The SUV Did It!

Scott wrote here about the appalling case of a 16-year-old St. Paul girl, Clarisse Grime, who was sitting in the grass at her high school, nowhere near the street, when she was struck and killed by a vehicle that careened out of control and bounced off a fire hydrant. The vehicle was driven by an illegal immigrant who has been in Minnesota for ten years without ever having a driver’s license. He was known to local authorities, having been convicted of drunk driving in 2001 and driving without a license just a few months ago. But the immigration laws are not enforced in St. Paul.

So today, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported on Miss Grime’s funeral. This was the paper’s headline: “St. Paul teen killed by SUV remembered at her funeral.” Killed by SUV? That doesn’t really seem to be the salient point. But the paper continues with that theme in the story’s second paragraph:

Clarisse Grime, run over by an out-of-control sport-utility vehicle, was Martha Tamene Woldegiorgis’s only child.

If you read to the end, you learn some of the facts, at least, about the vehicle’s driver, Carlos Viveros-Colorado. But somehow the story is a little neater and a little less troubling if you focus on the SUV.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses