This morning, it took somewhere around 90-100 minutes to get into work, capping off a truly horrendous work week of bad, lengthy commutes. Atlanta traffic is pretty bad in its own right, which is obviously no secret to anyone, but five straight days of abysmal commutes is enough to drive anyone insane.
However, the circumstances to this morning’s bad commute were different, and erred a bit into the extreme, as it was revealed that the nature of what many believed was just a typical bad accident turned out to be a frightening tale of a person jumping out of a moving vehicle and subsequently getting hit on the highway. Subsequently, all lanes of the highway were shut down, causing a massive delay that I happened to be in. But it’s also scary to think that if I were even ahead of schedule by anywhere from 2-4 minutes, I probably could have witnessed the incident, or worse, been the car that hit the person after they jumped out of a moving vehicle. In that regard, I guess a long-ass commute doesn’t seem so bad in comparison.
When I passed the scene of the crime, I noticed that there were news crews from the usual local outlets; I knew that when I got into work, I could probably be able to read about what had happened, since I was curious to know some details of the grisly incident that caused me to be so late, yet again.
As the day passed, a few details trickled out; namely the name of the person hit. But that’s really it; sure, it’s mentioned that the person survived, and was at a hospital, but I thought there would be a little bit more to it, because it seems kind of weird to me that a person would jump out of a moving vehicle on a highway where people travel at anywhere from 65-90 mph. There seemed to be more of a concern that the person who struck her on the highway didn’t stop and kept going than there seemed to be for the person actually hit.
One thing that wasn’t mentioned in any of the big three outlets, was anything at all about the person driving the car that the jumper flung themselves out of; I don’t know about anyone else, but there are only two reasons why I would imagine someone jumping out of a moving vehicle – a suicide attempt, or an escape. Escape, meaning the person driving the car is implied to be a kidnapper, therefore a criminal that’s apparently still on the loose, unless the news failed completely to mention that they stopped.
So out of curiosity, I Google’d the name of the person who was hit. Within the first five results, there was the obligatory Facebook profile, but also two links that pertained to an arrest record. Clicking on Google Images shows absolutely nothing other than mugshots and police blotter images.
I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but it seems like these revelations don’t exactly explain why this person jumped out of a moving vehicle, but does seem to lead me to believe why the news and police seem to be prioritizing other components of the story over them.
I get that there’s someone out there who hit a person and did not stop, as the law would typically expect a law-abiding citizen to do. But given the circumstances, and the nature of human panic, adrenaline, and reflexes, I can’t say that I’m at all that surprised that they simply kept going. It’s not every day that people jump out of cars onto the road right in front of you, so this isn’t a slightly more ordinary situation where a visible person kept moving into the roadway and got plowed by a moving vehicle. I’m by no means condoning the actions of the person who hit the jumper, but a part of me kind of gets it. Hopefully, they’ll turn themselves in, and some leniency will be granted given the circumstances of the situation.
Regardless of the details that have yet to be uncovered or the eventual outcome of this whole debacle, I do find it interesting to see how a victim’s history seems to create some sort of division in how they’re treated by the media; I’d have a hard time believing that if the person were a known outstanding citizen that went off the deep end and jumped into traffic, there would be more efforts to find out why, but with someone with a criminal history, they simply don’t seem to care; let’s find a way to make this into a more interesting story by pointing the finger of justice at the person who hit them and kept driving.
