I honestly do not think we have near enough information to be passing judgment on the lady. Or on the biker. The article contained absolutely no details… except that she was stopped for ducks.
I think there’s a big difference between a boulder falling into the road, stopping your car in a lane because of mechanical failure, stopping for a school bus with flashing lights, and stopping for a duck.
A boulder is a so-called “act of God” and can’t be helped.
Mechanical failure is also probably out of the driver’s control, though I would hope that the driver would have coasted to the shoulder if at all possible.
Stopping for a school bus is not only completely legal but required by law. Driver carries no blame.
Stopping in a lane and exiting your vehicle is probably illegal, definitely negligent, and regardless of the speed or control of the motorcycle created a hazardous situation whether others were acting legally or not. This woman either consciously and willfully created a dangerous situation that resulted in loss of life or lacked the common sense to know that she was doing so. For a freakin’ duck. How stupid.
The motorcyclist may have been in the wrong as well. I suppose that’s for the investigators and courts to determine. Seems he’s already paid the price though.
What crime she’ll be charged with will be up to the courts and lawyers I suppose. But in the “what’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong” department this woman definitely did something…I can’t seem to find another word besides stupid. I know there’s a nicer way to say it but it just escapes me at the moment.
I agree; except that on a restricted access highway, the rules governing driving are different. You should not expect to see stopped busses but by the same token, you should not be following in a vehicle (motor cycle) so closely that you can’t stop. That the women had time enough to get out of her car, meant someone was not paying attention. All stopping on a highway should be accompanied by a look in the rear view mirror. If a child were running across the road, there would be lot’s of support for this driver. She put the value of wildlife, which we routinely kill for food anyway, greater then the potential to harm another individual, then her judgement might seriously be questioned. Since she is being brought to trial, that is definitely an indicator there was enough evidence of some wrong doing.
We have no information that it was a restricted access highway. And that’s my problem… the newspaper article was almost totally devoid of any information.
Based on only the information in the newspaper article, it would appear that she did something really dumb and it cost a life. But in reality we have no idea what really happened. I’m reluctant to pass judgment on either the lady or the motorcyclist without a lot more information. That newspaper article was pathetically weak reporting.
I’m inclined to agree, however, that charges having been filed suggests at least some negligence on the woman’s part, but I’d still like a lot more information before personally judging her. She would not be the first person to be indicted by a DA seeking reelection that was ultimately acquitted when the facts came out. We just don’t know.
Riding a motorcycle on a freeway is outrageously dangerous. Maybe even negligent. Our automobiles are becoming cocoons mandated by various safety committees while motorcycles have been allowed to evolve into crotch rockets to launch riders into oblivion. Merely riding a motorcycle in freeway traffic makes one largely responsible for personal injury regardless who initiates a collision.
“She would not be the first person to be indicted by a DA seeking reelection that was ultimately acquitted when the facts came out.”
Very true, and–in fact–the former chief justice of NY state (Sol Wachtler) was quoted years ago as saying, District Attorneys now have so much influence on grand juries that “by and large they could get them to indict a ham sandwich.”
It should be noted that Justice Wachtler himself later went to federal prison…
:-))
In an entirely different Vehicular Homicide case in my state, I am gratified to see that justice did prevail:
I am 100% with you on this one. I have absolutely zero sympathy for drunk drivers, and believe she got off very light as it is. IMHO someone who kills another while driving drunk is a murderer, plain and simple.
“We have no information that it was a restricted access highway”
The article said: "heading west on Highway 30, a four-lane thoroughfare separated by a median."
so it looked to me like it was freeway but maybe not restricted access. At any rate they have a statute about unnecessarily stopping in a lane, so I guess a death created from an illegal action would warrant some penalty. Whether wildlife crossing would constitute “unnecessary” I guess would be up to the jury to decide. I myself sustained $700 damage from a dang raccoon so I guess she could have been worried about damage to the car, although I doubt it. Then mitigated by the length of time the cycle must have had, and then damaged further by getting out of the car. Why would anyone do that unless she was trying to clear the road of the hazard?
I dunno, I guess if I were the lawyer, I’d be talking preventing damage to her car and clearing the road of a hazard for others. What if the cycle would have hit the ducks? Just sayin’, then we would be reading about two killed from the cycle loosing control from hitting a group of ducks. I’m a hunter so I have no sympathy for ducks or deer or raccoons.
Circumstances have everything to do with her guilt or innocence. We can all come up with scenarios where she would not have been at fault. But she stopped in a traffic lane with a speed limit high enough that serious injury and even death were likely outcomes.
