Update: KATU covered the story of Sunday's crash.

Susan Otcenas, of TeamEstrogen.Com, relayed a story of a hit-and-run she witnessed last night, where a black Chevy Blazer drifted into a bike lane and hit a cyclist. While she and other witnesses knew the license plate number, the police really need a description of the driver to make prosecution stick in court. The cyclist was seriously injured (Susan reports "multiple lacerations, huge hematoma on his leg, dislocated shoulder or broken collar bone, and head trauma"), but not killed.

The good news is that the driver — who then went on to hit a car in Tigard and tried to abandon the vehicle — was caught. He had multiple DUIs on his record. The story reminded me of two stories with worse endings, because the driver could not be idenitified. Read on.

When Cars are Used as Weapons, Justice Fails Us

Last November, I arrived home one rainy evening to find a police car with its lights going right outside my front porch. A half-dozen people surrounded a bicyclist, Jake Gill, as he sat on the curb, his bent bicycle on the sidewalk.

Ten minutes earlier, Jake had been followed and threatened for several blocks by multiple people in a car, who then ran him and his bicycle into a parked car and fled the scene. A second cyclist raced after the car and got the license plate number, while two people who had witnessed the attack unfold stayed at the scene to support the cyclist. The police soon arrived and Gill was taken to the hospital.

Gill, who was riding legally on the street, was seriously injured from the assault, and is still recovering some four months later. You haven’t heard about the attack in the newspaper, because it wasn’t in the paper, because it never became news. Instead, it became just another police investigation that died in the criminal justice system recently.

Despite the multiple witnesses, having the license plate number, and the outrageous and potentially fatal nature of the assault, the District Attorney is stuck without someone to press charges against. Without the ability to specifically identify the driver, there is simply no case.

A different, but no less frustrating incident, was Morgan Hynson’s crash last October. Morgan was biking home one night when an oncoming car veered into his lane, hit a median, and swung around to hit Morgan, breaking both his legs. The driver and passenger fled the scene, leaving the car behind. Again, despite having the car physically on the scene, the car’s owner could not be held responsible for the recklessness that seriously injured an innocent person.

This need for positive identification of a driver sets a hurdle so high that it is ridiculous on its face. Imagine riding a bicycle on a dark, rainy night, and knowing that – as you are being threatened with violence and moving at 15 miles an hour – that you need to see through the window of a car and past passengers, and positively identify your assailant, while simultaneously trying to protect yourself from the attack. It’s a requirement to be superhuman.

Oregonians deserve better. When a gun owner is grossly negligent and makes a gun easily available to youth, who then use it to harm others, the gun owner can be charged with a crime. Yet when a car is used as a weapon in an assault, or is witnessed breaking other laws, the car owner has no responsibility. This is not the case everywhere; in some states, car owners can be charged for violations based on license plate numbers.

Cars are useful for many tasks, and are part of our society. I own and use one, as do most bicyclists. But due to their tremendous size and speeds, cars can be deadly. When they are intentionally used as deadly weapons, we need to hold the owner partially responsible, requiring the owner to identify who was wielding the car as a weapon. Changing the law would strip attackers of their armor of anonymity, and help protect our friends, our neighbors, and our family members who are simply trying to get around our city safely.

We owe it to ourselves to shoulder some responsibility when our cars are used as deadly weapons. Until we do that, more people will end up like Jake Gill, or worse – assaulted and injured, with no one to fund their medical bills, and no one to be held responsible, for no other reason than because the weapon of choice was a car.

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