Bizarre or widely accepted practices never cease to amaze me but some are so horrific that one wonders if those who practice it are actually humans or monsters in human form.

Such is the case of the Chinese people who practice ‘hit to kill’ ideology. A driver hits someone with a car, and rather than help the victim or take them to the hospital, they cruelly make sure the victim dies.

One of the cases of such cruel some behavior is that of a BMW racing through a fruit market in Foshan in China’s Guangdong province knocked down a 2-year-old girl and rolled over her head. Even after the grandmother shouted he has hit someone, the driver, a female probably might also be a mother switched into reverse and backed up over the girl. The woman at the wheel drove forward once more, crushing the girl for a third time.

The reasoning behind this gruesome behaviour is that when someone is hit and is rendered disabled, the offender will compensate the victim throughout his/her life time but if the victim dies, all they are required to pay is a one time compensation. Regardless, this is no justifiable reason to take someone’s else in the most gruesome way possible.

The Chinese law encourages the hit-to-kill phenomenom as the offenders tend to get lighter sentences when tried in the court of law when they kill a victim, as opposed to when the victim is injured.

In China the compensation for killing a victim in a traffic accident is relatively small—amounts typically range from $30,000 to $50,000—and once payment is made, the matter is over. By contrast, paying for lifetime care for a disabled survivor can run into the millions. The Chinese press recently described how one disabled man received about $400,000 for the first 23 years of his care. Drivers who decide to hit-and-kill do so because killing is far more economical.

Most of the victims of hit-to-kill accidents are the elderly or children. However, nobody should have to die in such a gruesome manner.

Janeth J