North Carolina parents arrested for letting their kid walk to the store. On his way home, he was killed by an SUV. The parents were charged with manslaughter.
(The driver faced no charges.)
🙄
The 76 year old driving an S.U.V. faced no charges.
This is America. This is not Trump's America, this is America.
Americans, when Trump is dead or when the civil war ends or how ever you get rid of his orange ass, this is America that needs fixing.
Let's play the colors game.
What color is the child? You guessed correctly!!
What color is the DA? You guessed correctly!!
The same DA did not press felony charges for a man who left his gun out for two kids to play with, one of them ending up dead.
Been shown a lot lately because it's been relevant a lot lately.
Yeah this is some DA bullshit, nothing to do with the story.
Throw all the charges at people and get them to plead to a lesser crime they also didn’t do. If you can make headlines with it, why you’re in line to be a judge or governor or whatever your shriveled evil heart desires.
The father's black, the mother's white, the prosecutor is a Republican, and this is North Carolina. And this is The New York Times, so the parents' race isn't even mentioned. Wouldn't know it's a mixed marriage if the paper hadn't included a photo, but you can bet District Attorney Travis Page knows.
But they did show several photographs of the parents throughout the article.
And the article is written to highlight the ridiculousness of the charges and even highlights another situation where much more leniency was provided, showing a double standard.
I felt pretty strongly the subtext was screaming racism. That can be much more effective then focusing on it.
They would certainly get more people to read it and question the situation than starting out as "Racist DA uses his role to imprison parents, blaming them for gerting hit by SUV."
You and I both know, people would stop caring once they learned the races of the child and parents.
But that way, maybe more people read a bit further, and maybe, just fucking maybe, empathized a bit before using the excuse that empathy is toxic.
"Why don't kids ever play outside anymore?!"
Headlines:
going outside for fresh air also hasn't been a thing in a long time. I went to abandoned farmland in europe before and there were still butterflies and grasshoppers but you dont see that in north america any more, just powdered cancer blowing around the tarmac.
Yeah you definitely do see that in North America. Just because you live in the middle of urban sprawl and suburb hell doesn't mean everyone does.
Can we stop glamorizing Europe? For fuck sake Frankfurt Germany looks like Detriot's heroin addict cousin and there's villages that look like Gary Indiana threw up in a liter box.
Only 5% of the land in America is developed according to a 2015 Bloomburg report. That leaves a lot of space for grasshoppers. By comparison, 80% of European land is developed. Fortunately a lot of that is farm and pastures or else they would be in trouble. We do have a lot of ugly cities though.
This is patently false.
jesus christ. what kind of of dystopian times are we living in? I'm only in my 40s and this would never have happened when I was growing up. in fact the opposite was more the norm. kids being monitored 24/7 was just not a thing like it is now.
how could such a dramatic change happen so quickly? and why?
Because your (our) generation has some horrifying groupthink going on. We invented the helicopter parent, even if we personally think it’s stupid.
Gotta get 'em used to the police state young.
The main change that comes to mind is that cars are designed to be less safe for pedestrians. SUVs have some of the worst frontal visibility of any vehicle, ranking below tanks. There are also more of those varities of vehicle on the road than before. In addition, those vehicle weight classes make these accidents more lethal. Whenever commercials advertise a car as being "The safest pickup of the year", that is ranking safety for its occupants, not the people outside it.
That said, I'm inclined to believe there are more reasons than just that - but with crime rates falling and street fatalities going down, it's hard to pin one thing.
We are also taught to be more fearful through media and our politicians, because scared people are more than willing to give up all kinds of rights. In spite of violent crime and car deaths going down, people are more worried about those things than before. The same holds true for child abductions. The rate of stranger abductions has gone down, but the fear of it happening has gone up.
I'm not saying these things aren't problems or shouldn't be addressed, but they are still less of a risk than previously.
Its amazing how absolutely adamant America is to refuse to hold parents accountable for all shit they are actually responsible for with their children, but are willing to throw the book at the parents if the kid goes outside and anything happens to them as a victim.
Prevents parents from letting their children taste freedom.
Where I used to live, parents were charged with child neglect after rats came out of the walls during the night and killed their baby.
What grand jury permitted these charges? This is insane. The driver should be arrested not the parents.
If it goes to trial. The prosecutor will threaten to stack an enormous number of charges unless they agreed to to a plea bargain.
Ah I didn’t know the second part. I knew Texas had them but didn’t know depends on the state. Well hopefully the judge throws it out or it goes to trial or something.
"Gaston County’s district attorney, Travis Page, has not explained why he brought such high charges"
North Carolina? I suspect we all know the answer to that one...
Fuck anyone (and there's a lot of them) who think kids shouldn't be allowed to walk and ride bikes or scooters or play outside. That the parents should get anything but condolences from this is absurd.
The high bail seems particularly cruel in this case. The purpose of bail is to ensure the defendant comes to court to answer for the charge, which these parents seemed inclined to do given they want to regain custody of their other children.
Wow. I was still in kindergarden when my mom sent me to the shop to get some milk and stuff. And nobody considered this evil or criminal. Are American kids that unindependent?
The primary issue isn't that American children are less capable but that American neighborhoods are unsafe. In many suburban developments in the United States it isn't safe to walk to anywhere of interest (excepting the neighboring houses). Residential areas are often separated from commercial and recreational areas by high speed automobile traffic lanes with little-to-no pedestrian infrastructure.
They are so much less capable tho.
