When a Street Kills a Child, We Put the Parents on Trial
strongtowns.org
strongtowns.org
What I see here is basically or low income probably poorly educated couple who didn't have the intellectual knowledge/capabability to seek proper legal support and advice to fight the case.
This is nothing more than the abuse of the justice system, otherwise known as lawfare.
Tall, heavy vehicles that make pedestrians and cyclists invisible:
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-safety/new-suvs-hav...
https://www.theautopian.com/full-size-suvs-are-twice-as-like...
All while putting forth the story that they protect children against their parents where necessary. And while that happens, that's single digit percentage of the children in state facilities. That happens so rarely that there's entire facilities where NONE of the children present have any problem with their parents. But every last child has problems with school (going from schools refusing to protect against bullying, refusing to abide by laws like access, or guarding children going to school, or transport, or ...)
A trivial example: pretty much the whole developed world has a law that schools are accountable for anything that happens to children in relation to school, including on the way to school and the way back. This goes as far as ensuring that the way to school actually happens, providing oversight on the way, preventing thefts, bullying, ... in class, in school, on the way to school and back, in after-school activities. No school on the planet actually does this, of course.
Anyone who had children can tell you how well schools, anywhere on the planet, actually do this and how much responsibility they accept when things go wrong, even or perhaps especially when a teacher is actively making things go wrong (e.g. the school is financially responsible when a teacher is involved in selling drugs, but teacher get caught all the time in things ranging from falsifying grades to paedophilic rape)
And for cases where children or parents insist on their legal rights, that's what you have youth services for. Note: another law that the whole world has is that youth services are exempt from legal protections. A youth judge can lock up a child, usually even beyond 18 years old, for no reason at all. A child can be convicted while having provided evidence of their innocence. A minor doesn't even have the right to a trial at all! Investigations can be performed without any of the rules of investigation apply (meaning even that it is perfectly legal for youth services to lie about the situation of a minor AND for a judge to convict based on a lie). So there is no defense against youth services (other than exploiting the fact that a child cannot be held responsible. In other words: the only "defense" is having the child commit sufficient violence against youth services personnel)
And, of course, when this was investigated ... there's a UN report pointing out that over 90% of all child abuse happens at school [1]. And no, despite the picture on the front page, it is not in fact about Africa.
[1] https://www.un.org/en/peace-and-security/violence-against-ch...
Legend’s parents, Jessica and Sameule Jenkins, did.
Two days after the crash, the district attorney charged both with involuntary manslaughter, set bail at $1.5 million each, and took their remaining children into protective custody. Facing the prospect of months in jail and the loss of their children, the Jenkinses took felony plea deals.""
This part.
Do bad things not happen in developed countries related to children? No. But this part would not happen.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8535968/
The entire movie depicts what the state does to the toddler as she grows up, in Germany. You'll have to look up the case. The guilty party ... was fired from her job. Nothing more.
Note: it ends with the child taking her own life because she would be forced to go live in Africa. Needless to say, this has no consequences for anyone at all that (radically failed to) take care of the child.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7704614/
This is, in a way, about a racist cop accusing a sole immigrant father of child abuse, where then a child is left alone as the father is (eventually) forced to leave the country (he now "doesn't have a daughter", so can be deported). That part is barely mentioned. The movie follows the girl. But the problem depicted here goes further than immigrants: the dutch state is regularly accused of separating children to avoid the law. You see dutch law is very strict that families that become homeless must be given suitable accomodations where they live (not somewhere else, citizens and immigrants). To avoid actually doing this, many dutch cities use youth services to, let's just call a spade a spade: abduct the children. Because that has 2 advantages, the children get a new address, and the parents "don't live with children" anymore, (accusation? Well, if parents become homeless they "don't take good care of their children", what an argument). Of course half the reason is to use the children as hostages to force parents to take a job. But if they don't, the city can still get out from under it's financial obligations: then these are no longer families and the parents can be thrown into the street legally. Obviously this practice is illegal, and the Dutch state has been convicted by the European court of Human rights. Needless to say, EXACTLY ONE change to the law was made, and of course nobody experienced any legal consequences whatsoever. The change? When children are abducted by youth services, their address changes (so the parents can still be thrown in the street) BUT not the city (even if the children physically live somewhere else). So cities of origin are forced to pay youth services for these children. My guess is that somewhere between 30% and 50% of all children in residential care in the Netherlands fall in this category, but of course, these numbers are not tracked (this is extrapolating from numbers out of Belgium (well, half of Belgium, Flanders), who do publish the numbers on the causes of "outplacement", depending on the year it's between 30% and 50%). These regions are very close to each other and essentially identical except for the state.
