I had somebody try this on me in real life once, a couple of decades ago, on a back country road in the middle of the night. I managed to dodge him. The mother and daughter in the minivan a half a mile down the road behind me were not so lucky, as I witnessed after I pulled a quick handbrake turn to track this guy down with the intention of determining exactly what his major malfunction was.

He swerved straight into their minivan probably doing about 60 MPH. I saw it happen, both vehicles rising off the pavement in what felt like slow motion. I remember the headlights shattering and throwing sparks up in the air. The minivan wound up in the ditch. Buddy’s car ended up facing the opposite direction in the middle of the road.

The woman driving was trapped, crushed in between the seat and the dash and firewall which had been pushed into her legs. She must have had both shins broken. I wasn’t aware at first that there was anyone else in the car until I was able to make sense of her screaming. She thought her daughter was dead.

I found her daughter in the back seat, barely conscious. Apparently she’d started off on the front seat but was not seat belted in and wound up there after bouncing off of either the dash or the windshield. Or both.

I was duty bound to check on the perpetrator as well. A bit bleary, probably drunk, and very belligerent. He was in what was for the time a late model Audi or something. It was black. Two doors. Fancy airbags. So he was fine, more or less. When I mentioned that he’d just about killed two people his response was, basically, “Fuck you and fuck them, too.”

I imagine the cops thought he wound up with that broken nose from the wreck. Nobody ever asked me about it.

I sure hope buddy remembers. I hope he remembers real good, but he probably doesn’t because there’s no fucking justice in the world. I do. It was June 22nd, 2007. A Friday.

I remember mom wailing from the front seat that her baby girl was dead. I remember the blood running down her daughter’s face from the gash on top of her head which I was desperately trying to staunch with a shirt in the longest 15 minutes in history until the ambulances and firemen showed up. I remember wanting to carry her to where her mother could see and show her that she was still breathing, but she was too heavy to get out of the car by myself and I had a hazy notion that you shouldn’t try to move people in that situation anyway, but you don’t think about that in the moment. My then-girlfriend was with me and she was telling the mother over and over again that we had her daughter, she was alive, we were keeping her alive, and help was coming.

I don’t know what happened to any of those people afterwards. As far as I know both the mother and daughter survived. It would have been in the papers if either of them died, I’m sure. I talked to the cops briefly but then we got the hell out of there. They told me that gathered somehow that the guy was trying to kill himself. Obviously he’d been drinking. Probably told himself it was to steady his nerves. The asshole could have thought to find a bridge abutment or a good solid tree or something instead.

Nobody ever called me up as a witness afterwards, and it seemed nobody wanted more of a statement. I never heard anything more about it. I don’t even know their names.

Sure, fuck up some innocent trucker’s day, and possibly take his life too.

Oh hey, did you know that being involved in an accident while holding a commercial driver’s license is one of the few times that a US Citizen has no presumption of innocence in the criminal justice system?

The bar that must be cleared is not “are you at fault” but instead “could you have done anything to prevent this”

So you say another driver crossed the median and plowed into you, head on? Well, if you happen to be driving a car and were in your own lane, you’re completely in the clear.

If you were driving a truck, WELL!

Does anybody think you maybe had enough time to see it coming and swerve to avoid it?

Hm, did you really spend enough time inspecting your truck that morning? If you had taken 20 minutes instead of 15 to kick your tires and check your fluids and lights, you know you wouldn’t have been there when that car lost control…

In fact, let’s pull up your entire logbook history and see if we can find any indication that you’ve never once in your life made a single mistake. Shows a tendency toward carelessness, that does.

Yeah, we think you could have done better. Enjoy your civil and criminal penalties for something you had absolutely no control over.

Think about that when you see those giant “INJURED BY A TRUCK? CALL OUR LAW FIRM!” Billboards all over every metro area.

Oh you think that’s bullshit?

I was legally parked along the curb in front of a warehouse, waiting in line to check in. A guy riding a motorcycle at well over twice the speed limit came around the curve, lost control and hit the back of my trailer.

He sued ME. His lawyer argued that I should have known better than to park on that part of the curb where sight would be limited by the curve for other traffic on the road.

Rather than fight it in court, my insurance just settled with him.