Swerving to avoid a deer at high speed IS reckless and is something that was always specifically warned against in drivers training classes when I grew up, and I grew up only a couple hours from the area in which this happened.
There are a lot of accidents involving deer, but the vast majority of them aren't because the deer was just standing in the road, they happen because the deer jumps out on the road in front of the car too close for the driver to avoid it.
I've been in a car that has struck a deer on a couple occasions, fortunately in neither case was the car badly damaged.
My wife hit a deer when she was young and almost totaled her parents car.
While I've never actually hit a deer, I have been hit by one. I saw the deer running through the field and slowed down, and the deer ran into the side of my car leaving a noticeable dent. It stunned the deer, but it got up and ran off.
Swerving to avoid what appears to be a full-sized deer in the road is not what I would call "driving recklessly", given that they could have been killed had they hit a real deer.
A fake deer placed on the road doesn't jump out at you. They shouldn't have had to swerve while traveling at a high enough rate of speed to roll the car in order to avoid it because they should have been able to see it in time to either stop, or at worst hit it at a low speed because they couldn't quite stop.
We have the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, knowing they could have hit that decoy with little damage.
What if they swerved into the other lane to avoid the deer and hit an oncoming car?
Even by your numbers, in the collisions with deer that were serious enough to be reported (which from my personal experience is a small portion of them), 150 people were killed in 500,000 accidents. Even assuming that there were not a significant number of multiple fatalities, that 0.03% of the accidents that were reported that had a fatality.
The fact that the driver was only 18 and lost control of the car in no way mitigates the fact that he attempted to do the correct thing.
I agree that their age is not relevant.
However, they were not in control of their vehicle as required by law. They were driving too fast or not paying close enough attention, or a combination of both.
While the accident wouldn't have likely happened if the "pranksters" didn't negligently place the decoy on the road, it also would not have happened if the driver was in proper control of his vehicle.
The "pranksters" had no business putting that decoy on the road.
The driver is required by law to maintain the ability to stop or at least avoid such obstacles on the road safely.
Live animals sometimes jump out in front of vehicles with little or no warning making avoiding them impossible. This was a stationary object.
Even if it were a live deer, and it jumped out in front of the driver too close for the driver to be able to stop, swerving off the road at a high rate of speed is extremely foolish. Hit the stupid deer.
As for those 150 car-deer collisions that were fatal, I suspect that a large percentages of the fatalities were not because the impact with the deer caused a fatal injury, or that the impact forced the car off the road or into another vehicle. I suspect that they were the result of the driver swerving in an attempt to miss the deer.
Solidly hitting a deer can do a lot of damage to sheet metal but unless your vehicle is low to the ground or you hit them mid jump, the grill will take the worst of it and they won't come through the windshield. If they don't come through the windshield or obscure your view of the road, you should be able to keep your car in your lane until you stop and avoid hitting other cars or going off the road and hitting a stationary object or rolling the car.
It's not hitting the car deer itself that kills people, it's losing control of their vehicle out of surprise and hitting something else.
Unless you are going slow enough to safely go around an animal on the road in a controlled manner, you should never swerve out of your lane to avoid it. Doing so puts yourself and others at serious risk, and since you can't predict what the animal is going to do you really can't determine if swerving would avoid it anyway until it's too late.
are you one of the kids that did this, how can you reason this? do you have nothing inside you that puts these two reckless teens at fault? My heart bleeds at these two teens who will have to not only live with what they did, with little tangible punishment, but live scorned the rest of there lives by their peers and hometown folk. It isn’t a matter of arguing for them, but giving them that which would have been more humane to them in the first place. Please rethink how you are approaching this, if not for me, for those involved, for all sides.