The incident was captured on video and shows a rally held by 40 people protesting the observance of Columbus Day - also in solidarity with the fight against the controversial Dakota Access pipeline.
When the group gathered under the Reno Arch crosswalk to pose for a photo, two men in a white pickup truck drove up to the protesters and revved the engine. The two men were asked to back up by the crowd as they gathered around the truck, and a heated exchange ensued. The driver paused for several minutes before finally plowing through the crowd as people were heard screaming. The truck hit five people, sending one elderly woman to the hospital.
Comment: This is beginning to sound a bit less like a grotesque attack on protesters and more like regular ol' road rage.
Reno Police Chief Jason Soto said at a press conference Tuesday that five people โ the driver, his passenger and three people from the scene โ were evaluated by medics.
The names of the driver and passenger were not released, but the driver was identified as an 18-year-old and the passenger as a 17-year-old.
Soto declined to say whether charges had been filed against the driver or passenger.
Soto said the protesters had not obtained a permit from the City of Reno.
The driver of the vehicle stopped several blocks away and called 911 to provide his account of events, police said. The driver and passenger of the pickup truck were interviewed and are cooperating with the ongoing investigation.
"This is a hate crime," Quanah Brightman, executive director of United Native Americans told the Reno Gazette-Journal. "It's still brutal to see this kind of racism in America. That man deserves life [in prison] for what he did."
Comment: See, when someone says stuff like that, they water down the meaning of "hate crime." Pretty soon - no intelligent person could take the term seriously.
Life in prison? Best way to not get political power: Tell people up front how you'll abuse it out of all proportion.
Brightman said the elderly woman went under the truck as she was run over. She was treated at the Renown Regional Medical Center and her injuries were listed as serious on Tuesday afternoon. Four people were treated on the scene for minor injuries.
Taylor Paniagua told the Reno Gazette-Journal that he jumped in front of the pickup in an effort to stop the driver from fleeing. He caught the hood of the truck, but the driver kept going.
Comment: He's learned a valuable lesson today - don't jump in front of cars.
He grabbed one of the side doors and was dragged toward Second Street, he said. He eventually let go and slid, scraping his arms. The driver and passenger were described as white, "chubby" and in their 20s.
"This just is not right," Paniagua said. "It didn't seem right when they revved the engine."
Another video posted on YouTube has surfaced which shows the encounter with two young men.
Comment: We suggest you actually watch the video, but we warn you it's intense. At the end of the day, the takeaway lesson is that people can be very mean and very stupid. When mean people meet stupid people - tragedy ensues. Whatever possessed these people to bodily block and harass a driver of a car can only be described as stupidity. Whatever possessed this driver to speed through a protest - no matter how verbally aggressive and menacing the protesters - can only be described as meanness.
The Rev. Ralph Whitted of Cincinnati told the Reno Gazette-Journal he was standing at the intersection of Virginia and Second streets when he saw the truck speed off.
"He was weaving in between cars, gunned it and nearly clipped another car," Whitted said.
The incident, which was posted on Facebook and seen by 70,000 viewers and shared by over 1,600, is being investigated.
We have entered an era when instead of focusing on moral civility and its ramifications, we focus on "its a hate crime" , political correctness, black lives mater, etc, etc. Wake up, don't you see that this fracturing of all immoral behavior into more defined and specific acts is insanity. It is designed to separate us in so many ways, even in how we view poor or illegal behavior. Why is it necessary to categorize criminal behavior in so many ways that you need a dictionary to determine what type of crime it is? and then the big question is: Do we have a statute or law that addresses that specific descriptor of immoral behavior? When you think about it, it is ludicrous. When human behavior reaches the point that it dictates or requires that another individual submit to this imposed behavior, it becomes immoral or criminal, ie a violation of free will. There should be no question when something is inappropriate, it occurs when an outside, individual or government entity imposes its will on another individual to the violation of free will.
As logical as this Golden Rule approach to immoral behavior seems, we all seem to be drawn into this need to discriminate into finer and more specific types of inappropriate behavior. Instead of one individual assaulting another, we are concerned with whether it is bullying, physical assault, rape, etc. The point is physical assaulting of another is painful and completely unacceptable. Only during the determination of punishment should the judgmental body consider the level of physical assault and its effect on the victim. In this phase the judging body should consider the physical effects both short term and long term on the victim. If during a physical assault with a vehicle the victim looses an arm, that assault is much more severe than if the perpetrator uses his fist to punch the victim. They both inflict pain but the loose of an arm is life changing and something that the body cannot heal itself from.
The point to this discussion is to illustrate how we have been manipulated by the system to divide ourselves into so many fragmented elements and thus loose the common thread that binds us. We have given up our power as a single group. Instead we have allowed ourselves to be marginalized into a myriad of individual causes, each without sufficient power to demand change.