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20-year-old Marco Antonio Valencia will be arraigned today in court for a weekend incident that killed a Santa Clarita Valley man and injured two others on Bouquet Canyon Road. It's a pretty gruesome story, as the local paper, The Signal, tells it:
The truck crossed the double-yellow lines near the Big Oaks Lodge and slammed into the single-file line of bicyclists on the opposite shoulder, Haselwood and investigators said."They had no place to go," Haselwood said. "My wife's screaming as he's taking these bicycles out. The last guy in the line gets hit by the truck. This guy flies 20 feet ... doing sommersaults in the air."
The truck sped off, and Haselwood lost him. He pulled over to help the bicyclists; one had broken his hand, another was leaning up against a rock, panting, with back injuries and the third, Novotny, was lying face-down, motionless.
"I couldn't - I just couldn't believe it. It was like watching a horrible movie," he said. "When you see it in real life, it was like - it just didn't seem real to me, that it was really happening. That this guy was lying right there in front of me and I was putting the blanket on him."
Complimenting this story, Jeff Wilson at SCV Talk, a local blog, says that Valencia may have a record, finding an article from last year with the same name and age of a morning DUI incident that left the Canyon Country neighborhood without power. "Just another in the long line of examples about how our justice system's leniency towards drunk and unsafe drivers is literally killing us out there," opined a frustrated Damien Newtwon at LA Streetsblog.
Furthermore, his name is mentioned in a local gang sweep from 2007. Another hit and run in the Santa Clarita Valley left a 26-year-old cyclist with major spinal injuries over the 4th of July weekend.
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That sucks.
Pathetic that we live in a culture that *so* enables alcoholics and crappy drivers and hides behind denial ridden delusional myths and mob contagion as justification.
But sure, waste time and resources going after medical MJ cancer patients instead of revoking more licenses and reforming the current barbaric alcoholic leniency. Because alcoholism is so patriotic and *normal*.
Yee ha.
Nobody thinks alcoholism and drunk driving is patriotic and normal. What does this incident have to do with medical marijuana?
Umm, this topic obviously rankles my ire, and the intended satire didn't read well with ye.
IMHO, as a culture we *enable* alcoholism *quite* a bit. I think the penalties are *far* too lax for DUI, *especially* when people are injured because of it. I think that both corporate and cultural prejudice/myopia/denial keep it thus, even when it wreaks more death and injury than all the other inebriants combined.
This is really sad...
Valencia does indeed have a rap sheet. See The Signal's latest story: http://www.the-signal.com/news/article/15558/
I just read the link.
Get this guy out of society, he is a total waste of space and a danger to us all.