection, a small gaggle of women have begun to cross the street. Then there is a sort of flurry of movement as a white SUV pulled up suddenly. The women jumped back, and the SUV stopped. The women hesitated for the SUV, but the SUV driver waved them on. So they start to walk across in front of the SUV.

Now I remember looking up at the light and it being yellow at this point–later on this becomes a point of contention because another eyewitness says it was green.

As the women are crossing in front of the SUV, a red pickup truck comes blazing through the intersection. I remember thinking two things simultaneously. First, that he was trying to just squeak through the yellow light. Second, that there was no way he could see those women around that SUV.

I watched it in slow motion. The truck getting closer, the women getting closer. I couldn’t belive what I was about to see… it wouldn’t really happen…

…but it did. The woman bounced off the front of the pickup truck, spun in the air a few times, and landed maybe 20 feet away. Her shoes flew through the air and landed on the other side of the street. The truck had been going fast. I was holding my breath. Had I just seen something fatal? How gory was this going to be? Was there going to be anything I could do?

The truck screeched to a stop. The SUV stayed stopped. Several cars pulled over and no one at the intersection knew what to do. Everyone was still stopped at the light, and I don’t even know which direction had the green at that point.

I know that all of the lights for me were red. I turned left anyway (the part of the street I was turning into was mostly a driveway to a parking lot, there was no traffic over there) and pulled to the side of the road. I got out my cell phone and dialed 911.

I was on hold for 5 minutes before anyone answered the call, and they told me that they’d gotten several calls simultaneously about the same accident.

I got out of my car and walked back to the intersection and saw to my great relief that the woman’s friends were helping her up, and she was actually walking to the side of the road, and all of her body parts were still attached to her.

The fire trucks showed up, and the ambulance, and a score of police. I saw them with a bloody cloth on the woman’s arm, and I know they strapped her to a board and took her away… but she really didn’t look that bad, considering. No really obvious injuries except for the bloody arm.

A few of the other witnesses and I were discussing what we had seen. Like me, they had seen it coming and knew what would happen before it did. We had all watched with that same sickening feeling. The color of the light we did not agree on. I was the odd man out thinking it was yellow.

So the police took down our statements and got our information, and they may call me if they need me.

I feel bad for the old guy in the truck… but he was being stupid. Think about it. If you saw a vehicle stopped in an intersection would you go blazing right by them at full speed? Or would you think “I wonder why they are stopped right there, I should be cautious in case there is something in the road (or whatever)”? The lady in the SUV probably feels guilty, too, because if she had gone when they waved her by rather than staying and waving them by, it wouldn’t have happened. She had no way of knowing that, of course, but it is the kind of thing that will probably bother her, I bet.

2

Oh Opal, I’m so sorry. Awful. Hugs to you, and very careful hugs to the lady who got hit.

3

Could do more than bother her, she could get sued over this!

In the Jun 25, 2003 issue of the True Stella newsletter, (See here) a similar case is reported, where the pedestrian sued the polite driver who stopped and waved them by (or maybe didn’t wave, witnesses disagree). The lawsuit was thrown out by the original Judge, but reinstated by the Appeals Court.
[The Stella Awards Newsletter is named after Stella Liebeck, who sued McDonalds 10 years ago because the coffee was too hot. It reports on outrageous lawsuits in American Courts, but only true ones – it also often debunks urban legend type stories about lawsuits. ]

4

I saw a pedestrian get hit by a car once, too. It was very awful. It was the pedestrian’s fault - she ran across an intersection against the light.

It happened right next to a fire station, so when I saw that other people had run to her, I ran to the fire station, and we had a paramedic there in less than a minute.

She didn’t die, but she flew a long way and landed on her head. Last I heard she was still in a coma. It was very, very awful. :frowning:

5

Opal–this is likely to be very stressful to you.

Perhaps you should take a little exercise tonight before bed, or you might not be able to sleep.

6

I’m a little confused. We’re the women crossing against the light?

I was almost hit it similar circumstances (a toddler who’d just learned to walk ran into the road against the light and I jumped out and grabbed him).

The car in the first lane saw the kid, stopped and tapped the horn lightly. The car in the second lane saw that the first car had stopped and immediately slowed down thinking something had to be amiss. The third car blazed on past at about 60 kmh (40 mph), clueless.

