[Arrocousa]

This is just horrible. Here is video footage of the man being hit by the car and nobody even responding to the incident.

Police Decry Callousness Of Hit-and-run

AP

June 4, 2008 --

HARTFORD, Conn. -- The surveillance video is gripping - a 78-year-old man is tossed like a rag doll by a hit-and-run driver, and car after car zooms by as he lies motionless on the busy city street.

Pedestrians gawk but do nothing. One driver stops briefly but then pulls back into traffic. A man on a scooter slowly circles the victim before zipping away.

Police say the video holds a sad truth about Connecticut's capital city.


A screengrab from the video of the hit-and-run accident.

"At the end of the day we've got to look at ourselves and understand that our moral values have now changed." Police Chief Daryl Roberts said. "We have no regard for each other."

Police released the May 30 video on Wednesday, hoping that it will lead to an arrest. The victim, Angel Arce Torres, was in critical condition in Hartford Hospital. Authorities say he is paralyzed.

"My father is fighting for his life," said Torres' son, Angel Arce. "I would like the public right now to help us in identifying the car and the person that did this."

The police surveillance video was taken at 5:45 p.m. May 30 in a busy Hispanic working class neighborhood a few blocks south of the state Capitol.

It shows Torres, who was walking in the street after buying milk at a local grocery, being struck by a dark Honda that was chasing a tan Toyota. Both cars dart down a side street as Torres crumples onto the road.

The minute-long video shows several cars passing Torres as a few people stare from the sidewalk. Some approached Torres but most stayed put until a police cruiser responding to an unrelated call arrives on the scene.

Robert Luna, who works at a nearby store, blamed witnesses for failing to help Torres. "It took too long to call police," he said Thursday. "Nobody did nothing."

Witness Bryant Hayre said he didn't feel comfortable helping Torres, who he said was bleeding and conscious.

"Whoever did this should be sent away for a long time," Hayre told The Hartford Courant. "It was as if he was a dog left in the street to die."

Roberts said the hit-and-run is the latest in a string of incidents that show the callousness of this city of 125,000. On Wednesday, authorities discovered a badly decomposed body of a man in the basement of his family's foreclosed home after he had gone missing for months. On Monday, former Deputy Mayor Nicholas Carbone, 71, was beaten and robbed while walking to breakfast.

"There was a time they would have helped that man across the street. Now they mug and assault him," Roberts said. "That's not a police problem.

We no longer have a moral compass. Anything goes."

Copyright 2008 NYPost.com

[Abnorbprootly]

What a sad and horrible story. This is the kind of thing you would expect to see in NYC in the 70's. That it still exists is very disheartening.

[masaredera]

My gut feeling is that hit-and-run accidents are more prevalent today (even adjusted for population) than in the 1970s.

[MizzDaizzy]

I agree. It's just terribly disturbing to watch that elderly man get hit by a car and watch literally, no body, care about it. That woman walks to close to him, just to look down the road.

What is the world coming too?

[ZXRamon]

I cant stand this, everyone on that street is guilty.

[bug_user]

My gut feeling is that hit-and-run accidents are more prevalent today (even adjusted for population) than in the 1970s.

oddly,it was not the hit and run aspect of this that bothered me as much as the inactions of the bystanders. I agree, we hear more about hit and runs today but what I find most disturbing is that at 5:45 PM on a busy street during rush hour, no one stopped to help this poor man. No one wanted to get involved, to take a license plate, to call the cops. That is what was meant by my 1970's reference.

[WeestDype]

Note the location: Downtown Hartford, Connecticut.

For those who've not had the misfortune to spend time there it is one of those "dead' downtown cities where 90% of the folks clear out around 5 PM. Some of our largest insurance companies are headquartered there, which is explanation enough for the lack of humanity displayed in this situation.

[ddwayspd]

Actuaries.

[Cheaperisdeeper]

I have actually spent time in downtown hartford... i never lived there,but the company i used to work for was known for providing wholesale financial services to large companies and institutions. Many of the insurance companies that were located downtown havde moved to corporate parks on the outskirts of the city itself. Or at least their operations did. Some did remain however.

Either way it is a vey depressed and depressing city. I am far from the architectural expert you guys are, but the city reminds me of what Robert Moses would do if he had a whole city to work with.

Read the article. There were plenty of people around to help that man, locals and commuters alike. There was a camera that recorded the comings and goings of people on the block. In one case a guy on a skateboard just circled him a few times and skated off. In others people walked right past him. Several cars passed by him as he lay bleeding in the middle of the road. People had the opportunity to step up nad help but decided not to

[__CVineXPharm__]

The bare inhumanity of it, for me, was that these people DIDN'T EVEN CALL 911!!!

