A Grim Collision

Last night around 7pm, a three car wreck happened in front of my immediate neighbor's house, about two hundred feet from my front door. I did not witness the accident itself but certainly heard the impact. I at first thought my ninety-year old father had fallen (or my mother who is younger but has a few afflictions of her own) and conversely, they thought I might have slipped in the shower. We called out to each other and quickly realized no one in the house had collapsed and my Mom yelled, "Must have been a wreck, I'll see". As she burst outside to see if she could aid anybody, I was urging, "Call 911", but as my Mom came back in, she said nearby drivers had immediately summoned help. In the event, I toweled off from the shower I had been taking and joined the bystanders outside. My neighbor in front of whose home the actual collision took place said his wife was given a baby to hold from the vehicle witnesses said had crossed three lanes of traffic to impale the driver's side of a car travelling in the proper direction. I never saw the motorist who did nothing wrong but received the brunt of the damage. I was told a nurse who happened to be driving by attempted CPR on this individual to no avail and the ambulance in which the body was placed appeared to be in no urgency to arrive at the trauma center. I have to presume sadly that this individual was dead at the scene. The driver with the infant in her old gold sedan may have been distracted by the baby or something else or had some medical issue which caused her to veer out of control and according to those who saw it actually cause the accident. She was removed from the car with the assistance of the "Jaws of Life", and I saw for myself that she unfortunately was in a critical condition (or worse). A third car that took a glancing blow from the spinning carnage also produced a casualty who appeared to be lucid and mostly functional but was also rushed away by a third ambulance. This was not the first wreck by any means near my property in the nineteen years I have resided at this home, but it did produce the first fatalities. A block away within the last month, a new array of two traffic signals have been installed and congestion has become a nightmare since the new lights came online. I do not contend that they are the proximate cause of last night's death(s) but the red lights may have been a factor. No one to my knowledge in the neighborhood was surveyed or consulted about adding the new traffic signals prior to their installation. When the bridge ices over in winter where the red lights are now deployed, there will surely be more wrecks as people will now have greater occasion to brake quickly on a frozen overpass as the signals change. Placing the stop lights there was ill-conceived, traps my family and our neighbors in our own driveways, and may have already within the first month of operation played a role in the first fatal accident here in at least two decades.