Driven to Kill I May 2017
Twice more he shifts back and forth be-
tween drive and reverse, each time thud-
ding over the grandmother’s body. He then
speeds away from her corpse.
Incredibly, Zhao was found not guilty
of intentional homicide. Accepting Zhao’s
claim that he thought he was driving over a
trash bag, the court of Taizhou in Zhejiang
province sentenced him to just three years
in prison for “negligence.” Zhao’s case
was unusual only in that
it was caught on video. As
the television anchor not-
ed, “You can see online an
endless stream of stories
talking about cases simi-
lar to this one.”
lifetime care for a disabled survivor can
run into the millions. The Chinese press
recently described how one disabled man
received about $400,000 for the first 23
years of his care. Drivers who decide to
hit-and-kill do so because killing is far
more economical. Indeed, Zhao Xiao
Cheng – the man caught on a security
camera video driving over a grandmother
five times – ended up paying only about
$70K in compensation.
[ The man’s
foot is so
close to the
toddler’s
head that, if
alive, the boy
could have
reached out
and touched
him ]
“The Double hit cases”
have been around for dec-
ades. I first heard of the
“hit-to-kill” phenomenon in
Taiwan in the mid-1990s
when I was working there
as a fellow English teach-
er. A fellow teacher would
drive us to classes. After
one near-miss hit of a mo-
torcyclist, he said, “If I hit
someone, I’ll hit him again
and make sure he’s dead.”
Enjoying my shock, he explained that in
Taiwan, if you cripple a man, you pay for
the injured person’s care for a lifetime. But
if you kill the person, you “only have to pay
once, like a burial fee.” He insisted he was
serious—and that this was common.
Most people agree that the hit-to-kill
phenomenon stems at least in part from
perverse laws on victim compensation. In
China the compensation for killing a victim
in a traffic accident is relatively small—
amounts typically range from $30,000 to
$50,000—and once payment is made,
the matter is over. By contrast, paying for
In 2010 in Xinyi Ye, video
captured a wealthy young
man reversing his BMW
X6 out of a parking spot.
He hits a 3-year-old boy,
knocking the child to the
ground and rolling over
his skull.
The driver then shifts
his BMW into drive and
crushes the child again.
Remarkably, the driver
then gets out of the BMW,
puts the vehicle in re-
verse, and guides it with
his hand as he walks the
vehicle backward over the
boy’s body.
The man’s foot is so
close to the toddler’s head that, if alive, the
boy could have reached out and touched
him. The driver then puts the BMW in drive
again, running over the boy one last time
as he drives away.
Here too, the driver was charged
only with acci