The Hidden Human Toll of Carnage

Harold Owens, the publisher of western New York’s The Batavian, a similar independent online news service to San Angelo LIVE!, taught me the technique of reporting news off the police scanner. You may have seen some of our work, as it’s proving to be very popular.

Owens has few rules, except that he will not photograph dead bodies. The rest, he says, is routine. In the news business, carnage sells papers, or in our case, banner impressions and subscribers.

This reporting is getting to me. Here’s why.

We haven’t seen a fatality yet, but some of the untold stories are affecting me. Yesterday, a white import car hit the Jeep Cherokee from behind, and spun into the concrete rail on Loop 306. I stopped to report it.

The driver, a young girl not much older than my daughter, wasn’t hurt, but she was in shock. Before the police arrived, her security blanket was her cell phone. She stood next to her wrecked car looking down at her iPhone mumbling about who she needed to call or text. She never looked up from that phone.

The accident was minor, and I didn’t want to report it. After the police arrived, I went back to my car, took a picture from a distance so that it did not reveal her face, posted the picture and the warning of an accident on the Loop on Facebook and left. I felt sorry for that poor girl who could have been my daughter.

The night prior, there was an accident with injuries at Sunset Dr. and Southwest Blvd. The Toyota Camry that collided with a Chevy Equinox had what I surmised was a mother and three children. Two of her children were in middle school, and one was almost an adult. The mother was strapped on a stretcher and taken away to Community Hospital, leaving an injured middle school child getting attended to by the EMS. The injured child was loaded into an ambulance and the older sibling was asked to ride with her.

That left a lone middle school child sitting on a curb as police and fire department personnel tended to cleaning up the accident scene and finishing the investigation. As the commotion continued, I heard the child sobbing. I mean uncontrollably sobbing.

Here was this young kid who is probably in sixth grade or so who had experienced a traumatic collision, had her mother and other two siblings transported off in ambulances, and she was probably thinking “what ‘s going to happen to mom, my sister, and me?”

A San Angelo Fireman saw the girl sobbing and quickly attended to her. I’m sure our firemen are trained in how to deal with shock, and (temporarily) orphaned children. She was driven away in a San Angelo police car, probably to the hospital to the care of her older sister, and to await the prognosis of mom.

Watching the impact of these accidents on kids makes me contemplate how I drive. That is because I don’t want my children to be orphaned, even temporarily. And I certainly don’t want to orphan someone else’s kids.

All of the accidents I’ve witnessed so far appear to be preventable if all of the drivers paid more attention to the road.