This is absolutely true. Most people can't truly understand what happened last night, but I can. Because it's my life. About 15 years ago a friend and I were run over by a speeding driver. He was in a stolen car, had been partying all night, had a fight with a sex worker and shoved her out of the car before peeling out and running over us as we crossed a street. Witnesses heard him yell "WTF did I just hit?!" I was thrown almost clear, but my friend was caught on the hood. The guy kept braking and accelerating trying to shake him off of the car, in the process running over and pulverizing my knee and dragging my friend for 3 blocks where he fell off of the car and died. The driver sped off despite witnesses giving chase on foot. Car was never found; most likely sent to a "chop shop". Eventually the sex worker named the guy to a police informant and he was charged, but she recanted and there was not enough evidence to convict. Charges were dropped. And he had never even been charged with vehicular homicide, despite my assertion that the moment he realized he hit people and kept going, and trying to shake my friend off of his car, which I believe resulted in his death because he could have survived the initial impact had the driver made a different choice--and to be clear, this is exactly what I also believe about Brooks. He chose to hit those people which makes it vehicular homicide. And that was the end of it, criminally. So my friend died a horrific death at age 27, and I spend a day or two in a medically-induced coma with a traumatic brain injury, a broken neck, and a whole laundry list of broken bones and shredded skin. A few weeks in the hospital, a lifetime of recovery which I still work at every single day.
And that is when I started paying attention to hit-and-runs. They happen all the time and with increasing frequency, sadly. People drive aggressively and carelessly, and there's oftentimes a culture of victim-blaming when it comes to auto-pedestrian incidents. There's just a total disregard for human life and a might-makes-right ethos. Every once in a while a see a decal on people's back windows of a jeep running over stick figures. It's supposed to be funny. It's sick. I woke up in the throes of a panic attack at 12:30 last night, to see all the hot takes on Twitter, people using this to blame social justice movements that they oppose or advance racist stereotypes. We're doing a HUGE disservice to the victims if we don't address the fact that this is an ongoing moral problem in our country of just wanton selfishness and aggression and disregard for human life. I beg you, google "hit and run fatality" and the name of your town and you will horrified how many there have been and how little attention they have received.