A 30-year-old woman was arrested under the Road Traffic Law on Sunday after hitting a man with her car in a Nagano City car park and failing to stop at the scene.
Minako Nishio is accused of hitting Kazutoshi Hara, 31, with her car at about 1.30 a.m. Sunday morning as she was leaving a car park in Central Square, and driving off without stopping to check on the man’s condition. A passer-by who saw the incident called for an ambulance and gave police the car’s license plate number. Hara was taken to hospital but was pronounced dead about an hour later.
Police found Nishio at her home and arrested her. She admitted to hitting Hara but told police that he was sleeping on the road.
© News reports
16 Comments
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Disillusioned
So, let that be a lesson to everyone. If you sleep on the road some trout will run you over without a second thought and no remorse. Cool!
mindovermatter
Don't understand why she just didn't stop, even if she was drinking, it didn't have anything to do with the guy getting hit, nobody's going to see a guy sleeping in the road at 1 am.
Wakarimasen
How fast was she going if she killed him?
METinTokyo
I once asked a Japanese lawyer friend of mine if he could describe a scenario where a driver would not be responsible or have little responsibility for hitting someone, he came up with; hitting someone wearing non-reflective black from head to foot lying passed out in the middle of a road around a blind curve with no streetlights on a moonless night, . He thought that in such a case the driver might only be 25% responsible. Of course in this current story it is the running following the hitting that exacerbates the situation.
moonknightskye
in short... its always the driver's fault
nath
Another case of an "Braga'o" on wheels!, licence revokation on it's way, but tell me if there were any charges
TSRnow
If he was really sleeping on the road, it's pure bad luck for the lady.
Or it could have been some conspiracy and the person who called the ambulance was responsible for making the guy fall asleep in the first place, placing him exactly where he would get killed... Oops, too much suspense dramas!
nisegaijin
what did she did wrong? why is she arrested?
ZetaSagittarii
@ xpidf1: that's probably a temporary license suspension of up to 30 days from the day of the accident if she wasn't a novice driver (Road Traffic Law, Art. 103-2).
By the way, has anyone tried to run a search on "hit-and-run" in the JT's search engine? Personally, I keep getting no returns on this particular string, whereas other keywords appear to function properly (and so does a Google 'site:japantoday.com hit-and-run', with 1,500 results). Just being curious about some statistics on this topic.
dr_jones
Sleeping man in public ... He would have died soon anyway, either of overwork or too much alcohol consume. I must admit though, I find it amusing to see people sleeping in all the crazy places in Tokyo.
tamesu
well that accident site is now haunted along with many others.
bamboohat
How exactly did she know that he was sleeping? She drives in her car, feels a bump, looks back and notices some guying lying there and decides he was sleeping BEFORE she hit him? Somebody call Horatio.
Seriously, it sickens me that she knew she hit somebody and left him for dead. I hope she goes away for a long time.
Good on the chap that called it in.
Icewind007
If I ran some idiot sleeping in the middle of the road at night where it was probably not well lit since it was in a park... I'd feel little remorse for a guy practically committing suicide. Right out of the gene pool.
If you are simply talking about killing a person, the speed doesn't matter much when it is a car vs a sleeping man on the ground. She could have even been traveling a sound 15 mph (24 kph) and it would still have been fatal.
If this man was in a full suit or business attire, he'd have been all the harder to see since there would be little contrast.
If only she had stopped... probably would have turned out in her favor.
seasider
he may have been laying in wait until a car stopped in front of him, at which point the driver gets out of their car to see if the person is ok, then the driver gets "carjacked", robbed or worse.... On the other hand the woman hit him and then and drove off in fear for her safety...it was 1:30am
ohmygod
Sounds like she was careless exiting the parking garage. One should always be alert when joining traffic. It's not murder, but she bears responsibility for causing the accident and because she drove off knowing she hit someone, she should be punished severely.
Fadamor
Maybe they'll do a toxicology report on the victim. He may have been passed out, not sleeping. She gets zero sympathy from me for leaving the scene.