Portland’s motor vehicle menace spread to someone’s living room in the Lents neighborhood in the early morning hours of December 30th. According to a post on Nextdoor shared by Portlander Lucy Dao yesterday, her family is now homeless because a driver piloted their Mercedes SUV into the front of their home.
“A drunk driver and three passengers drove their SUV through our fence and a tree into our living room, bathroom and barely missing my brother’s bedroom right where the head of his bed lay. Luckily no one was injured and no one was in the living room when it happened,” states a post on GoFundMe where the family has raised over $3,200 so far.
Photos show that the car came to rest inside the home and did extensive damage to several walls. The driver and passengers allegedly fled the scene and the family faces thousands of dollars in repairs and months of alternative housing.
According to the Portland Police, the home is located at the corner of SE Harold and 99th in the Lents neighborhood (see above). Given the photos, it’s likely the SUV driver was headed eastbound on Harold prior to slamming into the house. There’s a concrete, planted median (home to tiny Mill Lents Park) one block east of the house and the speed limit on this section of SE Harold is 25 mph.
The victims of this vehicular assault are left with trauma, their lives in disarray, and so far, there’s been no justice for the person who did this to them. “The negligence of their actions is abhorrent,” Dao wrote on Nextdoor. Her brother and his girlfriend were inside the home when it happened and she feels they are lucky to be alive.
“I believe there needs to be justice served here for the cowards that ran away from this disaster. So if you or anyone you know hear anything at all about this incident that would help us locate these people, please please reach out.”
Police responded to the scene and officers towed the car and helped Dao find a contractor to board up the house. The Portland Police Bureau told BikePortland this morning the car was not reported stolen and the case remains under investigation. If you have information about this, call PPB non-emergency at (503) 823-3333 and reference case number PP23-335352.
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The GoFundMe mentality continues to be a curiosity.
Fortunately, the victims have homeowner’s insurance and surely the owner of the Mercedes SUV have some type of insurance that the homeowners insurance will go after.
Maybe the family had some items that were not covered under insurance.
No one is forced to donate to a GoFundme…perhaps the family has no money for the immediate repairs that are needed?
We all know how quickly many insurance companies respond…
‘Why do you care anyway?
The “gofundme mentality” isn’t what you think. It’s gonna be a long time since the family sees any insurance money from this incident. Until then they will likely need cash to put themselves up in a hotel and try to resume life until their house is fixed. Given the location of this incident, I think it’s pretty safe to say this family doesn’t have the resources to put up the cash to front the costs of being displaced which is where things like gofundme go a long way in helping.
more than 10% of Oregon drivers are unlicensed/insured, and the minimum insurance you are required to carry is only 20,000 dollars in property damage per crash, I would not be so confident that the drivers insurance will cover this as it seems quite clear that the driver did far more than $20k in damage here. Personally I carry 100k in property damage on my auto policy and an additional million dollar personal liability umbrella policy. It is my opinion that is much closer to what the minimum insurance requirements should be and that we should be doing a much better job of enforcing insurance requirements by confiscating vehicles which are being operated without insurance.
7 likes so far for shaming a family that had a car pretty much destroy their home..
Nice pro car crowd here it seems.
Emergency alternative housing is seldom, if ever, covered under homeowners insurance. This means many months of rent, in addition to whatever they still have to pay on their mortgage. Thanks in large part to capitalism, the GoFundMe “mentality” has become a REALITY for so many people who lack a large enough safety net to cover anything of a catastrophic nature.
This is in the Powellhurst/Gilbert, Lents neighborhood. A long way from Cully.
I live just beyond where this crash occurred. I’m saddened to see this but absolutely unsurprised. People fly down Harold, particularly between 104th-136th.
The bike lane unceremoniously ends/begins at SE 104th. A majority of the street lacks sidewalks and has dangerous intersections with no clear pedestrian markings between 104th-136th.
This street would greatly benefit from any sort of traffic calming — speed bumps, sidewalks, separated cycling facilities, marked crossings, etc.
I’ll keep pinging PBOT, my neighborhood association, and anyone else who will listen.
