Driven to Kill I May 2017
[ China’s courts. Judges, police, and
media often seem to accept rather
unbelievable claims that the drivers hit
the victims multiple times accidentally, or
that the drivers confused the victims with
inanimate objects.driver claimed that he
had never noticed the child. ]
These drivers are willing to kill not only
because it is cheaper, but also because
they expect to escape murder charges.
In the days before video cameras be-
came widespread, it was rare to have
evidence that a driver hit the victim
twice.
Even in today’s age of cellphone
cameras, drivers seem confident that
they can either bribe local officials or
hire a lawyer to evade murder charges.
Perhaps the most horrific of these
hit-to-kill cases are the ones in which
the initial collision didn’t injure the victim
seriously, and yet the driver came back
and killed the victim anyway. In Sichuan
province, an enormous, dirt-encrusted
truck knocked down a 2-year-old boy.
The toddler was only dazed by the in-
itial blow, and immediately climbed to
his feet. Eyewitnesses said that the boy
went to fetch his umbrella, which had
22
.isms I May 2017
been thrown across the street by the
impact, when the truck reversed and
crushed him, this time killing him.
With so many hit-to-kill drivers escaping
serious punishment, the Chinese public
has sometimes taken matters into its
own hands. In 2013 a crowd in Zheng-
zhou in Henan province beat a wealthy
driver who killed a 6-year-old after alleg-
edly running him over twice. (A televi-
sion report claims the crowd had acted
on “false rumors.” However, at least five
witnesses assert on camera that the
man had run over the child a second
time.)
Escaping the law
Of course, not every hit-to-kill driver
escapes serious punishment. A man
named Yao Jiaxin who in 2010 hit a
bicyclist in Xian and returned to make
sure she was dead—even stabbing
the injured woman with a knife—was
convicted and executed. In 2014 a driv-
er named Zhang Qingda who had hit
an elderly man in Jiayu Pass in Gansu
province with his pickup truck and cir-
cled around to crush the man again was
sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Both China and Taiwan have passed
laws attempting to eradicate hit-to-kill
cases. Taiwan’s 1th legislature reformed
Article 6 of its Civil Code, which had
long restricted the ability to bring civil
lawsuits on behalf of others (such as a
person killed in a
Meanwhile, China’s largest legisla-
ture has emphasized that multiple-hit
cases should be treated as murders. Yet
even when a driver hits a victim multiple
times, it can be hard to prove intent and
causation—at least to the satisfaction of
.isms I May 2017
23