A drive for justice
Nothing will bring back little Abigail Blumenstein or Joshua Lew or erase the agonizing memory seared on two mothers who felt their children torn from their grasp and saw them mauled in broad daylight. But the arrest and indictment of driver Dorothy Bruns on charges of manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, reckless endangerment and more for ending the lives of two youngsters in March begins a necessary course of criminal justice against selfishness of the most shocking sort.
Message from Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez to drivers: Don’t even think of getting behind the wheel if doctors doubt you’re safely able to — because it’s more than stupid, more than callous. It’s a crime.
From Gonzalez’s lips to jury and judge’s ears, in a state where sky-high legal hurdles make convictions for inflicting death-by-vehicle all too rare.
Prosecutors say that Bruns, having experienced other medical episodes while driving, one of which landed her in the ER, was under doctors’ orders not to drive while they searched for the medical source of seizures and other physically impairing symptoms. Her defense attorney says a doctor cleared her to get back behind a wheel.
Bruns slithered through a loophole that allows but does not mandate doctors to report patients with seizures to the state Department of Motor Vehicles, which in turn may choose to suspend a driver’s license.
Just like her car zoomed through four red lightenforcement cameras and four speed cameras before, without a single point on her license.
This is the second attempt by Gonzalez to secure conviction for a driver he says was plainly instructed by doctors to stay off the road.
Mark Antoine faces trial on comparable charges for killing East Flatbush pedestrian Marlon Palacios last year with his speeding SUV after his leg locked on the gas pedal — and after his doctor told him his multiple sclerosis meant he’d have to stop driving.
Gonzalez takes a bold but necessary gamble to force drivers who not only drove recklessly, but were reckless the second they sat in the driver’s seat and pressed the gas pedal, to be held criminally accountable.