Jesus had a daughter Sophie, who he gave to his cousin Philip to look after. Afterwards when everything started going bad, and a lot of the men who were protecting the Jews started getting killed, he knew that many of his family were going to end up in slavery to teh Romans, so he had somebody kill Sophie, to protect her, but this is not that story.
This story is about my cousinn Phillip's and his wife Taja's daughter Sophie, who was killed outside her house while going across teh road to catch the school bus one morning. Sophie has a brother Kris, who is younger, and two sisters.
One of these sisters, Kif, now Brie, was standing beside the road that morning. According to what tehy later told me, the bus stop was about 30 or 40 metres further up the road to their left, as they left their house, which was on the right hand side as you come down the road as the school bus would have. A truck or something had just gone up the road, and Sophie was about to cross, when Kif called out for her to stop, as there was a car coming down the road. I told a policeman in Tauranga Police station what Kif had told me and he said to me "She had better not tell anybody what happened or the same thing may happen to her" I thought at the time that this was odd and made no sense, but ironically the same thing did happen to her, and her husband Brian accidentally backed over their daughter and killed her in a tragic accident.
So, Kif told me she saw the car coming down teh road at high speed and called out to Sophie to stop, which she did. We know she did, because I later saw the big dent in the bonnet of the car which hit her, and it was right in front of the steering wheel, about mid way between the side of teh car, and the mid line of the bonnet. There were also two skid marks on the road, beginning about where Kif was standing on the side of the road, where you would cross if you came out of a gateway, and crossed directly across the road.
Imagine a road with exactly two halves, divided by a centre line. There was no centre line on this road, because it was a rural road, but it is wide enough for two cars or two trucks to pass comfortably with out moving off the road. The dent in the bonnet and the two skid marks placed Sophie almost exactly in the centre of one lane, on her and her sister's side of the road. Imagine that you were travelling at 100 kilometres an hour, and applied the brakes of your car and locked them. That is how far the skid marks went. They probably went a bit further than that, because there was a slight down hill the car was on, and the speed may well have been slightly higher than 100 kph. There is no doubt that the driver was on the wrong side of the road, and there is no doubt that he had seen the girl crossing, or standing on her side of the road, because travelling at 100 k, it must have taken him some distance to cross from his side to teh opposite side, but he did not start breaking until the point of impack, immediately outside the gate.
Exactly how far up the road the driver saw Sophie is difficult to say. It could have been 50 metres. It was a straight road, althouh there was a corner a short distance further back. Certainly the group of children waiting for teh bus could see what happened, and where the driver saw Sophie and crossed the road.
Usiually, when there is an accident, we are told, even if you see another driver heading straight for you, do not avoid them by crossing onto their side of the road, because you will be automatically in the wrong. They may see you at teh last moment, and their instinct is to swerve back to their own side of the road. However in this case the driver was not prosecuted by teh police. Even though a 6 year old girl was killed, nobody was charged with manslaughter. Sophie had her life support turned off a couple of days later.
Recently a man who killed his daughter by throwing her against the wall, and then stomping on her was found not guilty of murder by a jury, but guilty of manslaughter, or accidental killing, and sentenced by the judge to 6 and a half years. A judge cannot overrule a jury, but a judge cannot make a decision, or hear a case if nobody is charged. Sophie diesd in 1992.