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.
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
419 points (99.3% liked)
News
31548 readers
4362 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
No arrest for the city planners who knowingly ignored accounting for pedestrians. Hm, shocked.
"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.
U must be a city boy. Out here in the mountains of New England we have nothing but fresh air (at least since the smoke from Canada has blown away ...) I have butterflies and fireflies and crickets and grasshoppers and frogs singing all the time
Kinds in the Netherlands and Japan roam in their cities safely. Its less an urban issue how rotten US mentality is.
10 years ago we had fireflies by my lake. This year I counted maybe 4 total.
My hometown was literally 14 houses in the woods with one road. 6 of them still exist in a renovated state but now there are apartment towers and paved townhouse complexes everywhere, invasive weeds at every roadside, dirt lots unused that used to be wild native plants but are just dandelions and moss. All the parks used to be connected by trail but now its streets without sidewalks on all but one side of the smallest park. If you go down the residential streets you will see enough cybertrucks that I want to cry.
So yeah its a city now but it wasn't before.
Damn that unfortunate. I live in a "city" for this state, and one of the bigger ones at that with 15k population. The "small town" in mass I moved from had 20k population. At least up here where the city ends, there is nothing but trees and mountains. Back in mass there was no distinguishable like as near the whole state is just sprawling suburbs and towns. I think some of what makes us glorify Europe in ways is they have harder lines where cities end, so you can still get to nature. Also, there's still some nature to get to instead of just suburbs till the next city limits
You don't even need to be in the mountains of New England. We're right outside one of America's bigger cities and within an hour drive of two more, and we have butterflies, frogs, raccoons, foxes, etc.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
What grand jury permitted these charges? This is insane. The driver should be arrested not the parents.
- A grand jury would indict a ham sandwich.
- Many states don't have grand juries. They are only required for federal cases by US constitution.
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.
If it goes to trial. The prosecutor will threaten to stack an enormous number of charges unless they agreed to to a plea bargain.
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
(The driver faced no charges.)
🙄
The 76 year old driving an S.U.V. faced no charges.
It doesn't look like they should. If a kid darts out into traffic and you can't stop in time, why would you get charged? The charge against the parents is ridiculous. If anything the rage should be against an environment that makes walking to a place so dangerous for anyone.
Just goes to show how deadly our streets are designed that the prosecution thought it was so completely obvious that the environment is too dangerous for a 7 and 10 year old pair of kids to navigate.
Even if I'm trying to tone down the fuckcars rhetoric...
If a kid darts out into traffic and you can't stop in time, why would you get charged?
If you can't stop in time, 90% of the time it means you were either speeding or not paying attention to your surroundings, and your negligence/incompetence caused a death.
It is absolutely absurd that the parents are being brought before the court to determine liability, but the driver is not.
The speed limit was 45 mph (72 km/h) and there was no crosswalk at that location; there are trees in the median obscuring the driver's view. A map is helpful: Google | OSM.
From context, the kids probably lived in the neighborhood to the southeast. The driver would have been eastbound, and would have just passed the Lyon street intersection, which has traffic lights and crosswalks. There is no sidewalk on the south side of Hudson boulevard at this location, so it's reasonable she wouldn't have been expecting pedestrians.
I can't see assigning criminal liability to anybody here. The infrastructure sucks.
People want to be angry at as many people as possible. Thank you for the actual information.
My father is in his mid-70s, and a better driver than many of my friends. And the hatchback he drives is often defined as an SUV.
While I find myself agreeing with the sentiment here most of the time, judging without fact is getting more and more common, unfortunately.
you just showed me a wide road with good visibility
drivers need to pay some fucking attention. they need to be looking ahead at all times, not just the 0.3 seconds that somebody was obscured behind a tree. if you watched them approach the tree, you goddamn well know that they're still behind it if you didn't see them leave.
I can't see assigning criminal liability to anybody here. The infrastructure sucks.
The liability should fall on the licensed engineer who negligently approved the design. The street was literally incomplete and should never have been built that way in the first place.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
"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.
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?
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
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.
view more: next ›