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Yes, I was implying that the first several cars at the scene may have not even seen what happened. Can you prove they saw it & ignored it? No, all you can see are the cars very near to the man laying in the street. What I attempted to do was put myself in the drivers’ seats of the vehicles involved. (Out side of the two that actually hit him, for which there is no doubt they were at least aware of what happened.)

Certainly, some of the people in the video chose to look the other way. But to act as if ALL of them did & oh the inhumanity & wailing….that’s all just trumped up hype.

And funny thing is, after I typed my previous response, I googled the Kitty Genovese story because I was not aware of what the connection was. And according to Wikipedia, that story was equally overblown by the media just as this one has been.

The main article argued that this was like the Kitty Genovese case in that no one tried to _help_ Mr. Torres, but the comparison is a bad one, as I tried to explain up top. While people might have given _comfort_ as loboinok suggests (assuming the man was still conscious which I gather he wasn’t) there was nothing they could have done to _help_ him – unlike the Genovese case where the rap against the 38 witnesses is that a timely phone call to the police would have prevented her murder.

I said in my initial post that you can criticize the bystanders for not appearing to show greater concern, if you want. However, I strongly disagree that the man’s condition would not have been readily apparent to those standing on the sidewalk – especially given the severity of what I understand his injuries to be. Unlike the Genovese case, the conduct of the witnesses made no difference to the outcome here.

Even though none of the bystanders will win any awards for good citizenship, I agree with Lori that the incident has been quite overblown.

Making excuses for callous, indifferent people effectively places you in the same group.

You say that no one tried to help the man, but given the severity of his injuries…could well have aggravated his already severe injuries.

How could anyone assess the severity of his injuries from the sidewalk?

Lori seems to imply that the driver’s attention was diverted and could not see a man standing upright, yet, several drivers could see the man laying prone in the street?

what could anyone outside of a hospital have done?

They could have assumed the man was injured, scared, disoriented and approached him to assess his injuries, reassure him that they had contacted emergency personnel and that they would protect him from oncoming traffic…to start with!

The excuses that the both of you offer, makes as much sense as the fact that this incident was video taped by a “traffic camera” which video tapes traffic violations, records the license plate of the offending vehicle and a citation is sent to the vehicles’ owner. Yet, they haven’t determined the identity of the hit and run drivers. Why?

In First Aid/CPR classes, they teach you that in medical emergencies you have to take control of the situation. Why? Because most people go out of control & panic, especially if they have no emergency/medical training. Actually, this is true even for people who do have CPR/First Aid training but have never or rarely used it. They teach you to enlist the help of others at the scene & to give instructions on how bystanders can help. There wouldn’t be such an emphasis on this (in training) if it were common place for accident witness to immediately snap into action. In the situation you mention with your brother, there really is no contrast at all. An off-duty paramedic has no such apprehension in approaching medical emergencies. Police, Fire & Rescue & EMS personnel learn to control that impulse to run away. Add to that the fact that they know how to handle such events & have a great deal of practice doing so and you’ll see that it is unfair to hold regular people on the street to the same standard.

I just think people are rushing to judgment on this. People who weren’t there seem to think seeing the video tells all you need to know. But the video gives a birds-eye view of events on the ground that these bystanders weren’t privy to at the time, never mind that they weren’t warned of the episode about to unfold in front of their eyes the way people who are now watching the video are. Also, there is no sound on this video – there may have been plenty of communication going on between the people on the ground that we are not even aware of.

What it seems everyone has forgotten is what it is actually like to drive down narrow city streets like this that have lots of pedestrian traffic & both sides of the street are lined with parked cars that could pull out any minute. People driving on these streets are typically looking for some hazard that may pop out from either side of the street; all the while watching for street signs or red lights and often trying to find the building or business they are looking for (if they are not familiar with the area.) They are not looking down at the street. All of the cars that came into the scene after the man was hit were witness to nothing more than a man lying in the street; they probably did not even see the accident.

Granted none of the cars stopped, but if they had, what would that have accomplished except to create a traffic jam and perhaps make it impossible for an ambulance to get through?

Witnesses would certainly be expected to call for the police or an ambulance, but we have no way of knowing from the video that none did so.

The only thing the video seems to show is that witnesses did not stand around Mr. Torres and express concern. OK, you can critize them for that, but even had they done so, it would have changed nothing. Unlike the Kitty Genovese case, nothing the witnesses could have done would have prevented the accident or changed anything.