Bing, I stand corrected. And that fact changes my opinion. The lady was at fault.
I would imagine the duck wreck happening this way ;
The cycle was probably following another vehicle that was large enough to block their forward vision. Possibly that vehicle slowed ( due to duck lady ) , or not.
The cycle then moved to the left lane to go around…just at the wrong point in the roadway !
Could’ve happened in that manner to a car following a truck too.
As a trained commercial truck driver, I believe the lady should have run over the ducks. Even if you ignore the cost of lost lives, compare the monetary cost of damage to the vehicles. That amount of money is far more than the lives of those ducks were worth.
At truck driving school it was explained like this: If a large dog or a deer runs out in front of your truck, you have two choices. (1) you can hit the animal and end up with a few thousand dollars worth of damage, or (2) you can swerve to miss the animal, likely totaling your $100,000 truck, along with the $30,000 worth of cargo and whatever other damage you do, which might include other vehicles and possibly human lives. However, if you hit the animal, you better pick it up and strap it to your catwalk, because nobody is going to believe you when you tell them you hit an animal.
I apply the same judgment to driving a car and animals the size of dogs, cats, squirrels, and ducks. I can hit the animal and do light damage to my car, or I can swerve and likely cause more damage than I otherwise would have. However, there may be value to swerving to miss a deer or moose in something the size of my Civic.
So as much as I love cute furry little animals, the ducks should have died.
Having said that, it sounds like the motorcyclist was out-riding his field of vision. There a concept the Motorcycle Safety Foundation calls “out-riding your headlight.” It’s when you’re going too fast to react to the things that you can see. A motorcyclist should travel at a speed at which he can either stop or swerve around an obstacle within his field of vision. If something like a stopped car sneaks up on you, you were riding too fast.
As far as a prison sentence goes, I’d have to know if there is a minimum speed limit on this particular highway. If there is, the car driver was certainly partially responsible, but both parties share some blame, because if just one of them had been doing what they should have been doing, the collision could have been prevented.
Neither of the parties is without blame.
Why do you need lawyers? Mostly to protect you from other lawyers.
I can only say how I drive. When I drive, I assume I must have my car under control at all times. A rock falls down the hill, maybe that is impossible to protect, but I have to try.
Someone stops with no valid reason, I had better be ready to stop within the clear distance. Of course,that was the law when I learned to drive back around 1960 in my state. If I am going around a sharp corner or over a hill, maybe I had better slow down a bit.
By the way, this issue interlinks with the topic of many here who think people who drive the posted limit are trouble makers. Properly posted speed limits allow some margin for unexpected issues.
Not knowing the conditions behind her car, hill sharp corner, I cannot easily say she was responsible for their deaths. If there was limited vision and she reasonably should have known it, that changes liability to a degree. Maybe 50% liability?
I had a minor crunch a few weeks ago. We were coming home from the market. I was driving within the speed limit on the outskirts of my village. Ahead of us was a passenger van, and a man without warning fell out of it, so the van stopped very fast. I made a fairly normal stop. The pickup behind me also did, and the taxi behind him also.
An excon murderer behind the cab in a small pickup came flying up and crunched us all. As soon as we all got stopped the man who caused it came running up and very aggressively accused me of having caused the wreck. My wife was furious. The transito agreed with us. I was the only person not ordered to pay anyone a cent. He said right out it was not my fault. The good news was a government official came running out and talked to the transito to tell what happened. Note the van driver was also not charged.
That excon had no license. Oh, he said it was at home, but that made no sense. He simply didn’t have one. He did become more pleasant when he found out who I was. I had arranged a computer transfer of photos for his mom with a daughter in California.
I think he really believed as some here do that you are required to leave a clear path for those behind you. Whatever the law says applies in that state or province, but I sure don’t agree. You are responsible for your own car at all times.
I don’t disagree except for the lawyer part. You need lawyers to protect yourself from local prosecutors. The prosecuting attorneys determine what the charges will be. If they choose to prosecute for murder instead of involuntary manslater, you will need a good lawyer and the money to pay for it.
We have a local case where a lady was walking in the road. A guy with the sun in his eyes hit and killed her. The prosecutor is like pit bull looking for long prison time when it was an accident. Thrown out by one judge and even the Supreme Court, but now the prosecutor has changed the charges and is at him again. Just the defense alone is over $20K minimum and it’ll hit 50K before its all done. All because the prosecutor needs to make a name for himself.
