(The driver faced no charges.)
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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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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.
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.
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.
The street was presumably designed to the standards adopted by the city and state. We probably shouldn't update the street design standards by punishing engineers who follow the existing standards; a legislative or regulatory approach is suitable here.
This is also why it's so important for adults to cross safely at crosswalks to set a good example for children in poorly designed suburban hellscapes. I cringe so hard every time I see some random idiot pushing a stroller across three lanes onto a raised median when there is a crosswalk 20m away.
Yes, we should design infrastructure better, but we also need to understand that what we have now is incredibly dangerous, and we need to set an example for children every time we interact with it.
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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.
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What if they weren't speeding and the surroundings contributed to a line of sight problem for both drivers and pedestrians. As mentioned in the article.
I can think of many places in my own area where a car could be going slower than the speed limit and someone just jumping out from a median would give no time at all to react. It's absolutely a car-dominant infrastructure problem.
I know you'd like to prejudge the driver based on age, but you need the facts of the case to know if the driver was at fault.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
- 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.
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"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...
Man, look at those good jeans....
What good genes...? I don't see any!
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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.
On top of that, most Americans drove SUV or straight up trucks (disguised as pickup). Those are so high that most people hit cannot roll over it and straight get the blunt force and die
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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."
So if I walked home but on my way got hit and killed by a car, I would've committed suicide?
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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.
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.
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