3/3/2021, morning. Ug. Driver wipes out a family walking on a sidewalk within a Walmart parking lot.
“the driver could face a reckless driving charge”. Don’t count on it. Authorities have already said impairment is not involved, more than likely this will be seen as the usual “just an accident”.
No names were released so we will probably never hear another word about it; even just finding out the outcome of the investigation would be very difficult, despite being a fatality.
Is this a “non-traffic” traffic fatality (because it occurred in a parking lot?). No pedestrian crashes for that date were entered into the AZ MV state crash database; FARS for 2021 is not yet available, but the guess is since it’s not in the state database, there is no way it’s getting into FARS. Another uncounted pedestrian traffic fatality.
news item: A 4-year-old girl was killed in a crash outside a Glendale Walmart
Young girl killed, family injured in Walmart parking lot crash in Glendale
youtube Fox news full news segment “simply a tragic accident”
Dangerous Machine, or Dangerous Driver? of course it might be both — but it’s well understood that the design of so-call light trucks is inherently detrimental to the safety of pedestrians who are crashed into. Federal authorities, whose responsibility it is to ensure that vehicles are as safe as can be refuse to act; as ever-more “cars” are trucks — “Trucks and truck-based sport-utilities now account for roughly 70% of new vehicles sold in the U.S.”
To refresh your memory, 28-693 “A person who drives a vehicle in reckless disregard for the safety of persons or property is guilty of reckless driving.”; Sounds serious but even in the unlikely event the charge is brought, and the driver convicted it is in fact a very minor crime (class 2 misdemeanor), and would result in a fine, and may (in other words, it may or may not; it’s up to the judge) result in a brief license suspension of no more than 90 days.
Driving laws “relating to the operation of vehicles refer exclusively to the operation of vehicles on highways” (highways, legally, means any street) and therefore don’t apply in, say, a parking lot. However reckless driving gets a specific call-out as applying anywhere.
Hopefully you are wrong about no charges. The driving does not sound like something that can be chalked up to being a mistake or a mechanical failure. The driver backed up, stopped, then hit some vehicles, drove over the curb and hit the girl. That does not sound to me like someone using their normal facilities to exercise due care over a dangerous instrument. This took place in a parking lot and so presumably at very low speeds particularly, since at one point the driver stopped and so would have had plenty of time to react to any problem before hitting the girl who was walking in a walkway where a vehicle had no place being.
https://www.azfamily.com/video/a-4-year-old-girl-was-killed-in-a-crash-outside-a-glendale-walmart/video_37abc57f-0270-5c36-8768-3434cd81efb1.amp.html