You would think that someone would have a cell phone, and at the very least, call 911! What were these people afraid of? Being blamed? Being inconvenienced?

Some bogeyman was going to come out and grab them, or infect them, or drive another car into them? These guys should feel ashamed from their lack of compassion and lack of aid.

There is not much you can do to a person who is struck like that that might have a back injury (for risk of paralysis which noone would know), but you would think that someone would go out there to see if he was bleeding or something!

And those cars were driving like Go-carts. I seriously hope they find them and rob them of their freedoms long enough to appreciate what they did just for the fun of a race.

[nushentelve]

Exactly, its not hard to dial 911 and say someone is injured at this location send an ambulance please, you would need to break your stride to do that.

[orerviche]

http://www.suntimes.com/news/nation/...-hit07.article

911 calls were made in widely viewed hit-and-run

June 7, 2008
Recommend (2)

BY ASSOCIATED PRESS

HARTFORD, Conn. -- Police released audio Friday of two 911 calls made after 78-year-old Angel Arce Torres was struck by a car and then left in the street by passing motorists and pedestrians.

The recordings were released two days after police Chief Daryl Roberts publicized a surveillance video of a car striking Torres and leaving him paralyzed. No one in the video stepped forward to help Torres, prompting Roberts to declare, ''We no longer have a moral compass.'' City officials later acknowledged that police received four 911 calls.

[Diortarkivoff]

^^ so they dialed 911 and what .... left the scene?? That's OK??
Pretty low standard of decency.

[Xlkl9SFd]

Is it so hard to go stand there with the guy til someone got there?

[Dastyh]

Yeah you should at least go stand in the street and wave off traffic so he doesn't get hit again. While another person or two go stand with him. If you aren't trained to give first aid, though, you shouldn't try to administer it and you should never try to move someone.

[exettybele]

Oh c'mon. I read the comments here before watching the video and expected a total disregard for the victim, but that's not what I'm seeing. Barely a minute passed between the hit-and-run and the police car pulling up. Not a lot of time to process the shock of seeing this type of thing. It's hard to judge anyone's emotion from the video, but judging by the small crowd that gathered (again, in barely a minute's time) and the fact that four calls were made to 911, it seems people were concerned but perhaps didn't know what to do. Let's not demonize them for not reacting perfectly in such a short time frame. The real scoundrel here is the driver of that car.

[KignPeeseeamn]

Hospital video shows no one helped dying woman

BY JOHN MARZULLI

DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Monday, June 30th 2008, 11:32 PM

A shocking video shows a woman dying on the floor in the psych ward at Kings County Hospital, while people around her, including a security guard, did nothing to help.

After an hour, another mental patient finally got the attention of the indifferent hospital workers, according to the tape, obtained by the Daily News.

Worse still, the surveillance tape suggests hospital staff may have falsified medical charts to cover the utter lack of treatment provided Esmin Green before she died.

"Thank God for the videotape because no one would have believed this could have happened," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

"There's a clear possibility of criminal wrongdoing with regard to recordkeeping, and that has to be investigated."

The city Department of Investigation is part of a sweeping probe that has brought some changes to the ward known as G Building.

A federal suit filed last year in Brooklyn alleged neglect and abuse of mental patients at the hospital. The suit sparked an investigation by the Brooklyn U.S. attorney's civil rights unit before the June 19 death.

Two different security guards spotted Green, a native of the island of Jamaica, prone on the floor and did nothing, the tape shows. They have been fired, along with four other staffers.

Green, 49, taken to the unit for "agitation," keels over out of her chair at 5:32a.m., according to the time stamp on the video. She had been sitting about 3feet from an observation window. Two other patients were in the room.

Green is lying facedown on the floor, her legs splayed, when a security guard strolls by at 5:53 a.m., looks at her for about 20 seconds and then walks away.

She is writhing on the floor, thrashing her legs, about 6 a.m., when her medical chart contends she was "awake, up and about, went to the bathroom."

Green rolls on her back at 6:04a.m. She stops moving at 6:08 a.m., but two minutes later a security guard pushed his chair into camera view.

He never gets out of the chair, but looks at Green and scoots away. A female patient who was in and out of the room finally brings a clinic staffer to check the woman and a crash cart is summoned.

The medical chart claims she was "sitting quietly in [the] waiting room" at 6:20 a.m., although she was already dead. The cause of death is still under investigation.

"We are shocked and distressed by this situation," the Health and Hospitals Corp. said in a statement.

VIDEO of the incident here.

Copyright 2008 New York Daily News