Good riddance.
The San Francisco judge who let an elderly driver off the hook for killing an entire family of four announced he’s riding off into the sunset.
And it can’t happen soon enough.
The Voice of San Francisco reports that 69-year old Judge Bruce Chan is retiring this year, one month after announcing he’ll let 80-year old Mary Fong Lau walk without a day behind bars, and three years before he’s set to face the voters again.
Because something tells me voters might have a long memory in this case.
It was just short of two years ago when Lau plowed her car into the bus stop where 40-year old Diego Cardoso de Oliveira and his wife, 38-year old Matilde Moncada Ramos Pinto were waiting with their two children, 1-year old Joaquim Ramos Pinto de Oliveira and 3-month-old Cauê Ramos Pinto de Oliveira, after celebrating their wedding anniversary.
Diego and Joaquim were killed instantly, while Matilde and Cauê died days later in the hospital.
Lau was driving on the wrong side of the divided roadway at 70 mph at the time of the crash. Yet Chan bizarrely ruled that there was no point in punishing her, because she’s old and really, really sorry.
Which must be why she tried to hide her assets before the inevitable lawsuit.
According to the website,
As if the family of the victims hasn’t suffered enough, last month, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Bruce Chan expressed sympathy for the now 80-year-old Lau and stated it was unlikely she would serve any jail time or even a community service mandate after pleading no contest to four felony counts of gross vehicular manslaughter…
After Lau changed her plea from not guilty to no contest, Chan said his duty “was to balance the deaths with the other factors of the case.” Those factors included Lau’s age, her lack of criminal history, and “her remorse,” as well as the fact that her own husband had died in a car accident early on in their marriage.”
Chan even injected some hearsay into the proceedings, saying that in the hospital after the crash, “Lau tearfully told medical staff she wished she could trade places with the family.”
Chan said jail time would mean Lau would probably die in prison. As opposed to her victims, who just died in the street and the local hospital.
Instead, he said he’d sentence her to a lousy two to three years probation. But at least she won’t be able to drive — legally, anyway — until her probation ends.
So we can expect Lau to get her license back when she’s 83, with the blood of four innocent lives on her record.
Seems reasonable.
But as writer Susan Dyer Reynolds notes, remorseful people don’t usually hide their assets.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, in July 2024, the surviving parents of Cardoso de Oliveira and Ramos Pinto filed a wrongful death civil suit against Lau. In May 2025, the relatives filed another civil lawsuit, this time asking a judge to void alleged financial transfers that Lau made after the first civil lawsuit was filed. The victims’ families accused Lau of transferring her ownership interest in several properties to new limited liability companies and selling properties to third parties, including her son-in-law, thereby transferring millions of dollars to avoid potential financial penalties from the civil suit. Hiding assets doesn’t sound like remorse to me…
Me, either.
So if you wonder why people keep dying on our streets, overly lenient judges like Chan are a damn good place to start.
But at least he won’t be around much longer to let any other killer drivers walk.
Photo by Sora Shimazaki from Pexels.
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This is why people keep dying on our streets, part two.
An estimated 77% of bike lanes in the US offer nothing but paint for protection.
And a new study in the Journal of Cycling and Micromobility Research shows that nearly two-thirds of those are on high-stress roads — aka, “fast, multi-lane corridors where traffic speed and volume make riding uncomfortable for most people.”
In other words, like virtually every bike lane in Orange County and much of Los Angeles, county and otherwise.
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Sadly, humans aren’t the only victims of traffic violence.
LA Reported says the number of animals killed by LA drivers reached a new high last year, with 33,458 deaths reported, including everything from family dogs and cats to deer, squirrels and birds.
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The annual Marathon Crash Ride returns to the streets of Los Angeles in the wee hours of Sunday morning, following the route of the LA Marathon before all those runners take over.
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Local
This is who we share the road with. A 55-year old man was arrested on suspicion of felony DUI, vehicular manslaughter and misdemeanor battery after he somehow threw his car into reverse at high speed, backing over a curb and slamming into people sitting on the stoop of a Long Beach building, killing a 20-month old toddler and hospitalizing a 45-year old woman and a 12-year old girl.
