Quickhits: We are dying

Lancaster Online: Crash injures man on mobility scooter

David Bair, 72, of Ephrata, was driving his personal mobility scooter southbound along North Church Street around 11:30 a.m. when the accident occurred. [...] A southbound car driven by John Risser, 81, of Ephrata, crested a small hill and struck Bair’s scooter from the rear.

The stretch of road where the accident occurred has no sidewalk, forcing Bair to drive his scooter on the shoulder of the road.

Mansfield Chad: “Gran died after mobility scooter hit by car”

An inquest has been opened into the death of Sutton pensioner Sarah Holmes who died after her mobility scooter was hit by a car. The 83-year-old, of Willow Crescent, died at King’s Mill Hospital on 28th September following the collision on Lammas Lane on 23rd September.

CBC Canada: “Woman in wheelchair dies after Fredericton hit and run“:

Fredericton police are looking for the driver of a car who fled the scene after a woman in a motorized wheelchair died following a hit-and-run collision over the weekend.

NPR: “Disabled People Are Frequent Victims Of Crime”

People with disabilities are one-and-a-half times more likely to be the victims of violent crime than are people without disabilities, says the first national study to compare crime rates.

The results, just released by the Justice Department, are disturbing. But they come as no surprise to those who work with people with disabilities. For a long time, they’ve known about this particular crime problem, at least anecdotally.

Sometimes cases get national attention, like the abuse revealed earlier this year at a state institution in Texas where workers trained and hired to care for the vulnerable adults there goaded them into fighting each other for the entertainment of the staff. Two of the staffers in the “human cock fight” case were recently found guilty and given prison sentences.

But what people in the field had long known, and what the Justice Department report confirms, is that crime is a daily fact of life for many people with disabilities and most of it never gets public attention. [...]

Disabled women were the most at risk: They were victims at rates almost twice that for other females.

There are nice examples of passive-voice and agent-deletion in this article, eh? I get that the study started with the victims, but I can’t help thinking there would be a better way of putting these sentences together, one that doesn’t erase the perpetrators so completely.

Additional results from the report:

Among persons with disabilities, females had a higher risk of violence than males (table 3). Age-adjusted rates of violence for males and females with a disability were higher than the rates for males and females without a disability. The age-adjusted rate of violent crime against females with a disability (35 per 1,000 age 12 or older) was almost twice the unadjusted rate for females without a disability (19 per 1,000 age 12 or older).

*Persons with a disability had an age-adjusted rate of rape or sexual assault that was more than twice the rate for persons without a disability.

Persons with a cognitive disability experienced higher rates of rape or sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault than those with a sensory disability.