Results tagged “accident” from Crime & Courts

*I originally misspelled his name with a y.

I received this e-mail today:

"Dear Mr. Altman,

I have been reading the emails between you, my brother, and my mother.  I am the mother of the boy who was killed.

You asked if there was anything you could do to help....
There are several very cruel and actually evil comments on the blog under your article.  As the moderator, if you could remove some of them which seemed to express joy in my son's death, and even  comments about how he looked (in the connotation of deserving to be dead), etc. (with captions like LOL)

Some of those comments are devastating to me, my husband, and Jakob's brother and my heart was racing for hours after seeing some of them.
If you are unsure which comments they are, I would be happy to cut and paste
and send them to you in email.

Thanks very much.
Heidi Weathermon
the mother."

Mrs. Weathermon is talking about user comments that appeared under a story I wrote the other day about the death of her son, Jakob. Jakob, 20, of Long Beach was killed last week when a big rig truck ran him over as he rode his bicycle near Carson.

I'm not a big fan of user comments because many people out there seem to take joy in writing crude, rude and hateful remarks.

I'm also not a moderator of them. I just reported and wrote the story. Readers are free to comment as they wish.

The paper has shut them down in this case and removed them. Unfortunately that meant more respectful comments also disappeared as well.

Hopefully those who write hurtful comments can realize the impact they have on grieving family members.

Previous entry and a link to the story of Jakob's death:
Family memorializes young man killed while riding bike near Carson

We had a short story on the Web site yesterday about a homeless man whose body was found on the Century Freeway in the Willowbrook area. He was hit by a vehicle and dragged.

The discovery of his body forced the closure of the eastbound lanes.

If you happened to be driving east on the 105 about 5:15 a.m. or so, CHP investigators are trying to find the driver of a late-model red pickup truck. They don't know if this is the driver who struck the man, but the motorist stopped at the scene and took off before officers arrived.

I'll have a story on all this coming up.

The victim was Alhakim Muntaqim Allah, a 66-year-old man who lived in his van in the area of El Segundo Boulevard and San Pedro Street.

"I think he was misunderstood by a lot of people," his daughter Al-Wasi Allah said. "He was happy. He smiled all the time."