It would also benefit greatly by people taking the personal responsibility to not drive drunk/impaired. Unfortunately in today’s permissive environment it seems a comprehensive street redesign is just as likely to be completed as people not drunk driving.
2024 off to a rough start already.
“Personal responsibility” to me is just code for shame. Western religions have tried the shame approach for 2000yrs with lackluster results. There’s no question that the world would be better off if everyone took personal responsibility, but it’s not going to happen in our lifetimes. What can happen in our lifetimes is building safer streets so the consequences of poor decision making are less impactful. The economic cost of each unintended death is just under $9M according to the CDC. What if we spent that money fixing dangerous intersections and roads before they cause the deaths? We can also invest in better transit infrastructure so that the easy decision is to take the bus/train to the bar instead of a personal vehicle. We lost 71 people in auto related deaths in Portland this year, that’s $600M+ in preventable economic losses.
The money you and the CDC are talking about doesn’t exist.
Every single person is an amazing singularity of uniqueness and at the same time we are worth not a cent when we are dead. There will not be some cosmic entity to place 10.7 million in a government credit when I die.
None of these streets are getting the redo so many people cry out for, we can’t even get the potholes fixed or pave over the gravel/mud streets.
Besides, with the coming climate crisis the needs of these streets are going to be drasiticaly different relatively soon.
I understand your desire to fix external things so we don’t have to fix things within ourselves to better society, but which one do you really think is going to be the long term change that will be for society’s improvement?
What we can do is focus on ourselves, if that is religion to you or simply civic pride or consideration for others than whatever you want to call it, it is all we realistically have.
That’s what you think
A scary thought indeed!!
Culture can be an effective curb on behavior. Some societies (and some US states, like Vermont) manage a high rate of gun ownership without many shootings, while others use guns to solve all manner of disputes.
The more people who fail to take responsibility for themselves, say, by driving after they’ve been drinking, the more we need police to ensure these people don’t hurt others.
I’d much rather people feel shame for drunk driving so that they avoid doing it than have to have cops to arrest someone after they’ve killed someone because “shaming people is bad”.
“shaming people is bad”
The person you are replying to didn’t say that though. He said it doesn’t work.
We know cultural norms work (as in my guns example, there are plenty more).
Maybe equating them with “shaming” is where Brandon went wrong. Or maybe shaming can be effective.
Either way, when it comes to drunk driving, it only needs to be a little effective to save lives.
Society/culture can have a huge impact, and I would argue that most drunk drivers feel shame when they wake up the next morning and realize they drove home drunk. I just don’t think shame is having enough of an impact on future behavior. Personal responsibility sounds great, but I have yet to hear an articulation on how a city can implement that. As I said above, the western faiths have been pushing that for millennia and yet the Catholic church has been paying out hundreds of millions for hiding sex abuse in their ranks, it just doesn’t seem like it works particularly well. What does work in most major cities outside of N America is a functional public transit system. As a country we have been investing trillions in car infrastructure since the 50’s. Until our financial priorities change from moving cars to moving people we will struggle with all of the associated negative impacts of a car based society, including drunk driving. I’m simply of the opinion that we have maxed out the potential benefits of shame and we need to look for alternative solutions. We can beat our heads against the wall trying to change the decisions of millions of individuals, or we can create a system that makes those decisions less likely to produce harm, I think changing the system is easier personally.
The people that live in the city can do that. Behavior can be changed with social pressure by peers. Government can’t do everything for the people, nor should it. At some point the people need to say that enough is enough and behavior A is not to be acceptable in pleasant company.
This all just boils down to thoughts and prayers. “Personal responsibility” is just “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”.
You see, “personal responsibility” has to apply to each individual. It’s not a matter of potential drunk drivers just magically deciding to not drive drunk. Everyone in society has to magically, spontaneously decide to act different. That’s why the solution is a joke. If it worked, it would be working now because it’s what we’re doing now.
Put another way, what is preventing “personal responsibility” from solving all the problems of drunk driving right now?
You’ve just made the case for the police.
Actually, no I didn’t. I made the case for “not personal responsibility”. Police vs. personal responsibility is a false dichotomy.
