Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/11/01/a-toddler-is-run-over-by-an-su.html
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Ugh - hold your little one’s hands in parking lots, please. They don’t understand the dangers, prone to bursts of movement, and often too short to see.
Also be careful around your own drive way, as many kids are injured/killed per year in the US backing over a child.
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The death of Tutu, as the girl was identified in Chinese news reports, is just the latest example of how “distracted walking” can threaten public safety.
What is “VICTIM-BLAMING”? I’ll take “common decency” for $800, Alex.
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Aren’t they blaming the parent?
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The SUV driver clearly floored it with pedestrians around, so they’re at least as much at fault as the mom.
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Well those kids should probably use a bigger vehicle to keep from being injured.
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Kid’s walking straight ahead, and all of a sudden makes a 90º turn in front of a car that took off so fast they couldn’t stop quickly enough to ‘merely’ injure the child.
Anyone else ever had a child by the hand and all of a sudden they take off for no apparent reason?
That’s why you’re supposed to go slow and check a lot when driving around pedestrians, especially children. It’s not about who’s right, but who’s left.
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“Distracted Walking” as a “thing” is part of a larger overall strategy of blaming people for being killed by the operators of motor vehicles who can’t be bothered to pay attention to where they’re driving.
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I will never forget the day my toddler bolted out the supermarket door while I was first in line. I was absolutely sure he was doomed.
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She is looking at her smartphone without holding onto the kid while walking around traffic, so it’s less than due care, but kids can be really unpredictable. I don’t really blame the driver though – it looks like he gets in the car while the woman and child come out from behind the other parked cars and go past the back, checks the rear view mirror while the kid is on the side, then checks the side mirror before facing forward and moving off. The SUV is too high and the kid is too close and in exactly the wrong place, and the mother doesn’t show any indication that she has a child with her. He takes six seconds to drive off, which is fast but not ridiculous (especially for China). The fatality rate per 100,000 cars in China was 104.5, while it’s “only” 12.9 in the US. I’m pretty sure it would be much higher if it weren’t for the economic boom and the fact that many cars are relatively new, but hopefully it will get better as collision detection systems improve. At least it isn’t Guinea, which has a rate of almost one fatality per 10 cars.
On the day of our son’s adoption, we went shopping in a supermarket that had cash desks on the second floor, then an escalator like this back down to ground level:
(The wheels have a groove so the trolley doesn’t move without difficulty while you’re on the escalator). I was holding the trolley full of shopping and looking ahead, and my wife was just behind me with our son. Suddenly he squeezed past me, ran in front of the trolley and fell down. I had both hands on the trolley and my wife couldn’t get past, and we were getting close enough to the end that there was no way that I could squeeze past and pick him up in time. All I could do was pull the trolley back and shout at him to get up, and everyone else to help him. That wouldn’t last long though, because there were people right behind me. He got up just in time and someone took him out of the way, but my life flashed before my eyes. Sometimes kids blindside you with the most monumental stupidity that you just weren’t expecting it. I still don’t know what caught his attention, and he wasn’t normally that impulsive.
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My niece bolted through the checkpoint in Dulles as a toddler. The TSA took down her father and drew multiple firearms on my sister, causing her to curse them loudly in multiple languages, mostly French.
They basically let her disappear into the crowd. It was at least five minutes (and to my family, felt like five hours) before anyone was allowed through to go find her.
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So glad they are keeping us safe from… rogue parents. And their diaper bags.
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Are you serious? At first I thought you were joking, but you aren’t are you?
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Nope, that’s a 100% real incident.
It happened only a couple years after 9-11, so the TSA were even more of a Keystone Kops parody than they are now. Today, I think they’d tackle the toddler as well as her father, and that would be slightly more sane.
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No Bang-Bang? That’s kind of lazy.
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