Hit-and-run charges for drivng over a leaf pile where kids were playing

[alp227]

That's what Cinthya Garcia-Cisneros of Forest Grove, Oregon is on trial for:

On the evening of Oct. 20, stepsisters Anna Dieter-Eckerdt, 6, and Abigail Robinson, 11, were playing in a large heap of leaves on Main Street when Garcia-Cisneros drove her boyfriend’s Nissan Pathfinder through it. Anna died at the scene. Abigail was taken to a Portland hospital where she later died.

Garcia-Cisneros took the witness stand in her own defense Tuesday afternoon. In tears at times, she testified about driving through leaf piles on the way home from picking up fast food with her brother and boyfriend.

In that large pile on Main Street, they felt the right front tire impact something. She and her boyfriend, she said, assumed it was a rock or a log. She continued driving around the block to her family's duplex.

Once home, her brother jumped on his bicycle and left. Soon after, he knocked loudly on the front door and called to her to come out.

The sound of his voice worried her, she said. When she went outside, he demanded that she sit down.

‘Then he said, ‘I think that you hit a child,’” she said.

So was the driver really supposed to suspect that humans could be inside a pile of leaves while driving at night? Or are the suburbs just not safe anymore for kids to play outside after sunset? From "stranger danger" to "hit and run danger", you wonder why you never see kids playing outside anymore.

[temporary311]

1. Why was there a pile of leaves on the street?

[upaloopa]

4. We used to rake them into the gutter and the city would come along and pick them up.

Before we would burn them but that was pollution.
I use to love raking leaves into the gutter and my dad burning them. On a cold day it was warm by the fire and I loved the smell.
Since you could no longer burn them they remained in the street longer giving kids a place to jump on the piles and play in them.

[Warren DeMontague]

2. I've been reading about this in the Oregonian. It is a very, very, VERY sad story.

To answer your question, no, she was not supposed to suspect that kids could be under those leaves. That is the tragic part.

The criminal part comes in allegedly leaving the scene and then taking the car to the car wash to hide the evidence of what happened.

[uppityperson]

18. Yup, that all is my take also. So sad, so tragic, and the trouble is for covering it up afterwards.

[Skittles]

3. I'm confused about the location of the leaves

were they actually IN the street?

[jmowreader]

7. Out west our cities have leaf sucker trucks

They wait till the leaves have fallen then send the leaf suckers down the street to suck up leaves residents rake into piles there. You can't park on the street the day the trucks come.

[Blue_Tires]

15. thanks for the explanation

because "leafpile in the street" was a major WTF? to me....

[JI7]

26. is it ok to drive through the leaf piles ?

or are people supposed to drive around it ?

[Xithras]

45. There's no specific law against it, but it's generally considered unsafe driving.

I live in a town where leaves get piled on the street (we have big pincer machines that pick them up, instead of suckers) and nearly everyone I knew in high school went "leaf bombing" at least once. I'm sure a police officer would issue a reckless or unsafe driving ticket if he actually saw someone doing it, but as far as driving infractions go, it's a fairly minor thing. The social pressure against it was actually a bigger deal than the risk of a ticket...in cities where gutter leaf pickup is the norm, knocking over a neighbors pile is a pretty rude thing to do (the city won't pick up spread out piles, so the neighbor has to go rake it up again). Growing up, I knew more than one teenager who lost their driving privileges when an angry neighbor came knocking on their parents door.

This is a situation where a young person did something that is technically a minor traffic offense, but is generally considered innocuous and doesn't result in real harm 99.9999% of the time. In this particular case, it killed two kids. It's a tragic situation.

[Ankletooth]

5. Leaves

In Forest Grove, the city comes by and sucks up the leaves. So you rake the leaves and place them in the street next to the curb.

[gollygee]

6. It sounds like a horrible accident

I don't think she could have been expected to know kids were playing in a pile of leaves in the street. And kids shouldn't have been playing there but I can see kids seeing big piles of leaves in the street and having trouble controlling the impulse to play in them.

I imagine the problem is that she got the car washed, and also that once she had an idea that she had hit some kids she didn't immediately call the police or in some way let the authorities know what happened.

[Kaleva]

8. +1

[jmowreader]

9. Why was she intentionally driving through leaf piles?

[Lost_Count]

30. They were in the street...

[jmowreader]

39. Where they are, is on the edge of the roadway

In all the towns where leaves are put in the street, at least in the Northwest where this happened, you rake your leaves into the "lane" where people park their cars. You don't stick them out in the middle of the street because they'd be all over the place long before the leaf trucks got there. The city will send you a letter that says the leaf trucks will service your street on x day and you can't park on the street on that day.

The very first line in the linked story: As Cinthya Garcia-Cisneros steered a Nissan Pathfinder into a heap of leaves... "Steering" implies she turned her car to hit the leaf piles.

[aikoaiko]

10. I think the issue is she didn't call the police when she was told she may have hit the children

But it is a very sad story for all, especially the children.