You know, btw, what the #1 cause of placing children in youth services is? Not abiding by family judge's decision, usually the child ("running away", or the legal term "taking a child away from their legal guardian". Note: it is THE CHILD that is doing that is almost all cases). There isn't even any accusation that the parents aren't taking good care of the child in these cases right, it wasn't even investigated. The children are taken away to, if we're frank, use them as hostages to cheaply (without involving police effort) enforce court decisions. Oh, and then one such child was forced to sleep in a police cell for 2 weeks, which made the news. They're still doing it.
In other words: in these countries, for children in residential care for there to be even the accusation that the parents abuse a child is not even 3%. The accusation right, cases where it's legally proven, the numbers are essentially "it happened X years ago". Meaning proven abuse doesn't even happen once per year on average for a population of 5 million. The accusation of abuse (not necessarily by parents), NOT investigated but the accusation is there, is only double digit children per year (meaning less than 30). There are far more orphans (both parents died in accident, no family available), even today, than abused children.
The odds that an entire residential youth services facility has a SINGLE actually abused child (suspected, not proven) is less than 30%. All the other children in residential care are cases where the parents not cooperating (or not able to cooperate) with the state one way or another. #1 reason? Parents not willing to cooperate with courts in divorce cases.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVBxvXzAIBg
Or a similar story, also Flanders. This is about a school "somehow" failing to prevent rape in school (which they are legally responsible for). Needless to say, the movie immediately moves on. Why? There never was any investigation how this happened (youth services is not allowed to investigate anyone, and certainly not schools). Given the reactions of the girls (yep, plural), obviously they were threatened, so presumably it wasn't classmates. What does the state do? Because obviously it is pretty damn critical to investigate the school, right? If not you're risking potentially a lot of repeats.
Oh here's another beautiful story illustrating how laws really work, from Antwerp. A child ("14 years old" only info given) was placed out of their home. No details on why, and placed in closed youth center after running away. The third day he broke a plastic knife in two, and stuck it into the throat of the caregiver/guard. Missed the artery, but hit the nerve. Did not fully cut it, but that must have HURT for a very long time, months. He was placed in prison for a short while (less than 2 weeks). So far so good, but what happened then is revealing. He was brought back to the same institution, at which point the personnel FOUGHT (yes, literally) with the police (one broken jaw, one broken arm) to keep the kid out. There was "no space" anywhere else (translation: one look at his file and nobody wanted the kid). He was held in a police cell for 2 days ... and sent home.
So you see even the reverse happens: the state refusing to apply law, REFUSING to taking children away, refusing to go after people, because the people that form the state refuse to do it because of violence.
No. I want examples where the driver doesn't get charged and faces zero consequences (not even getting fired from their job, fwiw) while the parents both get charged with involuntary manslaughter when their child got killed directly by a different adult.
And I'm happy to consider cases where the child was killed by an adult through other means than a car. Suicide has always been treated entirely differently by pretty much every justice system in existence, the analogy doesn't work.
On a related note https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2025/being-hit-suv-i...
Edit: I missed it: they do name the DA later in the article. The judge remains anonymous.
"Gaston County’s district attorney, Travis Page"
Yes, this is bad design. But I do think it’s negligent to let a child cross this road unsupervised. If it was a suburban street this would be crazy, but it’s not and I think them being charged is reasonable
There's a pretty big difference between random streets and a 4-lane arterial road like this one. I would take great care crossing it as an adult and I would only consider letting a kid cross it with explicit instructions to use a marked crossing or wait for traffic to stop for them and practice doing it accompanied.
Roads 100% are community killers, it's insane that people put up with such extreme infantilization and isolation, no wonder deaths of despair and chronic loneliness is on the rise. We've cultivated our own sad fragility.
And you just waltzed across it when it looked clear or you used marked crossings, timed it with the lights after practice with your parents, etc.?
I'm not saying there aren't ways to cross this road and that a 7yo can't be taught a couple of them, but to just turn a 7-10yo pair loose-ish on it seems foolish.
>Roads 100% are community killers,
There were a bunch of contributory factors leading to this kid's death. You're just as ignorant and wrong as the prosecutor who thinks this is all the parents fault.
>It's insane that people put up with such extreme infantilization and isolation,
Surely you see the irony here (by which I mean you are unwise for having a self-contradictory opinion)? You're basically saying that "people can't handle these roads". They clearly can. 4-lane boulevards with medians are all over even the most walkable cities in Europe. And some of America's worst cities for walking are grids that lack bigger roads (i.e tons of 2-lane grid). The devil is in the details.
We should have safer roads, we should stop hating ourselves and our fellow citizens, parents should not have to hover around their kids constantly, the burden of parenting has gone up an insane amount since I was a kid and there isn't a well justified reason for it.
At the height of the killings, 420 Children were killed per year: that is more than 1 per day. 3200 people were killed per year if you include adults. You can imagine that even more were wounded and maimed.
So yeah. You don't have to accept that roads are community killers.