THE REAL CRIME IS THE LEVEL OF SERVICE ON STROADS.

Reason's Lenore Skenazy finds a new manifestation of the Nanny State.  "A Car Hit and Killed Their 7-Year-Old Son. Now They're Being Charged for Letting Him Walk to the Store."

What happened?

A mom and dad are grieving in Gastonia, North Carolina. Their 7-year-old son, Legend, was tragically killed by a car after running into the street on a walk to the store with his 10-year-old brother.

If you were tasked with determining a punishment for the parents, would you: A) arrest them for manslaughter, set bail at $1.5 million, and forbid them from attending their son's funeral, or B) decide this tragedy has been punishment enough?

Authorities in Gastonia chose option A.

Jessica Ivey and Samuele Jenkins are facing felony charges of involuntary manslaughter and child neglect, as well as a misdemeanor child neglect charge, according to The NC Beat.

The tragedy occurred on May 27. Ivey claimed it was the first time she allowed the kids to walk to the store. A witness to the accident said the older boy tried to grab his little brother from running, but he broke away.

The Gastonia Police Department issued a statement on its Facebook page, saying that while it extended its "deepest sympathies" to the parents for their "heartbreaking loss," the investigation revealed that the children were unsupervised during their walk.

As if that's a smoking gun. As if no kids have ever walked unsupervised to the store. As if every parent who lets their kids run an errand is guilty of a crime.

Nothing epitomizes the way in which car brain has infested our thinking quite like officialdom's attitude toward pedestrian deaths.  The concluding paragraphs of the Gastonia police statement convey nothing less.

While the Gastonia Police Department offers its deepest sympathies to the family for the heartbreaking loss of their child, the investigation revealed that the children involved were unsupervised at the time the boy stepped into traffic. In such cases, adults must be held accountable for their responsibilities to ensure a safe environment for their children.

At this time, there is no evidence of speeding or wrongdoing on the part of the driver, therefore no charges have been filed. The driver continues to be cooperative and the incident remains under active investigation by the Gastonia Police Department's Traffic Division. Anyone who witnessed the crash or may have relevant information is urged to contact Corporal Carpenter with the Gastonia Police Department at 704-866-6702.

Once upon a time, dressing down the parents for letting their children run free in the streets got your name on Mme DeFarge's chopping list.

Miffed at Monseigneur’s haughtiness, one guest, the Marquis Evrémonde, condemns Monseigneur as he leaves. The Marquis orders his carriage to be raced through the city streets, delighting to see the commoners nearly run down by his horses. Suddenly the carriage jolts to a stop. A child lies dead under its wheels. The Marquis tosses a few coins to the boy’s father, a man named Gaspard, and to the wine shop owner Defarge, who tries to comfort Gaspard. As the Marquis drives away, a coin comes flying back into the carriage, thrown in bitterness. He curses the commoners, saying that he would willingly ride over any of them. Madame Defarge watches the scene, knitting the entire time.

These days, officialdom can dress the parents down and it's all in a day's work.  Presumably the cooperative driver's insurance company will toss a few coins to the family, and the driver faces higher insurance premiums for as long as she is able to drive, and nightmares for the balance of her days.

Ms Skenazy rings the proper libertarian changes.

"In such cases, adults must be held accountable for their responsibilities to ensure a safe environment for their children," the department declared.

They must be held accountable for an unpredictable tragedy? Parents aren't prosecuted when their child chokes on dinner or slips in the bathtub—because accidents happen, even in the safest homes. How can parents ever guarantee a perfectly "safe environment"?

Do they think the parents haven't learned a lesson from this heartbreak? Who is served by this arrest? Has the Gastonia Police Department considered the impact on the surviving brother who will now believe "that his failure to save his brother resulted in sending his parents to prison?" asks David Pimentel, a law professor at the University of Idaho. "Does anyone believe that child will be better off in foster care while his parents rot in jail?"

The parents were arrested because our country has come to believe that any child who is unsupervised anywhere for almost any amount of time is automatically in danger, and therefore, that any parent who trusts their kids to do anything on their own doesn't care if they live or die.

This delusion—that any parent who doesn't hover doesn't care if their child is safe—is what allows the authorities to act as if Legend's parents deliberately did something so evil it warrants felony charges.

But in fact, it was a normal, rational, and common thing the parents did. "Ten-year-olds and 7-year-olds have been walking to and from school, unaccompanied by adults, for over 100 years," says Pimentel.

The implications of this prosecution "are very troubling for parents everywhere who can never provide a guarantee against their kids getting hit by a car, even if they were right there with them," notes Diane Redleaf.

Parents have a harder time ensuring that their kids won't get hit by a car, because level of service is more important.  The details are in Gastonia's police statement.

On Tuesday, May 27, 2025, at approximately 5:55 p.m., officers responded to a reported traffic collision in the 1000 block of West Hudson Boulevard. Upon arrival, police found that a 7-year-old juvenile male had been struck by a Jeep Cherokee being driven by a 76-year female driver traveling eastbound. The preliminary investigation revealed that the child was attempting to cross the street outside of a crosswalk with another juvenile male, aged 10, when he entered the roadway and was hit.

The "1000 block of West Hudson" is Hudson west of Lyon, and if the kids were headed from a residence southeast of that corner to the store on the northwest corner, they might have been hard-pressed to find a crosswalk along Hudson, let alone a sidewalk on the south side of Hudson.  Standard car-brain infrastructure, undoubtedly someone, somewhere, figured that nobody would be walking there.  Nobody bothers to walk there, no injury accidents to document in order to provide crosswalks or sidewalks, no crosswalks or sidewalks.  Then a kid goes there.  Thus, Gastonia; thus, downtown Springfield, Massachusetts.

Budget-strapped mayors, city managers, and selectmen, though, might have an easier time keeping their cities and towns solvent, if they put more faith in emergence and toss away the planning manuals, and that if so, the kindergarteners might discover the kid next door long before they meet at school.

Confessions is an elaboration of the Tragic Vision, right from the beginning, the story of a youngster in Springfield, Massachusetts, run down on the way out of the downtown library because the high street is configured like a stroad rather than a boulevard, and in the city center, where there are lots of buildings with lots of doors and lots of reasons for people to cross the street, only the street gives drivers visual clues more like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway than a high street, and there are few crosswalks, and kids get run down.

Hudson Boulevard looks more like a rural limited-access highway than an urban boulevard.

Ms Skenazy's summation is correct in part, incorrect in conclusion.

The sad truth is that often when something awful happens to a child, it's not the result of bad parenting. It's the result of bad luck. Blaming parents just means we have a scapegoat and can continue to believe that bad things only happen to the children of bad parents.

Turning tragedy into punishment doesn't make kids safer. It just makes all parents more afraid—and all families more vulnerable.

It's not bad luck to provide motorists with the sight picture of an expressway and hope for the best.  It's what happens when public officials make "level of service" for motorists the Prime Directive.