Elderly Driver Crashes Tutoring Club, Injures Five
An elderly driver crashed into a Southern California tutoring club on Monday, injuring five people, according to a report from the Washington Post.
Peter Hauk, a 76-year-old Huntington Beach man, reportedly rammed his car through the plate glass entryway of the Tutoring Club in Orange County. Fountain Valley police said that two of the injury victims were trapped under Hauk’s 2011 black Buick sedan immediately following the wreck, which occurred at around 12:30 pm on Monday.
(The Tutoring Club faces a strip mall, where police were patrolling nearby and responded immediately, according to Fox News.)
Firefighters were able to remove the two victims, which included a 32-year-old male, who sustained what officials have since called life-threatening injuries. The other trapped victim was described as sustaining serious injuries.
Among the four non-life-threatening injuries, there was one 67-year-old woman, a 20-year-old man, and two 15-year-old boys. Hauk was also removed from the scene with minor injuries.
Police have not released any further information on the tutoring club accident, stating that the incident is still under investigation.
While it remains to be seen what caused this elderly driver accident, statistics show, on average, there are about 33 million individuals over the age of 65 regularly operating a motor vehicle in the US. Nearly 500 adults in this age group are injured daily from a driving-related accident, and 15 are killed. Notably, across all age groups, males have substantially higher death rates than females.
The risk of vehicular fatality increases significantly as we age, especially after 75, largely due to the heightened susceptibility of an elderly driver to injury, medical complications and disabilities, age-related decline in vision and cognitive functioning, and other physical changes that naturally come with age.
Do cases like the one of the Huntington Beach elderly driver or this one in which an elderly driver drove into a crowd and injured 60, make you think mandatory retesting for seniors is worth pursuing? Share your thoughts below.
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