[Nye Bevan]

11. If she had called the police as soon as her brother told her that she hit a child,

instead of moving the vehicle to a different town and taking it through a car wash to hide the evidence, she would not be facing any charges and it would be viewed as a horrible accident.

I wish there were public service ads about not driving through leaf piles, to drive this message home.

[exboyfil]

17. My driver's ed instructor was emphatic about never running

over anything - for example a bag in the middle of the street. He hit the brakes hard on another student about to run over it. His contention was you do not know what is in it. Same could apply even more so to leaves (irrespective of children a rake could be in there for example). I passed on the lesson about not running over anything to my daughters.

We had a family friend whose small child was riding his big wheel in the street and was killed. I was a very diligent father when my children where young always looking out for potential dangers, but sometimes things happen. Fortunately I was home from work when a snapping turtle wandered into my yard (a big sucker). My wife was ready to send the kids out to see the turtle (she is from Iowa so not alot of snapping turtles). I quickly stopped that. I still think how close we came. Also the railings on my 2nd story deck was too wide, and my youngest almost fell. My grandma stopped her - again I was fortunate.

So sad for everyone involved in this tragedy. Why she did not call the police immediately is a mystery?

[Salviati]

19. +1

This is what my dad taught me when driving as well. You NEVER know what is in/under/behind anything when you're driving.

[Liberal_in_LA]

23. good advice.

[Cairycat]

12. Some years ago there was a similar accident in my town

where a young boy was killed by being hit by a car while he was playing in a pile of leaves in the street.

Thereafter, the city banned leaves being piled in the street. People do have the option of piling the leaves on the parking (between the street and the sidewalk) and the city will send their machine around to suck them up, for a fee. Otherwise people can buy special leaf bags, take them to the city facility themselves, or put them in their yard waste bins to be collected for free for an entire month in the spring and fall.

As far as kids playing outside - I think many kids are in daycare until dark or later. After all day in structured environments, they may want to just veg - after all, they see parents doing that. Even those kids not in daycare, may not play much outside because they don't have a lot of other kids to play with.

[Solly Mack]

13. Sounds like a terrible accident but then -

- Within minutes, before emergency responders arrived, her brother returned to the scene. He saw Tom Robinson, standing over the leaf pile, screaming.

The boy went home and told his sister she may have struck two children.


- Garcia-Cisneros testified that minutes after her brother told her about the crash scene, the three teens left the house and took the SUV to her boyfriend’s house.

In a different car, the group then went to get ice cream. Garcia-Cisneros testified she ate none. Then, she said, they went to Walmart for a while and finally returned to her house about midnight.

and

(once the police found her)

[http://www.oregonlive.com/forest-grove/index.ssf/2014/01/cinthya_garcia-cisneros_jury_b.html|She] first told police she hadn’t driven through any leaf piles, but eventually admitted she had.


and

the day after she ran over the 2 girls

“I grabbed my iPod and I searched the Forest Grove news. (I learned) that two little girls were hit and one of them was dead.” (and she still didn't turn herself in)


She ran errands with her boyfriend, 18-year-old Mario Echeverria. She was with him, she said, when he ran the SUV through a car wash without mentioning it to her.

She went back by the crash scene:

On later passing by the crash scene:

“I turned in my seat to face my boyfriend, and I covered my eyes. I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to see anything of what my brother told me.”

I think the above presents a problem for the driver.

[lpbk2713]

14. An act of stupidity took two young lives.

A pile of leaves had to be fairly high to conceal two kids.

Seems like most people would have gone around something that high.

[In_The_Wind]

22. "Seems like most people would have gone around something that high."

I agree.

[pnwmom]

29. It was worse than that. She purposely veered into it.

She steered into it because she wanted to go through it -- a very reckless act.

[Logical]

36. There is always a perfect poster to explain it to us! nt

[LittleBlue]

20. This seems more like a tragedy than a crime

Her biggest crime is panicking when she realized what happened, but that was probably too late to save them anyway. Nothing she could have done, after realizing that she hit someone, would have saved them.

No point in charging her with a crime for what is really just a tragedy.

[pnwmom]

28. Isn't panicking and leaving basically why it's a hit and run? And she lied

afterwards, when the police came to her and she told them she hadn't driven through any leaf piles.

[jmowreader]

40. Her biggest crime was steering into the leaves

If she would have driven past the pile of leaves rather than veering out of her line of travel to hit it, this wouldn't have happened.

[justiceischeap]

21. It's always the cover-up that gets you.

I was instructed never to drive through leaf piles because you could catch them on fire. I don't know if that's true or not but it stuck with me and I never drove through them.

[Omaha Steve]

24. Remember the Twilight Zone episode about the hit n run that killed a child?

It really connects to this incident.

[Orrex]

25. My friends and I used to do this exact same thing.

We'd bury ourselves in the huge leaf piles in the street. Great fun.

I'm amazed that no one ever ran over our stupid idiot asses.



A very sad story.

