There’s a photograph of a really bad car wreck on page 6 of today’s newspaper.
Information accompanying the photo will tell you that two men were injured in the crash that happened in the early morning hours of Saturday.
Both men are in their mid 20s.
Both men are in hospital recovering from injuries.
Both men are very lucky to be alive.
Had they been killed you probably would have seen the photo along with a story on page 1.
We’re determined to place each traffic death on our lead page.
Fortunately, our photo of the crashed car didn’t make the front page.
We have it on good authority speeding was a determining factor in the crash.
The Caymanian Compass ran a story earlier this year in which we profiled car crash victims who were killed since 1 January.
Of the 22 people who had died in wrecks since that time, 19 were men and just three were women; only one of those women was actually driving.
The average age of all drivers killed was 27. The average age of the male drivers killed was 23.5.
Perhaps most troubling of all, 15 of the 22 people killed in vehicle accidents since 1 January 2005 to the time of publishing that story in February were age 26 or younger; six were teenagers. All but one of the 15 youngest victims was male.
The ages of the two men injured this weekend fit nicely into our statistical analysis.
And that should just be further proof to young men behind the wheels of motorised vehicles.
SLOW DOWN!
We don’t know anything about these two young men who were hurt Saturday.
It’s possible they are married with children.
It’s possible they are aspiring doctors or lawyers.
It’s possible they’ve got girlfriends, parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, sisters, brothers, friends and colleagues.
It’s possible their families could have been spending a rainy Monday making funeral arrangements.
But for whatever reason, the lives of these two men were spared.
We’re hope they are thankful and have learned a valuable lesson.
And we hope other young people – especially men – don’t see this accident in which the driver and passenger survived as and excuse to drive carelessly.
These two were lucky. The next young speeder won’t be; the statistics prove it.
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