From Rhino Times Reader Austin Morris
That incident in Eden last year was horrible. Four men were killed through irresponsible and careless driving by a City of Eden employee. But he didn’t intend to kill them; it was not murder.
The truck driver, Michael Vernon, 66, missed a stop sign. The consequences were horrific. Four guys were killed and two more injured. It doesn’t get much worse for running a stop sign.
But let’s tell the truth: it was an accident. A horrific dreadful accident that caused the death of innocents – but still an accident. When millions of people fly around in metal boxes amongst each other, there are going to be collisions.
This was one of them.
Today the driver who caused the deaths died in prison. His sister says he “grieved himself to death’.  To me, that is another tragedy, albeit perhaps a lesser one.
But here’s the thing. Am I the only one who finds the public anger at having been cheated of “justice” unsavoury? By justice, the aggrieved, indignant and righteous seem to mean that they didn’t get to put to death Mr Vernon, or impose an effective lifetime prison sentence on him.
Is that justice? Or just revenge?
Worse still, on Channel 12 I had to watch the litigous attorney David Dagget opine about how the victims’ families have been “denied justice”, as if destroying an old man’s life would have been justice. Forgive me, but I don’t care for that man who’s all teeth and tan.
There is no justice in this World. The four guys cannot be brought back, and for all we know Mr Vernon would gladly have given up what was left of his life if he could bring them back. He seems to have been a decent man. The burden of it all crushed him.
The seething anger against him is perhaps understandable, from the families of the victims at least.
But in the end it was just an accident. A horrible, deathly accident.
Perhaps we should add a fifth death to the count.
Michael Vernon.
I have no connection to any of the parties involved. I’m just put off by the grisly fury of those who feel cheated now that Vernon has died, probably of a broken heart.
The whole thing is a tragedy, but the reactions of those who remain tell us a lot.
Austin Morris

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