[freshwest]

33. We used to do that, but never in the street. We'd pile the leaves and make a bird's next to sit in.

No one ever put leaves in the street where I lived. In fact, we had to rake up the leaves that fell in the street alongside our yard.

Getting them out of the street to keep the storm drains clear was seen as a responsibility of the home owner.

This putting them in the street is a new one to me. What a tragedy.

[Art_from_Ark]

48. We used to rake up the leaves in the yard

and just dump them in the garden after we'd gotten through playing in them.

[freshwest]

49. When I grew up and got my own place, I did, but when I was a kid, we mulched trees and bushes.

Guessing communities with people throwing them in the street to be picked up for their community composting programs. But here, those have to go into the yard waste bins to be picked up. Never in the street, because they will clog the storm sewers and cause flooding in neighborhood. So the city in the OP must have a different plan, and don't have storm sewers.

But we're getting away from the topic and I don't know what to think about what happened there.

Was it intentional? Was the driver reckless, careless, or igorant? Could it have been avoided? Is the issue not going back to render aid? Was the driver and/or passengers callous or devious?

Looks like the jury will decide.

[pnwmom]

27. The fact that the brother rode back on his bike tells me that a thinking person

would realize that that "rock or log" should have been investigated.

[mythology]

31. I would certainly want to check, even if just to make sure there's no damage

As others said, I was taught to not drive over objects if at all possible. You never know what could be in it.

Although I don't have much sympathy for the driver given her efforts to conceal her actions. I get that's she's basically a kid herself, but find some intestinal fortitude.

[WillowTree]

32. Don't the little girls' parents bear some responsibility?

Two kids playing in the leaf piles out in the street, apparently unsupervised.......Is that something you'd let your kids do? Not to beat the parents up.......they're no doubt suffering more than anything anyone else could do to them, but geez, I just don't get that part.

Horrifically sad all the way around.

[DreamGypsy]

35. The girls' father apparently had been observing.

From the Oregonian, October 21, 2013:

The two girls, whom police said are step sisters, were playing in a pile of leaves, which extended over the curb and into the 1700 block of Main Street. Neighbors and police said the crash occurred across the street from the family's home, in front of the Forest Grove School District administration building.

Investigators do not think the vehicle that hit Anna and Abigail left the roadway. Herb said police think the children were playing in the leaves that were piled in the street.

The driver, Herb said, may not have known that he or she struck the girls. It's unclear whether the two were sitting up or completely submerged in the leaves.

Their father was outside with them snapping photographs, Herb said. At the time of the crash, he either looked away or ran into the house momentarily.

"Herb" is Capt. Mike Herb, a Forest Grove police spokesman.

Tragic.

[WillowTree]

47. Thank you. Just so bloody heartbreaking. Praying for all of them.

[kiva]

34. "Cinthya Garcia-Cisneros guilty of hit and run in crash that killed Forest Grove girls"

A jury of 12 unanimously found Cinthya Garcia-Cisneros guilty of both counts of felony hit and run she faced in a crash that killed two young stepsisters in Forest Grove.A jury of 12 unanimously found Cinthya Garcia-Cisneros guilty of both counts of felony hit and run she faced in a crash that killed two young stepsisters in Forest Grove.

............................................

Garcia-Cisneros’ sentencing hearing was scheduled for Jan. 31. The judge could impose a minimum sentence of probation. Under state sentencing guidelines, her presumptive sentence would be 16 to 18 months in prison on each count, McKey said after the hearing.

http://www.oregonlive.com/forest-grove/index.ssf/2014/01/cinthya_garcia-cisneros_guilty.html

Good, I hope she gets the max - I think that a year and a half to three years is a pretty light sentence.

[Logical]

37. 3 years is enough for a accident! Wow! nt

[kiva]

38. Hit and run.

The punishment is about running and denying what happened, not about the fact it was an accident.

[Logical]

41. 3 years is enough. The GOP loves long sentences! You too? nt

[kcr]

43. In this case I don't agree

She didn't even realize she'd hit anyone. She didn't intentionally leave the scene of an accident. I think the judge should take that into account. She should have immediately turned herself in when she realized what happened, but she doesn't deserve 3 years in prison for failing to do so. I think she panicked when she realized what happened.

[kiva]

44. My feelings are colored

by the fact a friend of mine knows the parents and has told me things about the young woman who hit her - and yes, they may be exaggerations - that my friend heard from the family. I know from a similar tragedy in my family that not everything makes it into court, particularly about a defendant.

One of the things to consider is that by the time the police arrested Garcia-Cisneros they could not test her to see if she had been under the influence of anything at the time of the accident.

[kcr]

46. I can understand why people close to a case feel the way they do

I can't argue with feelings like that. I don't even want to think about it if were to happen to me.

[Rex]

42. Intent, it might save her life from prison.

I would NOT suspect children to be playing in a pile of leaves that were in the street so that could be ME. However, I would avoid the pile...for the exact reason of I don't know what is in them. She however decided to have some fun and drive through a leave pile on the street. Not realizing there were kids inside. How sad and tragic for both families.