Yeah, that may have been a little bit over the line there. I’ll try harder next time.
I certainly don’t mean to disrespect Quad Bike Death Girl, who I personally consider to be one of the most influential metal groups of all time. I caught them in concert at the Metrodome back when they were opening for Styx, and they totally rocked.
Hey, don’t assume us country folks don’t agree with you about flogging the parents. There’s a state highway that runs right through town, and the speed limit goes down to 25 in front of the school. My wife spotted a little kid on one of those quads zipping around a corner coming off the highway, going well over the speed limit. A little investigation led her to discover that the kid driving it was four years old. Yeah. A 4-year-old driving a 350-pound vehicle capable of 40mph+ speeds on a freaking state highway.
She called in the Sheriff. The parents’ excuse? You’ll love this. “Well, we’re just not sure what to do. He knows where we keep the keys, so he just goes out for rides when he feels like it.”
The Sheriff told them they’d better find a place to lock up their damned keys or he’d confiscate the vehicle before the kid kills himself (and/or someone else). I don’t know whether they were fined.
I feel terrible about the poor “other driver.” I don’t know the circumstances, and she may have been partly at fault. But now she’s got to live her life with the knowledge and memory that she totalled a prepubescent child in her mind. That’s… awful.
Even though I’d imagine her life is now ruined, If she was DUI, her life is totally and utterly fucked, probably forever. DUI is an HUGE deal here - legal, moral and social. If she’s found guilty and gets away without a long jail sentence, she’ll probably lose her job and be ostracised by society - even if she’d have made the same mistake sober, and the parents seem to bear most of the responsibility.
My imagination is probably running away with me here, but I can’t help thinking that the DUI arrest might be a hasty reaction to the cries of the distraught parents - “that woman killed my baby! - she must be drunk or something!”
No, the whole thing is fucking stupid - giving a powerful vehicle to a seven year old and getting them to ride it for possibly the first time (it was a Christmas present, and this happened on Boxing Day), or at least with hardly any experience, on an unlit dangerous road at night, behind a car.
That you perhaps did something superficially similar as a child and are still here to talk about it does not render this any less mindbogglingly stupid an example of misadventure.
I think Santo Rugger is referring to one of these dirt bikes and not the BMX bicycle kind. They can be pretty powerful motorized devices and there is no uniform age restrictions on them (it varies from state to state), but it’s usually illegal to drive on a roadway unless you’re sixteen.
I think those are dangerous for kids, personally, but I have freinds who’ve been riding mini dirt bikes since they were six years old.
ETA: I think the parents were asshats for letting the kids follow them in the street BTW.
NO NO NO. No fucking NO. Obviously not. Yeah, it sucks to have your kid die, but it’s their god damn job to be an adult and TAKE CARE of the kid. They obviously didn’t care enough about it when it was alive to take care of it, why should their punishment be just to have a dead kid? What if they had just gotten tired of it and got it killed to get rid of it? </slight hyperbole, but I think my point stands>
Do you have children, Little Bird? Because your post contains the most fucked up use of the word “just” I have seen in a good long while.
Read it in its context - if the parent’s don’t care enough (as also stated), then it’s ‘just’ a death on the basis of their neglect.
I’m surprized to read that. When I was in England in the summer of 75 my English co-workers and local aquaintances got pissed a lot and didn’t think twice about driving. Hard not to at 19p a real pint of bitter, filled to the brim.
Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be the customary media-fueled blood-hunt in this case - maybe the involvement of the other driver has thrown them off the scent, or maybe the paedophile quotient of the story is just too low to be of interest.
Everything has changed since then, quite significantly.
Disclaimer: I am in no way trying to say that these parents are not responsible for what happened to this little girl. They absolutely WERE negligent. They are guilty in ways that SHOULD haunt them for the rest of their lives.