If we can’t rely on social pressure to get people to follow the rules, and if we don’t have some sort of enforcement mechanism to force people to do so, what is the alternative besides abandoning any rules?
Examples of rules I don’t want to abandon: Don’t drive drunk. Don’t steal. Don’t assault people. Don’t smoke fentanyl on the playground. And so on.
It’s like you’re straw-manning your own argument. You said I made the case for police, and now your follow up is “some sort of enforcement mechanism” (i.e. not only police), and completely ignoring all the non-enforcement ways to address problems that are mentioned in direct ancestors to your comment.
What then?
…or guard-railing infrastructure.
Even in a world with near infinite money, I don’t think trying to make the streets physically safe for drunks to drive on would be a thing.
I’m not sure you know how bad drunk driving used to be in the country.
As recently as 1985 drinking/being drunk while driving was completely legal in more than half the country.
Enter MADD whose members decided to cause shame, change laws and tell people that they could use their own “personal responsibility” to simply not drink and drive.
-break-
People concerned about the problem have been trying and succeeding (see above examples). If you’re not concerned about the problem and you’re not working to influence your peer group to not drink and drive, thats not the fault of anyone but you.
No, it doesn’t. Speak up when that person who has no personal responsibility is staggering towards their car reeking of booze. Sober people can speak up, shame, laugh at the potential drunk driver in order to make a change.
People are indeed choosing to not drink and drive. Some people aren’t. A lot of the problems of drunk driving have been solved, the willingness of people to get in a vehicle drunk while their friends shrug it off hasn’t been solved yet.
Again, I understand it seems easier to rebuild the city and/or ban cars, but those aren’t actually realistic by any stretch.
You didn’t provide any examples of “personal responsibility” reducing drunk driving. You cited legal changes which are still in effect today.
I don’t know what you’re not understanding here. That example is itself just hoping for people to have personal responsibility. Hoping the peer pressure will work, and hoping individuals across the country will just start speaking up and shaming people who are about to drive drunk.
Do you want to start DARE back up? Sure, maybe people need a reminder that drunk driving is bad. Maybe they forgot. Otherwise, I don’t know what you think is going to motivate anything different to happen.
Oh ok then, problem solved, what are we here talking about? Everyone knows what they should be doing. I don’t know, it just sounds like you’re proposing a media campaign. Sure, why not. But I also don’t think drunk driving was ever even close to wiped out by MADD et al, it never went away, and it’s not at some all time high right now.
That highly depends on the individual. We need social pressure, and in the cases where that fails, we need laws and enforcement of those laws.
The city cannot “implement” social norms. That has to come from us.
We already have tons of alternatives to driving yourself to the bar: transit, taxis, Uber/Lyft, designated drivers, walking, biking, drinking at someplace local. Would improving transit help? Probably, but it’s not like that’s the only option.
What works in places like Germany is strong social norms coupled with harsh punishment. Many Germans live in areas that are poorly served by transit, they like to drink, and they manage.
We have a social contract. Unfortunately many in Portland don’t think we need to follow it.
While I am a big fan of redesigning streets, I agree with you that people who choose to drive drunk/high need to be punished. Harold could, and should be rebuilt to include sidewalks, bike lanes, and lots of traffic calming. If PBOT set their gears turning on that tomorrow, we might see the project done in 2030. Enforcement can address the problem NOW. People sure are a lot less likely to drink and drive if they know it can ruin their life if/when they get caught.
With regards to enforcement, I recall seeing a moto-cop parked on my street in July ‘23. I live on one of the few North-South through-streets in this neighborhood and was curious to ask them what they were doing, so I did. The cop mentioned they were stepping up enforcement for people speeding on Harold, Holgate, and 111th. I recall them him saying something about the traffic cops participating in some sort of training and that they’d be much more of a presence in the neighborhood.
I haven’t seen any sort of enforcement to prevent dangerous driving since then, so perhaps they’ve shifted their focus elsewhere. Granted, I’m not on the streets 24/7 looking for cops but I do walk/ride in/out/through my neighborhood daily. Cars still drive very fast down my street and every other street in this neighborhood.
