Area leaders back legislation to crack down on stunt driving
New state law would stiffen penalties for reckless activities.
Dayton’s mayor said it’s only a matter of time before more people are killed in a hooning or stunt driving accident and he and others are pushing for a stricter state law.
Dayton Mayor Jeffrey Mims, Jr., Dayton Police Chief Kamran Azfal, and former Trotwood mayor Mary McDonald each urged the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday to address hooning, which has been a thorn in the side of local police for the past three years, including a crash that killed four of five occupants of a single car in 2022.
Azfal said hooning is planned on social media and entails a group of cars blocking the regular flow of traffic in order to create space to perform burnouts, wheelies, drifting and tire-squealing — often while passengers hang dangerously outside the car.
“During these events, vehicle occupants would hang from the car, ride in the trunk, and under the open hood while the vehicles were doing doughnuts and burnouts,” Azfal said. “Spectators would stand in the middle of the intersection filming this activity and would livestream or post the video to various social media sites.”
Mims called hooning — which he referred to as “stunt driving” and “street takeovers” — as a tragic, reckless activity that has brought major threat to participants, bystanders and police. Aside from the inherent danger of the act itself, participants and spectators often speed away from the scene when police show up, which has caused at least one serious injury of a Dayton police officer, according to Mims.
Hooning
“Hospitals are entitled to very special protection under international humanitarian law,” Türk said. “And the intentional killing of civilians, detainees and others who are ‘hors de combat’ (incapable of engaging in combat) is a war crime.”
U.S. State Department spokesman Vedant Patel on Tuesday called the reports of mass graves at the hospitals “incredibly troubling” and said U.S. officials have asked the Israeli government for information.
The Israeli military said its forces exhumed bodies that Palestinians had buried earlier as part of its search for the remains of hostages captured by Hamas during its Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war. The military said bodies were examined in a respectful manner and those not belonging to Israeli hostages were returned to their place.
The Israeli military says it killed or detained hundreds of militants who had taken shelter inside the two hospital complexes, claims that could not be independently verified.
The Palestinian civil defense in the Gaza Strip said Monday that it had uncovered 283 bodies from a temporary burial ground inside the main hospital in Khan Younis that was built when Israeli forces were besieging the facility last month. At the time, people were not able to bury the dead in a cemetery and dug graves in the hospital yard, the group said.
The civil defense said some of the bodies were of people killed during the hospital siege. Others were killed when Israeli forces raided the hospital.
Palestinian health officials say the hospital raids have destroyed Gaza’s health sector as it tries to cope with the mounting toll from over six months of war.
The issue of who could or should conduct an investigation remains in question.
For the United Nations to conduct an investigation, one of its major bodies would have to authorize it, Dujarric said.
“I think it’s not for anyone to prejudge the results or who would do it,” he said. “I think it needs to be an investigation where there is access and there is credibility.”
The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, said after visiting Israel and the West Bank in December that a probe by the court into possible crimes by Hamas militants and Israeli forces “is a priority for my office.”
The discovery of the graves “is another reason why we need a cease-fire, why we need to see an end to this conflict, why we need to see greater access for humanitarians, for humanitarian goods, greater protection for hospitals” and for the release of Israeli hostages, Dujarric said Monday.
In the Hamas attack that launched the war, militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250 hostages. Israel says the militants are still holding around 100 hostages and the remains of more than 30 others.
In response, Israel’s air and ground offensive in Gaza, aimed at eliminating Hamas, has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, around two-thirds of them children and women. It has devastated Gaza’s two largest cities, created a humanitarian crisis and led around 80% of the territory’s population to flee to other parts of the besieged coastal enclave.