Hit-and-run charges for drivng over a leaf pile where kids were playing [View all]

[alp227]

That's what Cinthya Garcia-Cisneros of Forest Grove, Oregon is on trial for:

On the evening of Oct. 20, stepsisters Anna Dieter-Eckerdt, 6, and Abigail Robinson, 11, were playing in a large heap of leaves on Main Street when Garcia-Cisneros drove her boyfriend’s Nissan Pathfinder through it. Anna died at the scene. Abigail was taken to a Portland hospital where she later died.

Garcia-Cisneros took the witness stand in her own defense Tuesday afternoon. In tears at times, she testified about driving through leaf piles on the way home from picking up fast food with her brother and boyfriend.

In that large pile on Main Street, they felt the right front tire impact something. She and her boyfriend, she said, assumed it was a rock or a log. She continued driving around the block to her family's duplex.

Once home, her brother jumped on his bicycle and left. Soon after, he knocked loudly on the front door and called to her to come out.

The sound of his voice worried her, she said. When she went outside, he demanded that she sit down.

‘Then he said, ‘I think that you hit a child,’” she said.

So was the driver really supposed to suspect that humans could be inside a pile of leaves while driving at night? Or are the suburbs just not safe anymore for kids to play outside after sunset? From "stranger danger" to "hit and run danger", you wonder why you never see kids playing outside anymore.