Regarding the slow timeline of PBOT completing projects, I remain hopeful and optimistic about any sort of positive change to street occurring in my lifetime! With luck, I’ll still be walking and riding around my neighborhood in 2030 🙂
People know it can ruin their lives, they just aren’t thinking about that after their 5th beer. I have several friends who have been through diversion and yet still drink and drive. They know they can get caught because they have been, and they know the consequences, because they spent time in a classroom learning them. Enforcement can save lives, and should be happening, but assuming it will fix outcomes is a stretch in my opinion. We can try to incarcerate every person who makes bad decisions, but we are already one of the most incarcerated countries in history and yet still have plenty of poor decisions being made. Let’s work toward making the safe choice be the easy choice, it won’t be quick, but positive change rarely is. I’ve wandered around European cities for weeks at a time drinking beers and looking at old shit, and at no point did I require a motor vehicle. The same is possible here, we just haven’t been able to turn off the car infrastructure spigot, even in one of the most “progressive” cities in America.
I see this as a funding priorities problem. Blaming individuals is akin to ticketing individuals for not recycling plastics properly. Sure, we can all recycle better, and that will reduce some negative impacts of plastics, but that will not fix the underlying problem. Pressuring individuals to change their behavior without addressing the system that generates those behaviors is ineffective in my opinion.
I’ve traveled around Boston, NYC, Washington DC, Seattle, and many other US cities using transit just fine. What you experience as a tourist in the cores of urban areas is much different than what you experience when you live in a particular place, which, like here, is often suburban.
Your view of European transit is highly influenced by selection bias. Europe is chock full of car infrastructure.
**Edit** The bike lane begins/ends at SE 102nd. Duh!
I’ve now regularly elect to ride the Springwater Corridor to/from work in Inner SE to avoid a majority of the car traffic. A 21 mile round trip commute is a bit more than I’d like to ride daily but the peace of mind while riding the path is worth it. I’ve stupidly bike toured on big roads (Highway 26, 97, 58, State Route 14, 395) so it’s not as if I’m not used to fast passes — it just gets old after a while, ya know?
“The Portland Police Bureau told BikePortland this morning the car was not reported stolen and the case remains under investigation”
Should be a pretty short investigation then, since the car wasn’t stolen and there are license plates on it. If they plates turn out to be stolen presumably the driver didn’t burn the VIN off the car with acid before fleeing…
Right!?! Can’t they hold the owner of the car responsible if the car is not reported stolen?!?
The car owner’s insurance will be making a payout either way.
Unfortunately, only the driver can be held responsible. And nobody can prove who was driving.
How do you know this?
They have top men working on it right now.
“… … … top… …men.”
Haha!
The driver knows that he or she will be charged. They may have also known that they were impaired. Since they fled, they cannot be convicted for DUII – no breathalyzer or blood test to confirm it. They can be charged with reckless operation, fleeing the scene, etc., but a good lawyer can make the case for a medical or mental health crisis causing the erratic response and the prosecutor will likely offer a plea deal for some misdemeanor charges instead of spending resources to teach the public a lesson. This is how our system works. The disincentive for taking responsibility is greater than the penalties for fleeing.
Insurance will pay out the victim’s claims. Sadly, that will take time and a lot of personal effort to get the damaged repaired.
I really don’t understand why they allow any place that serves alcohol to have a parking lot. Designating a driver is a very silly preposition and obviously not going to work, and I don’t think there is any form of drinking and driving that is responsible.
Whether we should be devoting any part of a city to hardscaped parking lots is debatable, given the climate crisis.
In terms of impaired drivers, the pressing question is whether we will begin to hold accountable the venues that serve alcohol to people who then leave those establishments intoxicated. Per the OLCC: “It is against the law to serve or sell alcohol to a visibly intoxicated person. The law says that you shall not ‘knowingly allow’ a person to drink or continue to drink alcohol after you have observed that the person is visibly intoxicated. This means: FIRST, do not sell alcohol or serve an alcoholic drink to a visibly intoxicated person. SECOND, if a customer is in the middle of a drink and begins to show signs of visible intoxication, you must remove the drink or at least attempt to remove it.” (Note: this applies to ALL patrons, not just those who are about to drive.) When I was in high school, which admittedly was a while back and in another state, we knew that if someone was underage and served alcohol in a private home, the adults in that household could be held legally responsible if the underage person crashed a car. If Portland were serious about curtailing impaired drivers, they could start doing breathalizer tests for drivers leaving venues that serve alcohol. We do not need to wait for a crash that kills, injures, or destroys property. But we do need to stand up to the business interests that push alcohol consumption, which is killing an increasing number of Oregonians.