This simply isn't true. Crime rates have fallen significantly, including violent crime. In addition, car accidents and pedestrian deaths have also decreased significantly per capita compared to 30+ years ago, though has been on the rise in the last decade or two depending on the study.
This is entirely being driven by changing perceptions in America due to the 24h news cycle and sensationalized national news.
Arrested!
How lovely to deal with your kid being run over and then get charged with a crime. There's no guarantee it would have not happened if they were there, too. Would the driver be at fault then?
"While they sat in jail, furloughed by a judge only to attend their boy’s funeral, social services workers placed the five younger siblings with Mr. Jenkins’s parents and Brandon with a relative of Mrs. Jenkins."
Why? They didn't do it on purpose, and it will never happen again. They just lost their kid. They're going to be miserable for life, without the sentence. What point does the punishment serve?
They are being punished for being poor. The driver is rich and someone has to pay for the death of a child and they aren't going to put a 76 year old rich white woman in jail.
"North Carolina is about average for national pedestrian deaths. But in the United States, that average is bleak, three times that of the rest of the developed world. The death toll of Americans on foot rose by 58 percent in the decade leading up to 2022..."
"A common response to the death of a jaywalker — whether an adult or a child — is to blame the victim: Why didn’t the boys cross at a traffic light, less than five minutes away?"
23 months ago a unhoused pedestrian was killed in hit-and-run just around the corner from me in a place I walk for exercise multiple times a week. It blew my mind when I fully considered how few people (especially officials) care when a pedestrian is killed. Sure enough when talking about it with family one of the first things I heard was "What was she even doing near the road" I mentioned the bus stop was only a couple yards away.
I was hit at a crosswalk a year before that by a lady pulling out from stop sign in traffic but at least she was coming from a dead-stop. I watched another guy one or two years ago roll off of some college kids hood because he was crossing at a crosswalk and the kid just made a left turn directly into him... -I'm beginning to think pedestrians need better protections from careless drivers, and I reside in what's supposed to be a more pedestrian friendly town already.
So if I walked home but on my way got hit and killed by a car, I would've committed suicide?
Yep, straight to jail.
Community rhetoric aside for a moment, I cannot imagine hearing one of your children tell you over the phone their sibling was struck down in front of them. How traumatizing for them all.
Crazy how they don't even name the driver, like actually crazy and intolerable. I'm very curious just who the 76 year old is, and if that played a role in how charges fell at whose feet.
I really miss when the phrase, "Look both ways before you cross the street," was drilled in every kid's head. Now, I just see so many people (especially teenagers with living next to a high school) completely ignoring where they are walking, ignoring the signs/signals, with all their attention on their phone.
Then we have the new law (at least in California) that says pedestrians don't have to use a crosswalk if they think it's safe to cross. 9 times out of 10, they don't bother looking until maybe thay are halfway across.
Are y'all not telling your kids to look both ways? It's still very much a thing where I live. Maybe people don't cross roads with their kids in more rural areas so they are missing that experience?
I'm pretty sure they covered it in my kids elementary schools too. They have a walk to school day each year and empathize safety.
I was on a walk with my kids and it had them stop so that this lady who was walking could go by. The lady who was walking was completely oblivious and nose deep in her phone. Was walking at a snail's pace. I almost told the kids never mind just go ahead.
That's awfull,
I am not from America, am from UK.
Currently reeling from the ill-advised amendment to the Online Safety Act.
I could see situations where the "security" theatre of ID based age verification could cause parents to let their guard down too low and get in legal trouble for negligence.
I happen to be a software engineer by trade, i feel no software can protect people from bad decisions they want to make willfully. (Without a strict régime of oppression/surveillance enforced)
You can mitigate accidental exposure with local filters though. (But those are readily available on many routers, even at the technical level(that you don't nessesarily see) its just a list of domain names to block/allow).
The question I always ask people when they have greviences about a political problem is: "What are you going to do about it? 🤔"
There is probably some advocacy group this political issue cited.
Any Americans or others here who care about this a lot, should reach out to them and/or contact their representative directly.
I am sure many people know this, I was busy focusing on recovering from the lockdown's and serious health issues when all this amendment was mentioned in Parliament. (Not that this is an excuse for not utilising my expertize till this when its bit late)
Where I live its pretty quiet when politicians say its to "protects the children" with no reasoning how it does so and amendment involves information technology, which many people understandably find difficult to navigate.
Many of my family still upload their passport or driving licence now despite what I warned.
Guess I just have to keep quiet to them about it unless something bad happens like identity theft or worse. (Then I help if they ask, but it just sucks).
Am glad that our votes in UK are least are paper only votes. (I don't think our democracy could withstand long-term large-scale computerized voting)
Just some food for thought. Goodday, from across the pond to my American folks hot on this story, and to everyone else. 🙂
Our electronic voting still create paper ballots.
Anything but make the cars smaller
Sheesh when I was 10 me and my little sister would sometimes miss a bus and walk home from school in ft worth from riverside to bluff street by ourselves across three lane highways and bridges
Fuck cars and car culture. Roads are for the people.
No arrest for the city planners who knowingly ignored accounting for pedestrians. Hm, shocked.
way people drive here in the tar states it is criminal to let your kids walk by themselves a certain distance
even a high turnover with the crossing guards here because of the unenforced driving violations
How old was the child? Are you fuckers going to make me read the article?
Kid was 7 walking with his 10 year old brother and being guided on the phone by a parent on a ten minute walk.
7 years old. It's in the first paragraph.
10 year old and 7 year old asked if they could walk to the store.