State
A proposed San Diego ordinance would ban kids under 12 from riding Class 1 and 2 ebikes, as well as prohibiting a passenger from any ebike without a permanent passenger seat; children under 16 are already prohibited from riding Class 3 ebikes.
A 51-year old Hesperia man was hospitalized with major injuries, and his dog killed, when they were struck by a van driver while walking his bike across the street early yesterday morning. But you’ll have to get around the paper’s paywall to read the whole story.
Alameda’s mayor writes that the city’s efforts to make roads safer for all users is paying off.
This is who we share the road with, part two. A Sacramento website reports that Black pedestrians are disproportionately more likely to be killed on the city’s streets, illustrating the story by describing a 26-year old South Sacramento man who was struck by a driver while crossing the street, then repeatedly run over by multiple drivers — all of whom fled the scene, and none were ever brought to justice.
National
A proposed IRS regulation could mean that bike couriers and pedicab drivers could write off their tips.
A Mesa, Arizona woman has filed a pair of $15 million claims against the city and county, after her 71-year old father was killed while riding an ebike when the lane he was riding in suddenly ended in a large pothole and a patch of gravel, with no warning in the dark because the stop sign was on the ground and there were no streetlights.
No surprise here. After the police chief of Greeley, Colorado hit a 15-year old bike rider while driving off-duty, the state police charged the kid, not the cop, for failure to yield.
An 82-year old Iowa man spends his winters repairing and refurbishing bicycles in Tucson, Arizona, before going home in the spring to work on more bikes.
That’s more like it. A Texas man was sentenced to 15 years behind bars for the hit-and-run that killed a popular 38-year old bike rider four years ago, and reporting his car stolen in an effort to cover up the crime. Does that ever work?
Indianapolis adopts Vision Zero, vowing to end traffic deaths by 2035. Let’s hope they take it more seriously than Los Angeles did.
New York’s city council rakes the city’s new transportation commissioner over the coals for the miserable job expanding bike lanes done by the previous administration, with one councilmember arguing that meeting just 50% of the city’s goals earns it a “big, fat F;” however, the new DOT head won’t commit to doing any better.
Residents of Maplewood, New Jersey are raising funds for the leader of a local bike bus after a hit-and-run driver left him with life-threatening injuries; a crowdfunding page has raised nearly $40,000 of the $55,000 goal.
A Virginia driver says he’ll be riding a bicycle now after the war with Iran caused gas prices to spike. So there’s that, anyway.
Seriously? Police in Raleigh NC have no intention of filing charges against the driver who killed a 65-year old man riding a bicycle, even though he was in a crosswalk with the green light, apparently because a) the victim was riding against traffic, and/or b) because the driver wasn’t drunk — even though the investigation is still ongoing, for no apparent reason. Never mind that crosswalks are bidirectional, and being under the influence isn’t the only way a driver can be at fault. And be forewarned, there’s no way to opt out of the cookies if you click on the damn link.
International
Road.cc takes you on a tour of the wonderful world of the year’s best bicycling shoes for beginners.
A writer for Cycling Weekly explains why his high-end bike tires cost three times as much as his crappy car tires.
A London law firm says they get contacted by an average of ten people a month who have been injured riding Lime bikes in the city, even though the company says 99.99 percent of journeys end without incident.
An Irish detective was awarded the equivalent of nearly $290,000 after he was suspended for three years for the crime of loaning a farmer an unclaimed bicycle that had sat for a long time at the police station during the pandemic.
Ireland’s transportation authority says active transportation takes up to 660,000 cars off the road every day in the country’s five largest metro areas. It could here, too, if people felt safer walking and biking.
Finally…
If this ebike bill passes, you’d better get used to lentils. How to make the bike of the year even better.
And now you, too, can be a super secret motor doper.
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Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.
Oh, and fuck Putin.
