Hi all,
True story! I was driving from my home in SC to Florida for a vacation with the family all in the vehicle. Driving on state rd 15 just coming in to Race Pond Ga. Probably about 2-3 in the morning. Everyone in the car sober and straight, although the kids were asleep. I was doing about 65-70 on a two lane rural road with probably 30' of grassy area between the road and the treeline. Just minding my own business when suddenly I see this bear coming straight on to the roadway and I didn't have time to do anything but swerve slightly. I wound up punching the bear in the nose and he turned tail and ran back into the woods. If the bear had made it another foot or two onto the roadway, I'd have probably had to get a hotel room for the night and rent a care to continue my journey the next day.
About 10 miles down the road we came to one of those big canopied gas stations and I pulled in to check out my car. As I'm checking it out an 18 wheel trucker pulls up along side and asks, "Was that a bear you hit back there?" I replied that it did appear to be and he said that he had seen it scamper off into the woods and that it didn't seem to be particularly injured. I told him that it looked like I just grazed his nose.
The point being that a 7yo girl, as far as understanding the dangers of a highway, wouldn't be a lot different than that bear. She may have not even understood that the lights she saw 300' down the road would be on her within 5 seconds and stepped out thinking the immediate area was safe. I can't imagine any responsible parent allowing their child to walk about on an interstate highway at anytime of day, but most certainly not in the dark. So, their is some negligence involved here, but it isn't the driver that struck the girl. They were likely driving reasonably responsibly and did immediately notify the highway patrol that there had been a possible accident. We don't even know that this girl didn't just run right out into the path of that vehicle thinking that it was just somebody that she could get to help. She may well have been standing in front of the wrecked vehicle and saw this car coming and thinking nothing of the physics of what it takes to stop a car, just ran on the roadway to get help for her father.
Now, something that no one has mentioned is where the father was in all of this. Was he injured to the point that he didn't know his little girl was getting out of the car? Or, was he so inebriated that it didn't register that his little girl was getting out of the car and the dangers that would open her up to? He had, after all, just run into a stalled vehicle which I must presume was off to the side of the road. One has to be pretty loaded to run into a vehicle in that manner. It obviously wasn't so bad of an accident that the little girl was incapacitated. So, where was the father during all of this going on? How sad it would be that his little daughter is laying dead on the highway and the police opened his door and had to wake him to tell him that she was dead.
Of course, all of that is conjecture on my part, but if we're going to assign blame wouldn't it be good to have all the facts?
God bless,
In Christ, ted