According to a 2024 Gallup poll, there are only 3 of 17 institutions in which a majority of Americans have “quite a lot” of confidence: small business, the military, and police. Only 12% trust TV news. Revenue comes from advertising, which depends on audience size, and confirmatory bias is the best way to attract channel surfers. If you like believing what they say, you’ll come back.
When TV news stations said a woman in a car had chased a juvenile on an e-bike on a trail where motor vehicles were not allowed, I was not among the 12% inclined to believe it because TV said so.
The evidence is a Go-pro video with 10 frames per second. The kid narrates, “This lady is trying to hit me!” He turns around to show us. The headlights seem far back. Four seconds later he crosses a 93-foot wide divided highway with a zebra crosswalk on black asphalt. He doesn’t slow. He crosses 3 stripes on the near lane, then 30 feet of concrete, then 5 stripes on the far lanes.
A second later he looks back. The car reaches the concrete median 44 frames after he did. If he’s going 25 (the advertised speed of his e-bike), he has traveled 165 feet. That’s 11 car lengths. She’s following, not chasing. Following is legal. It doesn’t threaten or endanger. If he’s going faster, she’s following at a proportionately greater distance.
TV said it happened along Pine Lakes Parkway, a two-lane residential loop whose walkway is posted against motor vehicles. It didn’t happen there. The only zebra crosswalk along that walkway is a single unit of 8 stripes across the concrete entrance to a service station.
The crosswalk in the video would be easy to spot on aerial maps, but I haven’t found it because the city has so many trails. A trail is a one-lane road. In 1970, when a corporation began laying out the city, the county population was so thin that one-lane roads sufficed. The city became notorious for pedestrian deaths and uncontrolled brush fires, so some trails were added as sidewalks along the busiest roads and others were added for fire trucks. Without knowing what trail it was, we don’t know if it cars were allowed.
In the TV video, the roadside trail becomes trail with no road visible. It looks like a 3.7-mile stretch of the Palm Coast Park US 1 Trail, a concrete road 10 feet wide and 10 miles long that was probably built for fire engines. This section runs on a 100-yard mowed swath between the highway drainage ditch and farmland. It has benches for bird watchers but no restrooms or lighting. If cars weren’t permitted, a bird watcher might have to walk miles in the dark before viewing at dawn or after viewing at dusk.
The kid is going south, and there’s no roadside trail that connects behind him, so two Go-pro sequences must have been edited together for TV broadcast. They may not involve the same car. A reckless rider may often find himself followed by a driver with a dash cam, in order to show LEOs what the offender did and where he lives. This section would make it easy to evade a car because at one point it connects with the shoulder of US 1 northbound, where a bike could continue south but a car couldn’t.
June 12, the sheriff’s office posted the 62-second video that the boy uploaded to the dispatcher June 8, the morning after he filmed it. It shows what’s missing from the TV splice. Thirty-five seconds after the zebra crosswalk, his camera suddenly sweeps down to his left handlebar. His hand isn’t on it. Then, in 0.6 second, it’s aimed at the horizon but tipped 90 degrees to the right. It shows bits of horizon for 1.2 second before there’s suddenly not enough light to make anything out. For 3 or 4 seconds, there’s a sound like sliding on grass, along with a bit of thudding. Then, for 5 seconds or so, it’s silent but for a soft whine. In the last 2 seconds, the whine winds down, as if his knobby tire had been spinning and he’d finally taken his thumb off the throttle.
There was reason for the woman to be concerned about his recklessness. If she’d been chasing him, his crash was her chance to catch him. The video continued 13 seconds after the crash with no sound from her or her car. She was following but not chasing.
The woman was arrested not because of the boy’s video but because after three days, the father brought in sworn statements from two witnesses unwilling to speak to the cops. One said he’d made an anonymous 911 call to say the car was only 6 to 10 feet behind the e-bike. Then he’d saved the boy’s life by cutting the driver off. The other said she was his girlfriend, who happened to be driving the vehicle behind his, making a video.
The 59-second video was uploaded to the dispatcher, and the sheriff’s news release had a link. It’s the right road but the wrong night. I guess she thought that if she turned her wipers off, the cops would be too dumb to realize it was raining, but the blurred lights, shiny pavement, and ripples on the windshield show that it was raining pretty hard. There was no rain June 7. June 8, the only rain was a shower about 2 PM. It must have been June 9, when it rained from 5 to 10 PM.
The sheriff’s department posted these links in a June 12 news release.
https://www.flaglersheriff.com/cmsf...ing-Teenager-on-E-Bike-on-Restricted-Path.pdf
The release says that on June 7, the dispatcher received a call from a man saying an SUV was chasing a juvenile on an e-bike on the pathway along Pine Lakes Parkway. Simultaneously, the girlfriend uploaded her video. It said deputies responded to the scene, where they interviewed the witnesses and reviewed the video. A video that wasn’t made until 48 hours later?
It says the caller told deputies he observed the juvenile trying to flag down vehicles while the chasing car was only 6 to 10 feet behind him. How do you flag down a vehicle while racing along a sidewalk? Except for a quick pan to her speedometer at 22 mph, the girlfriend aims her camera left for 48 seconds, at the e-bike and car on the path on the other side of a 50-foot grass strip. Quick brake flashes show that the car driver is careful to maintain a distance of about 50 feet. A passing deputy would have thought the driver must have turned onto the walkway to change a tire and was driving forward to the next street rather than backing onto the road on a rainy night.
