Today, I am going to give you some advice you probably didn’t expect to find on this blog.
Here goes: In North America, if you want to get away with killing someone run over that person with a car, truck, bus or other motorized vehicle.For one thing, dead victims can’t tell their side of the story. So, even with the worst lawyer (or no lawyer), the most egregiously aggressive or careless driver can make him or her self seem blameless.
For another, North America has had a “car culture” for a century. Roads and intersections are therefore built or re-configured to convey motorized traffic as quickly and efficiently as possible. Such a mentality among planners has inculcated a few generations of Americans with the not heir physical fitness—is somehow a second-class citizen, at best.
Such attitudes, combined with anger at whatever or whomever or with any other mental disturbance, often lead drivers to believe they have the right to run down cyclists. Such an attitude, I think, nearly turned Sacramento cycling advocate Sherry Martinez into such a victim.
“I have four broken ribs, a fractured clavicle, a partial collapsed lung from a collision “I can’t remember,” she said from her hospital bed. Fortunately for her, there are people who remember it: members of the small group of cyclists with whom she was riding, as well as other witnesses.
Their testimony, and witnesses’ photos, confirmed the charge against 30-year-old Caleb Taubman: He deliberately drove his pickup truck at Martinez.
In other words, he’s been charged with assault with a deadly weapon. Members of Sacramento’s cycling community have engaged in a letter-writing campaign urging the district attorney to prosecute Taubman to the fullest extent of the law.
Taubman has been released and awaits his first court date. Whenever it is, he is on a more certain timeline than that of Sherry Martinez She has no exact date when she!l be well enough to discharged from the hospital. And I imagine that when she’s released, she’ll still have a long road to recovery ahead of her.
At least Caleb Taubman won’t get away with murder—we hope.
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