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Andrew Thomas Gallo, 22, of San Gabriel fights-back tears during a court appearance in Fullerton for arraignment. A judge has increased bail to $2 million for the 22-year-old man charged with three counts of murder, felony drunken driving and other counts. (AP Photo/Pool, Joshua Sudock)
When Richard Bohannan went outside his Chino house last night to go to the front yard mailbox, he never came back. A car hit and killed him before it fled the scene. His 13-year-old son that was with him was not hurt and this morning California Highway Patrol officers impounded a car parked nearby that is likely the suspect's vehicle.
This news is another of the many hit and run fatalities in Southern California being reported in the last few weeks. Last week, 22-year-old Andrew Thomas Gallo was arrested after fleeing the scene of DUI related crash in Fullerton that left three people dead, including Angels rookie pitcher Nick Adenhart and Courtney Stewart, a Cal State Fullerton student who will be remembered tonight in an event. Gallo couldn't contain himself, breaking down in tears week in court.
Another man broke down in tears today in court while being arraigned for an incident last August when he killed a woman in a crosswalk while allegedly text messaging. Martin Burt Kuehl, who did not flee the scene, was featured in the Orange County Register last November because he would visit the scene every single day. "I just didn't see her," he said. "I accidentally killed somebody.”
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Tom Vanderbilt, author of the excellent book Traffic, has been ranting lately on his blog about the media reporting on traffic collisions. One of his peeves is that time after time the media uses language that makes personal responsibility ambiguous or shifts blame in such a way as to make death by automobile almost sound like a natural cause. I've noticed this same use of language creeps into LAist from time to time.
"A car hit and killed him before it fled the scene." Wait a minute, the car of it's own free will hit a pedestrian and than the car fled the scene? Sort of like the saying goes, guns don't kill people, people do, cars don't kill people, drivers do. A car without a driver is an inconveniently large chunk of metal that takes up space and sits there. If a person shoots someone and flees the scene, you would not say a gun shot the victim and then fled the scene, the gun is simply the tool by which death was delivered. The gun will not sit on trial if it is caught. A more correct way of saying it would be "A driver hit and killed him with his vehicle before fleeing the scene."
What is odd to me though is in this same post personal responsibility is used to describe the other collisions. Are only the ones who get caught a he or she, and the ones who get away aren't really people, but run away automobiles?