Round here if you rearend someone,its your fault(doesnt matter if the perp stopped on a crowded interstate in the hammer lane ,in the case I’m thinking about a woman stopped in the left lane on afton mtn,because a truck cut her off’she said"(dont know why she didnt go on,when the truck cleared.anyway she got the rust knocked off her hitch and the middle lady got her little "Accent totaled and the poor sap driving behind this mess got the ticket(BTW did anyone see the FACEBOOK video,were the vigilante hero in the diesel dodge pickup took it on himself to stop a runaway Hyndai Veloster driven by a 14 yr old near a playground(the guy rammed the kid on the street,totaled the little car,hardly hurt the truck(good thing he didnt kill the brat)-Kevin
“Round here if you rearend someone,its your fault”
Several years ago, the lady stopped in front of me decided to back up
I honked my horn, but she still damaged my front bumper
I was actually worried she might claim that it was the other way around and I rearended her. But that didn’t happen
She had good insurance, and everything was settled and my car was repaired
I was not found to be at fault
The only problem is the body shop did a lousy job fixing my bumper. They did a decent job painting it, but it was misaligned. Not only that, but they forgot to reconnect my headlamp harness. A few days later, driving at night, I had a hard time seeing . . .
"Round here if you rearend someone, its your fault"
That is the norm, but my family's own experiences show that there are exceptions to that rule:
It was during the summer of 1959, and we were on our way from NJ to Cape Cod for a long-delayed family vacation. We were on the CT Turnpike (pre-I-95 days) in the vicinity of the town of Norwich. At one point, we passed a car fire on the shoulder, with the car fully involved–but with no people visible. Very scary!
Shortly after passing that car fire, we were on a slight downgrade, with a long curve. At the bottom of hill was a culvert/bridge, and a car was stopped on that culvert/bridge, partially in the left lane, partially in the right lane. There was no shoulder on this culvert/bridge.
Why was the car stopped, blocking two travel lanes on the CT Turnpike?
Because he spotted a CT state police cruiser parked on the median of the culvert, and he wanted to report the car fire about 2 miles back!
My father–who was a very careful, cautious driver who did not speed–locked-up the brakes, but the brakes and tires on '55 Plymouths were…not up to modern standards…and we wound up hitting the back of the stopped car. The look on the faces of the two state troopers was as if they had seen a ghost, and apparently they knew that they were at least partially to blame for not getting that moron out of his stopped position right away, before he caused an accident.
Needless to say, our vacation ended before it began, the car was wrecked, and we were all taken to the hospital. My brother spent a couple of days in the hospital for evaluation of a possible concussion when he hit the dashboard–where he left a portion of his scalp.
My father was not a litigious person, and he decided that he would just let his insurance company take care of things, but his employer urged him to speak with an attorney. The bottom line is that we did file a personal injury suit against this moron (who was the Fire Chief of nearby Jewett City, CT), and we collected–I think–something on the order of $3,000. for the diminished value of our car, and for pain & suffering.
So, just as there was no apparent good reason for somebody to stop her car on that divided highway in Canada, there was no good reason for somebody to stop his car in a travel lane in CT, circa 1959. I have no idea whether that Fire Chief was ticketed, but I suspect that he wasn’t because he was a local…somebody…and because nobody died as a result of his bone-headed actions.
“Round here if you rearend someone, its your fault”
Yes…that’s generally the rule but there are exceptions. A friend of mine borrowed my Simca (a French vehicle) years ago in order to go see his girlfriend who lived about 100 miles away. He had trouble with reverse so I made him practice until he could properly shift. I might explain that the Simca had a “3 on the tree” shifter but the reverse gear is where 3rd gear in an American car would be. The 3rd gear was where reverse would normally be. 1st and second gear were the same as our domestic cars.
He reported back with the Simca and said he had a minor collision in “the big city” and he wanted me to look at the rear bumper. All was OK and then he handed me $50. I asked him why he was paying me since there was no damage and he said the man in the car behind gave it to him. He explained that he was fiddling with the shifter and accidently backed up at a red light. He thought he was in 1st gear but he was actually in reverse. When the cars collided…the man just jumped out and put the money in his hand and drove on without explanation. I divided the money with him since there was no way to find out who the guy was.
@MM,sweet,been a long time since I heard Simca, actually methinks they were pretty fair autos.
a person must concede there are always exceptions to the rule,to believe otherwise is absolutely specious thinking,sometimes ,the stars indeed ,lineup-Kevin