A man in Maryland was carried for two miles while lodged in a windshield of a car before being dumped by the runaway driver on a neighborhood street last week.
Franklin Mendez was originally involved in a fender-bender, but when he got out of his car, Mendez was hit by another driver. That driver made it two miles with Mendez on the hood of their Civic before they stopped and removed his body from the car, continuing on their way.
Video from local doorbell camera, obtained by Fox 5, shows the Civic driver’s actions. They carefully pulled the car over to the side of the road, before presumably removing Mendez’s body from the hood. The video on Fox, thankfully, cuts past this process. The as-yet-unidentified driver then got back in their car, turned around, and continued off into the night, according to the Prince George’s County Police Department’s official blog.
Car-dependent infrastructure is an endemic problem in the United States, one that carries a massive body count. Terms like “pedestrian impact” and “moving violation” try to obscure the worst of it, but some deaths by car are simply too egregious to bury under layers of sanitized speech. This is one of them.
Next time you get behind the wheel of your car, make an active effort to think of the people around you as actual, genuine, flesh-and-blood people. Keeping that in mind will leave us all better off.