A 93-year-old driver apparently suffering from dementia fatally struck a pedestrian and drove for three miles with the man’s body through his windshield, police said.
Ralph Parker was stopped after he drove through a tollbooth on the Sunshine Skyway, Traffic Homicide Investigator Michael Jockers said. The toll taker called police, he said.
Parker was not likely to face charges because he did not appear to know what happened or where he was, said Bruce Bartlett, chief assistant in the Pinellas-Pasco County State Attorney’s Office.
“He may have somewhere in his mind have realized it was a crash, but immediately forgot about it,” Jockers said.
Parker had renewed his license in 2003.
“That was the one thing he had, to get in his car and just drive for the sheer enjoyment of driving,” Jockers said. Parker lived alone after his wife died in 1998, authorities said.
I received a note from my insurance agent, yesterday, that he’d get me a reduction in my auto insurance if I took a course entitled “Senior Defensive Driving”. Silly me. I thought it was about maintaining my own driving skills — not avoiding getting killed by my peers!
I think Dennis Miller said it best, ” I don’t think you should be able to drive, if you are old enough to remember when there weren’t any cars.”
This is a tragic incident, but there must be some way we can monitor older people and take away their driving privileges if they are no longer competent.
By ‘monitor’ I don’t mean RFID tags and GPS sensors. I mean frequent licence renewal exams. Maybe require people over 65 to renew their licence every 2 years and over 75 every year.
The every two years proposal makes sense but wouldn’t have helped in this case since the original article said he renewed his license in 2003.
I know a little about dementia and have a hard time believing that this guys wasn’t already showing significant signs of the disease in 2003, considering how advanced it was in 2005. I suppose it is possible to go from total lucidity to total obliviousness in two years but I have never seen that.
Even so, didn’t he have relatives or a care takers to take away his car? If his disease was so advanced, he must have had somebody taking care of him.
This case raises a lot of questions!
AS the son of a 85 year old driver I can tell you there is no way to take there licence away. As long as he can pull off the test every year witch he has to do in indiana we can not stop him. He has found ways around the eye test and aparently if he can make it around the block he gets to keep his licence. Any one who has a parent this old is strugling with this problem. Just think in ten years my generation will be terroizing the roads.
>> AS the son of a 85 year old driver I can tell you there is no way to take there licence away.
It is often hard but not impossible.
We’ve done it several times in our family with grandparents, great uncles, etc. More important than getting rid of the licence is getting rid of the car! It helps if you live in a progressive city with good mass transit.
The international symbol for dangerous driver – white hair.
This almost isn’t news in Florida. Not long ago a group of girls playing jacks on their front lawn were crushed by an elderly driver here. He did not notice them while poorly navigating a cul-de-sac at the end of a long quiet residential street. He had no memory of even going down the street, but will not be behind the wheel again now that he is behind bars. It seems negligent homocide is a crime in Florida.
I lived in Florida for 12 years (recently escaped) and I doubt this story even made the front page of most major newspapers down there.
I moved to FL from the Northeast and thought that I had seen driving at its worst. I was unprepared for what I experienced in FL. People dead asleep at traffic lights, people driving the wrong way on the interstate (saw this multiple times), and a car flipped on it’s roof in an Arby’s parking lot.
Soon after I arrived in FL a 90 year old woman plowed through a bus stop and killed 11 people (this was her 2nd fatal accident). This provoked discussion about changing the laws in FL so that drivers over 75 would have to have an actual driving test every 2 years.
The AARP came out hard against the proposed law and elderly people were mobilized, forming picket lines, hiring call centers the whole show. The law quickly died.
Just last year an old man in Santa Monica killed a bunch of people at a farmers market. Again there was talk about additional driver testing for the elderly, again the AARP sent reps to all the talk shows etc to show what an evil idea that was.
It is insanity that many areas now have .08 legal alcohol limits (about 1 beer for the averaged size person) but continue to allow people suffering from dementia, blindness, palsy etc etc to drive.
My grandfather moderated himself. He turned his license in voluntarily and got a letter from the Sheriff a few weeks later thanking him. I find BOB G’s comments disturbing and I think his grandfather could learn a thing or two from the example set by mine.