When stupid people happen.


While I’ve been recuperating with my own personal encounter with the road, the big news around here (here being the local area) has been a really horrid accident which happened not too far from where I live. Literally about five minutes away (driving) and a place I pass most anytime I trek down into the city, the accident in question killed 8 people and injured more.

I heard about it (really there has been no way to escape the coverage) and was dumbfounded by the event. Knowing the local roads as well as I do, I was hard-pressed to imagine how someone could err as badly as the woman who caused the accident erred.

Driving against traffic for some distance on a busy three lane highway is no small feat. Aside from the fact that exits are clearly posted, there even is a ‘turnaround’ (a crossover between the north and southbound lanes) midway along the woman’s trail of destruction. It was an avenue of escape for someone who might have made such an error.

Throughout all the coverage, one thought was nagging in the bag of my mind and that was the woman had been trying to commit suicide somehow. She had several small children in the car, two of her own and three nieces. She had spent the weekend on a camping trip with the husband and it was reported he was venturing off on a fishing trip leaving his wife to return back to their home in Long Island (with the children) without him. It has since been reported he was returning home as well but that doesn’t make much sense seeing as even if they had been in two cars why they wouldn’t make the trip down ‘together.’

The story has those telltale gaps making you think the math doesn’t add up.

Well, today the state police held a press conference in which they disclosed the information the woman had a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit (with 15 ounces of undigested hard liquor still in her stomach) and traces of THC in her system (indicating marijuana intoxication as well).

I have to believe the State Police were well aware of this information for several days now but held back as the children were buried. Of course the upshot has been that the woman up to this point has been painted as a tragic victim of circumstance in all of this who perhaps was suffering from some unknown physical affliction. Since she was driving children in her car, the focus has been almost entirely on her and the innocent passengers in her vehicle but, the thing is she killed THREE OTHER PEOPLE who she hit head-on!

She also managed to injure a few other people too!

The media though finds a better story in depicting some poor women, sick trying to make her way home after a family trip who falls nobly while trying to get her family home.

I’m sorry for the kids but, I also don}t for a minute believe no one in the woman’s family was unaware of her proclivity to indulge in alcohol or pot. Specifically, I can’t imagine her husband didn’t know she was a drinker (or that she was drinking) or that she was a pot-smoker. This seems more than slightly disingenuous. Also, the woman called family on the trip home! Drunk and high, are we to believe the people in her own family couldn’t tell the difference during that phone call?

Maybe this comes across as heartless but, THIS PERSON HAD A RESPONSIBLITY AND F**KED UP! It would be bad enough if she just wrecked her car and she was the sole occupant. It would be even worse if it was a question of her killing members of her own family, BUT SHE KILLED A BUNCH OF OTHER PEOPLE TOO!

Now, the husband is a peace officer (I’m not quite sure if that’s a buzzword for police officer in the municipality where he serves) but do you think this guy should be keeping his job? His wife was smoking pot, HELLO!? What she was out scoring when he was busting other people for it?

I’ve got sympathy for the people she hit. I’ve even got sympathy for the kids who had the misfortune of having an idiot for a parent and an Aunt but for the adults in that family, sorry but I’m not giving you guys a pass on this one.