Another day, another child killed by an Escalade

The Bike Snob NYC does what NYPD doesn’t: Investigates a car that killed a kid:

But, you know, it’s the victim’s fault because she wasn’t holding mommy’s hand:

The girl was not holding her mother’s hand as they crossed the street near 5th Avenue and 55th St. in Sunset Park around 3:15 p.m., sources said. The little girl drifted into traffic and was crushed by a white Cadillac Escalade, sources said. 
So, take a deep breath and say it with me now:

No criminality suspected!

Now, I may be suspicious by nature, but when I see a little girl dying in the street I actually do suspect criminality.  I know, call me crazy, right?  So I looked more closely at the picture.

First of all, the windows on that car are more tinted than Lindsay Lohan’s sunglasses, which is illegal in New York City.  Fine, not a smoking gun, but it’s a start.  Next, I looked up the license plate number, which is also legible in the photo.  The system only gives you information on parking tickets and red light camera violations, but I found that this particular vehicle had received three tickets for not having a valid inspection:

The most recent of which was issued this past Saturday:

I considered the possibility that maybe I’d looked up the wrong plate, but the system is pretty clear on the fact that these tickets were issued to a white Cadillac.

Okay.  Even though we’re talking about a dead child for fuck’s sake, let’s give the owner the benefit of the doubt.  Let’s say after last Saturday’s ticket he went and got his car inspected, and so he was operating his car fully legally when he ran over the child.  (You know, apart from the windows.)

No.  Fuck that.  I’m pretty confident that tub of shit Escalade should not have been on the road.  And I don’t want to let the driver off the hook here, but I also suspect that if they’d towed the shit tub after that third ticket it would now be sitting in the impound at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and not on top of a dead child.  If someone can’t be bothered to get their potentially deadly $60,000 car inspected in two weeks then they shouldn’t be allowed to have it.  At the very least, you’d think that a dead child would be more than enough to arouse suspicion of criminality, and that maybe someone would, you know, look into it.  I found this stuff in about 19 seconds while sitting around in my underpants drinking coffee.  What else was he doing wrong?  Are we not even going to investigate the possibility?

I’d love to see a mayor with the balls and/or vulva to admit that if you cracked down on all the assholes with expired inspections, no insurance, suspended licenses, out of state registration to save money when they actually live in New York, and so forth, you’d take a shitload of dangerous drivers off the road. Three tickets for no inspection? Tow that shit! “Oh, boo hoo, it’s hard having a car in New York City.” No shit, asshole. It should be hard, and if you can’t hack it then don’t drive. You’re asking a lot of the city and its residents to accommodate your car. You should be creeping around town at 20mph with your valid paperwork on hand at all times, petrified at the idea of making contact with anything

Read the whole post. It’s good. In that sad depressing kind of way.