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:
http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/020106/woo_20970117.shtml

If asked for a user ID, I used "freeloader" and password "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 funerals, 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 funerals.

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 fatality, 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."

<<< IIRC, this was from our Busted Urinal Award candidate, judy >>>

# "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 killed 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 killed.

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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