The second car hit the brakes to a full stop when he saw me (he never saw the kid, the kid’s head wasn’t high enough to see over the hood.)

But that third guy… Like Opal’s “Guy in Truck,” it never occured to him that other cars screeching to a halt in an “Emergency Stop” might be a hint that something was wrong. I snatched the kid and just pulled him back from in front of the third car. Since I was bent over grabbing him, I felt the wake of the rearview side mirror – damn thing nearly grazed my forehead!

It scared everyone so bad that the first two drivers pulled over to calm down. The kid’s parents were blanched (and I never truly appreciated that word until then).

The third car kept on going without slowing down – totally oblivious! Everyone else had almost peed themselves.

The poor truck driver’s not to blame, but ack!

Opal I’m soooo relieved to hear that the woman wasn’t crushed and still has all her limbs attached! Still the trauma of what you witnesse must’ve left you with some serious jitters.

7

At least the truck driver stopped.

We live on a curvy road at the top of the hill, which means we get the occasional hotshot driving the the hill like a slalom. Sometimes a hotshot will screw up and hit a parked car (or three) or an oncoming vehicle. Usually, they keep right on going.

We had one particlarly bad wreck across the street here, the oncoming vehicle had been hit so hard that it had ended up perpendicular to the road and knocked a piece of fence into a patio door. Eyewitness reports said the hotshot stopped, surveyed the damage, then split. No idea if the cops ever got him.

8

In a bizarre bit of synchronicity, my wife and I have both, on separate occasions, seen pedestrians hit by automobiles.

My incident (I’ve mentioned this before, but rather than tax the hamsters with a search I’ll give a recap): I’m sitting on a bus at a red light, on a one-way street with several lanes. The bus is in the rightmost lane; the parallel lane to the left is empty, so there’s nobody in that lane waiting at the light. I’m on the lefthand side of the bus so I have a clear view. As the crosswise light changes to yellow, two things happen: One, a pedestrian dashes across the street in the crosswalk, trying to beat the light. And at the same time, a car, a sporty little job, comes flying up in the parallel lane, timing their approach to the intersection so they get to the light right when it changes to green. Result: WHAM. One of the most sickening sounds I’ve ever heard; I remember being surprised at just how metal it was. I also remember clearly the man’s baseball cap spinning for a split-second in the air when the car’s impact took him out from under it. :frowning: Oddly, the bus driver didn’t wait; we pulled away with the green, so none of us who witnessed it got to talk to the police or find out what happened with the guy.

My wife’s incident: She was in the university neighborhood, on another one-way street with parallel lanes. (I wasn’t with her. I’m recalling details as she told me.) She and a couple of neighboring cars were passing through a green-light intersection when a young woman ran across right in front of them. My wife managed not to hit the person; the car next to her was not so lucky. Again, WHAM. Luckily, they were right next to a fire station; unluckily, the pedestrian was hit hard and the paramedics couldn’t do anything: She died almost immediately. It gets worse, even. First, the driver of the car that hit the pedestrian was a teenage girl, someone who hadn’t been driving very long, who was absolutely traumatized by the incident; all the witnesses repaired to the lounge of the fire station to take their turns talking to the police, and my wife said the girl was close to falling apart. And second, the woman who had been killed was from another country, and had come here to attend the college. :frowning:

So, yeah, this sucks big time. It sticks with you for a while. My incident happened maybe three years ago, and it took weeks to stop thinking involuntarily of that horrible sound. It’s still a fresh memory I can recall at any time.

Sorry, Opal.

9

I have no idea. The traffic lights around here are all strange. They don’t just go N-S on, E-W off… now N-S off, E-W on… rinse, repeat. Insteasd they will go, say, N and left turn on, S, E, W off… Now N-S on and E-right-turn on, E and W off… Now N-S-E off, W and left turn on… etc etc. It’s all chaos and if you don’t know a given intersection really well you really can’t predict what lane or direction has or will have a green light at any given time.

That said, they had gotten all the way to the middle of the street (5 lanes, but with no median) and by the time I was paying attention to them, the cars that were facing me oncoming were all stopped. My guess is that they started crossing when the light turned yellow. This would fit with the way I think I remembered things. If, on the other hand, the light was green the whole time, then I don’t know what they were doing… prancing out into fairly busy moving traffic seems a bit odd.

10

Hence my confusion. One person making a dash is one thing, but large groups don’t generally.