Bartenders like their tips, so they’re not in a hurry to cut you off. I was blacklisted from a bar because I reported them to the OLCC for overserving and they figured out it was me.
The whole thing about not serving a “visibly” intoxicated person is an unenforceable joke and I hope we all know it. It amounts to a blanket prohibition on alcohol (at least outside the home I guess), which is a thing that has been tried.
But I like your suggestion of breathalizers before leaving. I’m not sure exactly how it could be done, since it’s not illegal to be drunk and so they can’t hold you in the bar until you sober up. They could keep your keys until you pass a breathalizer, which I think would go a long way but would be trivial to circumvent by just keeping a separate car key. You’d have to be a dedicated drunk driver, so I bet this would go a long way.
You could require the actual driver pass a test to leave the parking lot, but that assumes a parking lot which doesn’t have to exist and patrons don’t have to use if it does.
Breathalizers in every car is what would be the most fool proof, and that’s going to be a really hard sell.
How about a breathalyzer test BEFORE you get your next drink? Once you reach the legal limit that’s it.
If you want to be an idiot and drink until you are impaired/drunk, do it in your own home, not in public.
And yes, I abhor the false narrative that one must drink alcohol to “have fun.”
I’m sorry to be the first one to tell you this, but the reason people drink alcoholic drinks is because of the alcohol. We could save a whole lot of health problems and other social ills by just drinking fancy juice at the bar, but if that was what people wanted, bars wouldn’t exist. Mocktails exist, NA beer exists, people drink those things, but if that gave people what they wanted nobody would be drinking the other ones. People are there to get drunk. Or get a little drunk.
I suppose if a BAC of .06 has enough of an effect to give people what they want and doesn’t greatly increase the danger they pose in a car, sure. Maybe your suggestion would help. But I’m under the impression that even that level still impairs you some, and we would just have this background level of increased crashes from people who were legally not drunk.
Also, by your suggestion, you’d be serving people until they were above the legal limit, so… not sure what that does.
Not everyone who goes to an establishment that serves alcohol drinks, and so many places serve – basically every restaurant – that this would just be a ban on commercial parking lots.
now you’re speaking my language
Why is DDing a silly proposition? I do it for my friends all the time: we all go out, I volunteer to not drink, and then I drive them home. I hold myself accountable, and it works every time. And the times that I want to drink, we find another friend who is willing to DD.
And what are the alternatives for those who live in a place that’s underserved by TriMet? Cycling while drunk would be dangerous (not to others but to yourself), obviously driving drunk is a no-go, transit is nonexistant, bars are too far away to walk to. Ubering and DDing are the only options for the majority of people.
Because the consequences of drunk driving re too great to simply trust people to manage DD logistics. If you move to a place too far to walk home from the bar drunk, then just get drunk at home. It’s not worth killing someone – and that is the big issue. A drunk cyclist can only kill themselves – bad but that was their choice. A drunk driver can kill innocent people sitting in their living rooms watching TV – this should be prevented at all costs.
That sounds like a great way to develop an alcohol addiction/problem. In contrast, drinking only while out and about around town sets that boundary.
and yet those who drive drunk or impaired are not setting that boundry. I wish more people would get drunk at home rather than getting drunk out and about.
Because one can go to such a place and order food?
I wish “the system” that we have for cars required all drivers to pay into a fund that covered ‘crashing into stationary objects’ which seems to happen regularly. the state minimum insurance policy only requires coverage for up to $20,000 for damage to another person’s property.
Obviously it is easy to do way more than $20k in damages to someone’s property and who ends up paying that money? IT SHOULD BE DRIVERS paying that money.
