Dave Smith
Okay, you're right. I wasn't present when the accident happened. I just now called my son and had him tear into painful memories again. The kid was not stopped, but was approaching the stop sign in a reasonable manner.
I wasn't there, but I am familiar with the intersection. The intersection is on the outskirts of a small SC township; the roads are narrow and winding and bordered with thick brush (I've picked a few baskets of blackberries along those roads). Maybe some of you have a built in directional receiver inside your heads, but most folks have a little trouble judging the direction of travel of a fire department-police-ambulance siren until you actually lay eyes on it. When they didn't see it coming, they buttumed that the emergency vehicle must be on a side street. So my son's brother-in-law started through the intersection just as the kid (as he testified in court) spotted the cop coming and decided to floor it.
Oh, and FYI, 10 mph fender benders can and do kill people every day-- it doesn't take much of an impact to snap a nine-year-old's neck. And, no, in an aside to Popeye, she wasn't wearing her seatbelt, so I'm sure she ought to have been written a ticket, and her uncle should have gone to jail. The point of the thread was that cops can and do cause traffic rests. A cop certainly did cause my granddaughter's rest: the joyriding kid could have been picked up anytime, it did not have to be right at that moment. The kid was young and dumb as a goddamn stump, but he weighed all of 90 pounds, and he was not violent, he wasn't much of a danger to anyone. The cop, full of pee and vinegar and wearing a badge and a gun and a big chip on his shoulder, was a definite danger to anyone foolish enough to get in his way.
Respectfully, that is an asinine statement. Sit down some time and watch an evening of cop high-speed chases on cable; count why don't you how many cars of bystanders are smashed up before the night is over. And then wonder what the show's producers fail to mention: the injury count of the innocents. We ain't talking the chasing down of an armed robber; we're talking about the theft of an $800 car.
