The Mini Van

It rained today! Yea! It rained! Hard - for a long time. And then I remembered that JB had taken the top off of his Jeep over the weekend and I wondered if he had put it back on before heading to school this morning. So, I sent him a text and asked. He replied that he had put the top on, but his Jeep was at home. He had ridden his bicycle to school. (It's about 6 miles!) He then told me that he was already home (he has an off period the last period of the day on A days), and that he had an adventure to tell me about when I got home...

I had no idea how terrifying the adventure would be! First of all, he's okay. A little scraped up, but no permanent damage was done to the boy.

On his way to school he was riding in a school zone in the bike lane, when a woman in a maroon mini-van decided to make a U-turn. She didn't look where she was going and ended up heading straight for him! As in a head on collision in the bike lane! He did some quick thinking and tried to jump the curb, but the bike he was on is a fancy street bike with super skinny tires and the curb was about 12-inches high and only the front tire made it up. He went down. The rest of the bike and JB were banged up pretty badly. A couple of hundred dollars of damage was done to the bike and the nurse at school spent quite a bit of time bandaging him up before he could even go to first period.

Now all of this is bad enough - my child has minor injuries and his bicycle has major injuries. But the thing that really set me off was that the woman made eye contact with him and then SPED AWAY!!! She didn't stop to check to see if he was okay as he lay splayed on the street; she didn't offer help; she didn't apologize for running the kid over. She looked at him and hit the gas. What kind of person does that? He was too stunned to get a license plate number.

There is nothing we can do about this incident, but please, if you see a teenage boy in trouble, stop. He's someone's little boy. He's probably not a serial killer - or even a hoodlum. He's probably a good kid. And he might be mine!