Ideally the one doing the driving would have to pay but this fund could be a way to pool all accidents damages into one pot and pay out. A lot of the damage is done to government property like traffic signals, bus shelters, and other public infrastructure. Who pays for that currently? taxpayers but not drivers specifically I believe
The minimums are so low, I encourage anyone who drives to explore raising your coverage to a more realistic amount. I am not sure when the last time the minimums were adjusted but I know it wasn’t recently.
“Insurance” is such a system. I agree the current limits are pathetically low, and I totally support raising them, which would be much easier than creating a new program that fulfills the same function.
YES. Internalize the #%^£ externalities!
We absolutely should have a system like this, but it would be opposed as a “tax on the poor”.
This gets to the fundamental problem of private insurance. If driving is a thing we all decide is necessary (I don’t, but the status quo does), expecting individuals to have insurance which has to be able to cover an arbitrarily high amount of damage just doesn’t work. As mentioned by Chris, it unironically would make driving impossible for many (because it disproportionately affects the poor). Making fewer people drive is good in my book, it makes the cost of driving include the true actual cost. Hell, actually include all the unpaid infrastructure and environmental cost, let people see how unreasonable driving is.
This is the same reason individual health insurance is also nonsense. There should be one big collective pool of risk so we smooth out the outliers. Even if we assume everyone is a perfectly safe driver and we have the best infrastructure, it’s hard to imagine there isn’t some possible way for disaster to strike, and putting all that burden on the person who caused it or worse, their victims, just doesn’t make sense.
Why not? We already do this, except that the arbitrary limit is too low. Raising it (as I suspect we all agree we should) is completely doable, and wouldn’t be terribly expensive, based on what it costs me to get higher liability coverage.
I found it a bit shocking that Oregon’s liability limits are already higher than many places. In Virginia, insurance isn’t even required!
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/insurance/minimum-car-insurance-requirements
Arbitrarily high means whatever you raise it to, someone could exceed that. I mean, you could cover millions in damages, but it raises the costs too much.
My point is just that you need to spread the risk out over the most people possible, and the most efficient way would be one single provider. That is the best possible insurance, but that’s a monopoly and free market freaks hate that stuff.
I’m sure we could get some benefit from increasing the minimums a small amount. And we should. It’ll of course only negatively impact the people who have the fewest options, so it sucks.
While I see not even the faintest hint that the problem you want to solve (overly shallow auto insurance pools) actually exists, I have no philosophical problem with the government providing all the insurance. However, it would lead to some practical problems, such as the government making insurance rates too low for political reasons, leading to a general subsidy of the insurance program.
You see that starting to happen in places that do have public insurance, such as Florida. If you want such a system to work, you need to find a way to ensure that it has enough independence to manage its finances properly, free of political pressure. You also don’t want a single monopoly getting too cozy and just jacking the rates up unnecessarily.
The competitive system, combined with some level of oversight and regulation, solves both problems simultaneously without, as far as I can see, making insurance overly expensive. And similar government programs don’t always work any better (look at FEMA for disaster relief).
To me, private insurance is one answer to a practical problem, and I’m happy solving it by whatever mechanism works best. The current system seems to be working fine, even if we both agree mandated coverage levels should be higher.
So, the victims get to keep the car, right? Sell it for parts and use the money to fix the house? /s
Maybe they could charge the car owner rent for parking in the living room.
They have a ‘wine country’ license plate. I assume when I see that, it is likely the driver has been drinking and keep alert as they are near by (doesn’t work while inside one’s home, or approaching from behind).
NO enforcement (or next to none) = Traffic Violence.
So sorry for this family.
I’m surprised no one has accused the house of failing to wear retro-reflective garb. I mean, come on!
The reason this was funny the first time someone made this joke is because it conflates two very different problems and proposes the solution to one (people being hard to see on the roadway at night) with the other (people driving drunk or high).
As you said elsewhere, reflective garb is not a forcefield. It helps with the first class of problems but not the second.
If it didn’t want to be hit on then it shouldn’t have been wearing that sexy teal trim.
We could require all cars to have tech that limits drunk driving. In theory, it should be coming soon as it was included in the infrastructure law…
https://www.wired.com/story/us-regulators-cars-drunk-driver-detection/
Door Dash