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The hits, they just keep comin'
Oct. 4th, 2011 08:52 amWe've had some pretty tragic crime waves in this town over my years of living here. "The .22 Caliber Killer." "The Bike Path Stalker." All of them worthy of an entire series of Dexter. Yet even he, I think, would be stumped (maybe even literally) by the latest wave of terror on our streets:
"Crabbies in Caddies."
Counting last night's four-wheel visit by a 79-year old to the front of a Joseph A. Bank store in Chikkawagga, the Buffalo metro has had nine crashes of cars into commercial buildings in the past 19 days. Most of them have involved drivers well into their 70s; at least one of them ended fatally (an elderly woman's minivan taking the lives of two Cheeburger Cheeburger patrons on the Boulevard). The closest to us was at a dessert place two traffic lights up the road from here, where our neighbor's granddaughter used to work.
None of this is new in our aging generation- News of the Weird regularly runs "old driver mistakes accelerator for brake" stories- but they're not this common. One can only imagine what forces of evil, karma or just randomness are at play here. Town officials are falling over themselves with ideas about mandating those Stonehenge-style barriers across the front lines of car parks, and the comment sections of the news articles are, as they almost always are, full of insensitivity and name-calling among the usual suspects. Yet one comment on this past incident got a real LOL out of me; I credit its author, one Mark Fahey of Lancaster, and I quote it in its entirety:
Its like a flash mob for seniors. Instead of breaking out in dance, they ram their cars into buildings. They're spread out a few days because they still use rotary phones.
So far, I've only seen one of these perps who was younger than us (that was the one who created a new drive-thru lane at the Dessert Deli near here), and she was charged with driving under the influence of drugs. So I'm hoping my generation is still mostly immune from such things. After all, it's not like the icons of our childhood are now considered suitable for senior citizen expos or anything, are they?
Oh, shush. And get off my lawn.
"Crabbies in Caddies."
Counting last night's four-wheel visit by a 79-year old to the front of a Joseph A. Bank store in Chikkawagga, the Buffalo metro has had nine crashes of cars into commercial buildings in the past 19 days. Most of them have involved drivers well into their 70s; at least one of them ended fatally (an elderly woman's minivan taking the lives of two Cheeburger Cheeburger patrons on the Boulevard). The closest to us was at a dessert place two traffic lights up the road from here, where our neighbor's granddaughter used to work.
None of this is new in our aging generation- News of the Weird regularly runs "old driver mistakes accelerator for brake" stories- but they're not this common. One can only imagine what forces of evil, karma or just randomness are at play here. Town officials are falling over themselves with ideas about mandating those Stonehenge-style barriers across the front lines of car parks, and the comment sections of the news articles are, as they almost always are, full of insensitivity and name-calling among the usual suspects. Yet one comment on this past incident got a real LOL out of me; I credit its author, one Mark Fahey of Lancaster, and I quote it in its entirety:
Its like a flash mob for seniors. Instead of breaking out in dance, they ram their cars into buildings. They're spread out a few days because they still use rotary phones.
So far, I've only seen one of these perps who was younger than us (that was the one who created a new drive-thru lane at the Dessert Deli near here), and she was charged with driving under the influence of drugs. So I'm hoping my generation is still mostly immune from such things. After all, it's not like the icons of our childhood are now considered suitable for senior citizen expos or anything, are they?
Oh, shush. And get off my lawn.