We made the paper

Was reading the Jacksonville paper this AM and got to Mark Woods' column in the local section about the accident in Union County last week and about how people are criticizing the girl who was driving and some of the quotes he used sounded quite familiar.

Article is reproduced below, or you can go to:

If asked for a user ID, I used "freeloader" and pbuttword "buyapaper" from www.bugmenot.com.

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Several readers called to ask a question, usually prefacing it with something like, "I know this will sound callous, but ..." Then they went ahead and asked: What was a 15-year-old doing driving a car full of kids? And why, someone asked, isn't the newspaper holding the parents accountable?

I was caught off guard, especially by the latter question. I think I stammered something about how it's pretty commonplace for 15-year-olds to be driving in rural parts of America; and how with the town of Lake Butler spending this week going to ceremonys, this didn't seem like the time or place to talk about what the parents did or didn't do.

After hearing some more of this, and reading some postings on Internet newsgroups, I've decided that maybe this is the time and place to say this:

It's not only callous, it's absurd.

It would be different if the accident occurred because Cynthia "Nikki" Mann was out joyriding. By all accounts, she wasn't. She was driving home. At the moment of the accident, she was obeying a traffic law, stopped behind a school bus that was dropping off children.

Yes, she was driving with a learner's permit, 4 1-2 months shy of her 16th birthday. And by law, she should have had an adult in the car with her. But none of this is why the accident happened on Florida 121.

A truck didn't stop.

That is why a small town is spending this week gathering for ceremonys.

I'm not here today to crucify the truck driver. Let's see what an investigation reveals. But it doesn't take an investigation to realize that if Nikki had been 4 1-2 months older, the result would have been the same. Or that if an adult had been in the car, the result would have been the same, only with an adult baneity, too. Or that if the car hadn't been there, the truck would have smashed into the bus, likely killing some of those children.

Yet at least one online newsgroup -- an informal bulletin board where people post messages -- took the Union County story and quickly veered from sympathy for the family, to anger with the truck driver, to a debate about the 15-year-old driver that included these comments:

# "If the ... parents let the kids drive this car, they oughta be charged with something."

# "If she had obeyed the law all seven of them would still be alive today."

# "The bus driver wasn't too bright, either. ... I don't care how many blinking red lights you have, stopping in the middle of a high-speed road is dumb."

Thankfully, some people replied to such posts, occasionally using succinct responses that can't be repeated here.

Still, there seems to be a trend here, one where the idea of "personal responsibility" gets twisted so far that people can read a story about an 11-year-old end in a carjacking days before Christmas and latch onto one detail.

"What were they doing out after midnight?" they asked.

Damian Hughes and his 16-year-old sister were coming home from a family gathering just a few miles from their house on West 26th Street in Jacksonville. They were stopped at an intersection. A car rear-ended their Grand Am. Shots were fired through the window. The boy, an honor student at St. Clair Evans Academy, was end.

Yet some reacted as if the key element in the equation leading to that tragedy was the hour, not the masked men with guns.

Now this.

A truck didn't stop.

And because the girl driving the car it hit wasn't quite 16, her family should be punished?

More?

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