Cary police yesterday charged the driver in the death of Maria Soledad Ponce-Perez, a jogger who was struck and killed last week. Beverly Alice Castelli, age 51, was charged with misdemeanor death by motor vehicle in the incident.
Kelly and I agreed that this is an unfortunate move on the part of Cary PD. Its tragic that Ponce-Perez was hit by Castelli’s car, to be sure. Its something Castelli will have to live with the rest of her life. On the other hand, Ponce-Perez was jogging with her back to traffic. Not only that, she was jogging in the middle of the road! The article doesn’t specify but it wouldn’t surprise me if she was also wearing headphones like a lot of joggers do.
Any kid can tell you that you that if you’re a pedestrian you’re supposed to face traffic and if you play in traffic you’re going to get hit. I don’t know what kind of reaction time Castelli may or may not have had, but there’s no doubt in my mind that Ponce-Perez was in the wrong here and solely responsible for endangering herself. She was jogging in a manner and place that made it inevitable she would be hit. Its the same as if I decided to play on the power lines: no one would blame the power company if I get electrocuted.
Now Castelli will have to go through the spectacle of a trial in addition to the grief she already must feel. Unless Cary Police know something I don’t, there’s no way Castelli should have been charged.
Neither of us know the real details of the case, as the posted article was rather sparse.
But any time a motorist hits a pedestrian, there is cause for exploring the need for filing criminal charges. I’ll bet a nickle the driver was yapping away on the cell phone, but it wasn’t mentioned in the article.
If you look at the map of the accident location ( http://tinyurl.com/ytrhuy ) you’ll see that Reedy Creek (where the accident happened) is fairly straight there. If the driver was going the speed limit and not distracted, they should have seen the pedestrian, even though she was not where she was supposed to be.
The local rtp_bike_ped list ( http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/rtp_bike_ped ) had a very interesting reply from the Cary Police Chief to someone one the list about this accident where he explained how they go about investigating things like this. I’d link to it, but the archives are only available to list members.