A 12-year-old girl was hit by a car. It had $19,770 in unpaid tickets.

“Mommy,” she said, “I just got hit by a car.” Allen, 49, doesn’t drive, and she didn’t have money for a cab. “I had the light,” Paisley immediately told her, referring to the walk signal. A witness told police, and later The Washington Post, that the driver did not stop in time for the red light. After he hit Paisley, witnesses said, the man berated her for being in the crosswalk, claiming she had a red signal. Paisley, unable to walk, was taken to Children’s National Hospital. Advertisement The driver, Earl Darryl Curtis, of District Heights, Md., said in an interview that he stopped in the crosswalk once he realized the light was red and that it was Paisley who collided with his car, not the other way around. “If I had ran the light, I would have run her over,” he said. “She damaged my car.” He went on to say, “I didn’t even see the girl. … The only thing they got me on is the crosswalk.” “I’m awfully sorry about the situation,” said Curtis, 58. “An accident is an accident.” D.C. police would not comment on the witness account, but a police report labeling the incident “reckless driving” says the driver “operated a motor vehicle on a public street in the District of Columbia in a careless and dangerous manner.” It wasn’t the first ticket or even the 50th tied to the car. Allen, who was given a photo of the license plate by a witness, learned that the Land Rover has 94 unpaid tickets worth $19,770 from D.C. traffic cameras, six for speeding just this month and four for running red lights since July. Advertisement When it comes to tickets linked to the Land Rover, Curtis said that “you can’t prove” who was driving and that his traffic-related record is “irrelevant” to the incident that left Paisley injured. “With everyone who does that in the District of Columbia, they’re singling me out?” Curtis said. The Land Rover is among roughly 2,100 vehicles with 40 or more unpaid tickets, according to D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles numbers from last year. Allen works at the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles, making sure people are qualified to drive. Advertisement “If someone hit her with his fists, he would get arrested,” Allen said. “But he hit her with a car, so he just gets a ticket and can walk away.” So far this year in D.C., 17 pedestrians have been killed and 473 injured in traffic. “Whether we need legislation, whether we need to get the mayor on board, something needs to happen,” said Tricia Duncan, an Advisory Neighborhood Commission representative in Ward 3. In June, a 77-year-old woman in her neighborhood, Patricia Bullinger, died after being hit by a driver turning left on Foxhall Road. Advertisement “Most people pay their tickets, but the worst drivers who get the most tickets realize there’s no consequences,” Duncan said. A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office said of Bullinger’s case that “to prosecute someone for a fatal traffic accident … is an exceedingly high standard when many accidents are simply the result of a tragic mistake.” The office is prosecuting a woman who police say fled a traffic stop before killing three people in Rock Creek Park last summer. In a separate incident in May, Nathan Barbour was biking into Rock Creek Park from Virginia Avenue when he was hit by a driver running a stop sign. As soon as Barbour picked himself up and got out of the road, he said, the driver sped off. A police spokeswoman said that “the case remains open” and is “still under investigation.” Advertisement Meanwhile, the car that hit Barbour is still racking up violations — it currently has 46 unpaid tickets totaling almost $10,000, according to D.C.’s DMV website. “Originally I was thinking, ‘Do I have to get killed for anybody to notice?’” Barbour said. Even in D.C., tickets can’t be used to prevent someone from renewing a license, because they are associated with the car rather than the person driving it. A D.C. law taking effect next month, the Steer Act, requires people convicted of speed-related crimes to install devices in their cars that prevent them from going over the limit. The man who hit Paisley “is exactly the type of driver the attorney general can go after” once the legislation takes effect, said D.C. Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), who wrote the Steer Act and chairs the council’s transportation committee. Otherwise, “he’s going to be racking up those tickets all day long.” Allen is not related to Deirdre Allen. A police crash report says the driver was given a “colliding with a pedestrian” citation, which to can lead to 30 days in jail. Advertisement At a meeting with the D.C. Pedestrian Advisory Council in July, Jamie Carter, a prosecutor who handles traffic-related crimes for the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C., said that since June 2021, she has been involved in 12 sentencings and has seven cases set for trial and two more awaiting indictment. “And then an extremely large number of pending investigations,” she said. We definitely have people on our juries who maybe have done exactly the same driving behavior, and it just has not resulted in someone’s death.” Lower-level traffic violations, up to aggravated reckless driving, can be prosecuted by the city’s attorney general. Advertisement “It’s God’s grace she’s still here and she’s okay and her foot can heal,” Deirdre Allen said. She appreciates that staff members from Paisley’s middle school, Stuart-Hobson, came and stayed with her daughter after the crash, and that neighbors around the intersection kept checking in with her even though she doesn’t live nearby. After he posted about the crash on X on Wednesday, a police sergeant got in touch with Deirdre Allen and said he was investigating. “It’s a good community around there, good people. They care about the kids, they really do,” Deirdre Allen said. “She was scared to stay there after that,” Allen said. “I wanted them to be in a better place.” Now, she said, Paisley is scared to walk her regular path to school. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/09/17/dc-child-struck-driver-tickets/