The other side of that coin, however, is that people are negligent. All the time. Every day. You forget to check the battery in your smoke alarm. You don’t check your tire pressure regularly. You decide to take care of that one little detail tomorrow, when you’re not so busy. No, none of these are equal to letting your very underage daughter drive a powerful machine on a dark and dangerous road. But negligence leads to negligence. You get away with being a little negligent here, so you let something else slide a little. And something else a little more. Then you think that there’s no way that something like that could happen on a road that you’ve driven god only knows how many times in the past and nothing like that’s ever happened before, so why would it now?
The ones we had when we were the girl’s age were smaller than that. I think they were YZ 50s or something like that, so they had 50cc engines, and small, fat tires. We used to call ourselves the Rice brothers, because we found a black and white picture of them in the Guinness Book, and their bikes looked just like ours. While sifting through the BBC, I found one article that said the girl’s four wheeler was 100cc. While that was probably too big for the girl, it was probably just right for the older, heavier child. When buying siblings gifts, and buying them the same thing, parents and grandparents tend to get them the same size, to avoid the inevitable, “Why is his better?” If it was a bit to big for her, the parents probably thought she’d “grow into it”.
My little brother’s best friend in elementary school died on his dirt bike when he was 11, less than a quarter mile from my house. He was riding on the back of his bike, while a girl was driving. As they were getting ready to go down and up a dry watering hole to “get some air”, that I had to have taken at least, literally, a thousand times, he thought they weren’t going fast enough. He reached up and feathered the throttle. She wasn’t expecting it and leaned back, causing the bike to wheelie and knocking both of them off. She had his helmet on, but broke her hip. He didn’t make it.
Nobody in the community blamed the parents, or said they were negligent. It was his bike, and they didn’t even use keys. If we wanted to ride our bikes, we’d hop on. We didn’t need to ask permission. The roads between our houses weren’t “urban” in any way. Heck, I lived on a gravel road, and we were the only house on our side of the street. We would ride our bikes all over the place, well before we were 13 (the age you can get a motorcycle license in NM), even to town to get gas in them (although usually our dads filled up our portable tanks when they got gas in their trucks).
If this had been in my neighborhood, even today, the only retrospective error in judgment would have been that it happened at night. While the point that it was a brand new machine for this girl is a good one, I doubt it was her first time operating one. My buddy’s parents owned less than 10 acres, and a four wheeler with a utility trailer on the back was the main form of transportation for feeding, hauling manure, and just general getting around. I would assume that since the family had 50 acres with horses, that they used them to get around on, too.
I can imagine the excitement on Boxing Day of wanting to get out and ride. I don’t think riding at night, in the dark, was the greatest idea ever. But I rode behind cars in the daytime all the time when I was seven or eight, and nobody thought anything of it. Shit happens, and accidents suck. I’m not trying to high five the parents or anything like that, but I am saying that events similar to this happen all over the place, every single day, without any accidents. They were negligent, sure, but I really don’t find this pitworthy.
I completely agree - people (including me) are negligent frequently in many ways. What sets this apart is solely the magnitude and obvious stupidity of the negligence. Loud alarm bells should have rung somewhere - that they didn’t, or that they were ignored, is what makes the parents stupid fuckwits.
None of this seems particularly relevant. This isn’t a case where the parents allowed the kids to go off and do reckless things unsupervised. This is a case where the parents supervised their children right into a stupidly dangerous situation.
It’s not endangerment through neglect, it’s endangerment through explicit and idiotic exposure to significant risk.
Dad recounts the same, driving pissed, not being quite sure what route he took home :rolleyes: He and Mum got some sense when I was due to be born and gave up DUI, smoking etc.
But back to the OP, holy fucking what? :dubious: You have to wonder about shits like that, they obviously feel this accident was a one in a googolplex event that could not have been influenced in any way by their choice of present, pathetic.
:eek: 100cc for a kid how old? Jeebus.
The case in the OP is probably about more than just negligence. In the British legal systems it could well be recklessness, which makes it a lot worse, and can make it a criminal act.
