Woman killed in practical joke that turns tragic

Boston Globe ^ | March 7, 2005

[billorites]

COVENTRY, Vt. --A 21-year-old Newport woman was run over and killed when a practical joke turned tragic on U.S. Route 5, police said.

Ashley Lewis was pronounced dead at North Country Hospital in Newport early Sunday, said state police Sgt. Kevin Charboneau.

Keith Gingue, 21, of Johnson, was charged with drunken driving following the incident.

Charboneau said Lewis was driving on Route 5 with three friends at about 1 a.m. Sunday when she stopped at a large pull-off area about a mile south of Airport Road so the women could relieve themselves.

Police said Lewis and Aimee Hopkins, 21, of Lyndonville, got out of the vehicle and left Gingue and another man in the vehicle.

While the women were relieving themselves, Gingue got into the driver's seat and pulled the car ahead about 25 feet, running over Lewis, Charboneau said.

"He didn't know the girl was squatting in front of the vehicle," Charboneau said.

Lewis suffered massive internal injuries. She was pronounced dead at the hospital.

[Mr. Jeeves]

Practical jokes are neither.

[Feiny]

Sometimes you just gotta go. I have travelled with people that have bladders the size of a walnut & they need to stop often. It is annoying. In college, we used to just pull over to the side for that person to go...and we did pretend to pull away once or twice.....and we were drunk. Hey, it was college.

Also, if you travel with kids....you may not have the option to go another 10 miles to the exit.

[theFIRMbss]

>i guess it never occurred to them to go to a garage or restaurant and use a real bathroom

I thought everyone
on the east coast was supposed
to be a genius . . .

(I guess these people
were more H. P. Lovecraft types
not John Updike types . . .)

[coloradan]

Ban urination. (Drunk driving is already against the law, and didn't stop this tragedy.)

[Feiny]

Who hasn't pretended to leave someone....or pull away when they get close to the door?

[sockmonkey]

It's amazing any of us survive the idiocies of youth.

That was my first thought.

[Khepera]

OK... You Drive

[dead]

or pull away when they get close to the door?

When you're drunk and twenty, that can be funny over and over again, for a quarter mile or more.

[sandalwood]

I had a friend in high school who was home from college as a freshman and went out for a night of drinking with some friends. He decided to go "surfing" on the roof of the Jeep Cherokee, and when the driver (who was drunk) put the car into gear, he fell off the roof.

Hit the back of his head on the asphalt just so, and after laying brain dead in a hospital for three days, died.

Sad, sad, sad. Because in a few more years, these young adults would have been old enough to know better, but never got the chance.

[sandalwood]

When you're drunk and twenty, that can be funny over and over again, for a quarter mile or more.

Come on - when you're twenty, even sober it's good for a couple hundred feet!

[Paloma_55]

When I was a teen, I was sitting on the back of a friend's car in a parking lot while talking to other friends. He started it, rev'ed the engine and took off.

I stayed on because I thought he was going to slow down, but he kept going faster and faster until I figured that if I fell off I would be dead.

So, rather than fall off at 40, I jumped off at about 20mph.

The only thing that saved me was my western boots with steel "horseshoe" taps. I slid backward as the taps sparked all over the place and came to a stop facing backwards. I was able to modulate my traction by shifting my weight from front to back to remain stable.

I was really pissed, but alive.

If I had been wearing tennis shoes, probably would have been brain dead too.

[Feiny]

Or someone starts crying....nope...that makes it even funnier.

[dead]

I dated a girl whose previous boyfriend was in a completely vegetative state. His friends had taken him out for his 24th birthday and got him drunk. When they stopped at a red light, he got out of the car to run up and tell his other friends in the pickup ahead of them something. They didn't see him approaching and they didn't see him slip on the ice and fall under the truck. The light turned green an instant after he slipped and they stepped on the gas and crushed him.

The guy driving the truck was never the same either.

[albee]

Geeeeeeeee Whizzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

[dead]

One time, we were driving back from the shore in an extremely hung over state. My friend Joe and I were in the front seat when we spotted the most messed up scraggly homeless guy ever to wear a cardboard hat hitchhiking, so we stopped to pick him up.

We rolled down our windows, then engaged the child locks so the windows in the back seat wouldn't work.

"Hop on in!" we told him, "Just wake up that guy back there and tell him to make room."

We drove that guy for twenty miles, with my hungover friend Ronnie muttering "C'mon a$$holes, open the windows! I'm gonna puke!" the whole way.

"Thanks for the ride, fellas! I think your friend here had too much to drink last night! So did I! Threw up on myself, I think."

[Osage Orange]

It was by God's Grace that I survived my late teens and early 20's...

"There go I, but for the grace of God..." comes to my mind quite often.

FRegards,

[ladiesview61]

It's amazing any of us survive the idiocies of youth.

You're so right..when I think back on the stupid things I did with my friends in my early twenties, I'm thankful I'm still here to talk about it. I feel so bad for this poor girl and her family and all of her friends. Damn.

[Feiny]

That is cruel & unusual punishment.

[monday]

A friend of my roommate in college took a taxi home after a night of drinking and stopped to puke behind the taxi after he got home. He was bending over and the driver backed right over him. Dead, dead, dead. The Taxi driver wasn't even drunk.

I expect this sort of thing happens all the time.
,
Lesson: never, ever, sit, kneel, or stoop in front of, or behind, a motor vehicle. Especially if there are drunk people anywhere near by.