The video shows that the car wasn’t blocked. The girlfriend points her camera below the window for 4 seconds. When she brings it back up, the car on the path is making a slow, tight right turn onto Woodhaven. It’s about halfway through the turn, at 45 degrees. A second car is parked on the other side of the street. As the turn proceeds, the lights hit the front of the stopped car. They don’t light the side until the turn is nearly complete. If the second car had been parked across the path, the first car would have lit its side up before even starting to turn.
The video doesn’t support the allegation of tailgating. It refutes the claim that the caller blocked the path. Deputies could not have reviewed the video 48 hours before it was made. I’m confident that the LEOs are neither stupid nor corrupt. A cop can lie about what he believes to gain the confidence of a suspect. The penalty for perjury is 5 years in prison, 5 years on probation, and $5,000. That’s the same as aggravated assault.
The release says the woman was arrested for “aggravated assault with a deadly weapon without intent to kill.” That’s a cop with the gift of gab. The charge would be “aggravated assault.” Usually, an arrest warrant means the person has been charged, but when it comes down to it, it means only that the judge saw a legal basis to say, “stay in touch.” The woman was photographed, fingerprinted, and immediately released on bail that she could have put on a credit card.
When you pay for news, you expect facts, not unchallenged allegations. You expect to be told who, what, when, where, why, and how. The Palm Coast Observer is a weekly online subscription newspaper. Reporter Sierra Williams interviewed the boy’s father and several LEOs for a story in the June 16 edition.
https://www.observerlocalnews.com/n...-on-e-bike-with-her-suv-down-pedestrian-path/
Deputies said their dispatcher had received a call on the evening of June 7th from a man who gave her registration number and said she was chasing only 6 to 10 feet behind a juvenile on an e-bike on a trail. Deputies found her. She acknowledged driving on the specified trail but was not ticketed. She said she was following the boy to speak to his mother about his recklessness.
With no evidence against her, they accepted her story. That means they couldn’t get a statement from the informant. Had he used a throw-away phone?
It wasn’t until the next morning, June 8, that the boy’s father had him dial 911 and upload his video to the dispatcher, who reviewed it and told him there was no evidence of wrongdoing.
The father went in to demand the woman’s arrest. A division head told him that following someone was not a crime unless there was evidence of intent to harm. To Williams, the father expressed outrage that the LEO ended up telling him that if she’d intended to harm the boy, she would have hit him.
The night before, deputies hadn’t ticketed the woman when she acknowledged driving where the tipster had said. Now the father did not demand that she be ticketed. Apparently cars were allowed on the trail where she’d followed him.
The man said he went home and posted the Go-pro video online. “My Facebook page blew up.” Nobody I know would say that. To say his videos had a large following is to suggest he’s monetized. That could explain why his son would be riding at night with a Go-pro and mic, repeatedly turning to show headlights behind him, and why the father would have video of more than one such “chase” on hand.
After putting the video online, he arranged interviews with eager TV stations. If you’re monetized on Facebook, publicity pays handsomely. He sent his wife and his son but did not show his own face. He returned to the sheriff’s office the next morning, demanding badge numbers and threatening to sue. More reality TV for his Facebook page.
LEOs told him that without witnesses, there were no grounds for arrest. He said he’d find witnesses. He signed a statement demanding prosecution and asked for three forms for sworn statements by witnesses. He quickly submitted one signed by his son.
The father said that later that day he became aware that a witness had come forward to a reporter in another county. In other words, deputies hadn’t told him about the anonymous tip. If he didn’t know about the call, why would he think they knew who to arrest?
The sheriff’s department told the reporter that the father returned the next morning, June 10, with the sworn statements. They didn’t match what his son had sworn, so he had his son recant and file another. Deputies took the statements to a judge, who signed an arrest warrant.
The woman was arrested without charges. Only a prosecutor can file charges, but the sheriff had gone straight to a judge. To charge a felony, a prosecutor must first get an indictment from a grand jury.
The sheriff’s news release must have assured the witnesses that he had swallowed their story, hook, line, and sinker. They would not be inclined to plead the Fifth Amendment when subpoenaed to testify, and a grand jury can indict anyone against whom it finds persuasive evidence. This may lead to indictments of several people who are monetized for videos that encourage kids to ride e-bikes lawlessly.
The anonymous phone call indicates that the woman was set up by the unsophisticated. Until recently, she worked for a security company in Maryland. That suggests to me that at 65, she’s a retired cop. The same may be true of her husband. The way to discourage e-bike recklessness would be to use unmarked cars to get dash cam evidence and find out where a kid lived, then have a deputy show the evidence to parents.
From 2005 to 2012, a private security company provided the sheriff with up to 128 deputies at a time when the county couldn’t offer the usual job security and retirement benefits. To investigate reckless kids, a security company could provide retired cops as private investigators, too old to look like cops and working part-time as needed. Husband-wife PI’s would be great because if one was following a bike toward an evasion such as going south on the shoulder of a northbound highway, the other could be ready to follow him home when he turned off.
Some parents would be grateful if a deputy brought evidence that a son was flirting with disaster. Video makers might react differently. I think a kid got her license number, and adults decided to have her convicted of a felony as a warning to others with dash cams. They thought an anonymous tip followed up by a kid with a Go-pro video would be enough.
www.wesh.com
sad reflection-its a bicycle,has to be safe?
