Two Dead, One a Child, After a Pickup Truck Ran Through a Wichita Soccer Field
A child and an adult are dead in Wichita, Kansas, after a pickup truck drove straight through a youth soccer game at the Stryker soccer complex on Saturday. Several more people were hurt, some badly enough to be rushed to the hospital. The driver is in custody, and police say there were two juveniles in the truck with him.
That’s the part we know. The part we don’t know is the part that keeps a person up at night.
Wichita police spokesman Aaron Moses stood in front of the cameras and said, “This is a tragedy.” He said he didn’t know how fast the truck was going. He said he didn’t know how it got onto the field. Bless his heart, that’s an honest answer, and I’d rather have an honest “I don’t know” than a polished nothing. But when a black pickup truck comes “plowing through the youth soccer fields,” as one witness told KWCH, and doesn’t stop until it’s a hundred or two hundred yards down the field, with bodies in its path, a mama and a daddy somewhere in Wichita are asking the only question that matters: why?
I have questions for the manager, and so does every parent who ever dropped a kid off at Saturday soccer.
A witness described dozens of emergency responders on that grass, doing CPR right there on the field. Think about that picture. That’s not a news alert you scroll past. That’s a Saturday morning at a community sports complex, the most ordinary, wholesome thing a family can do in this country, turned into a scene with paramedics pumping on little chests. The city has canceled everything at the complex until further notice, and Wichita police have set up a portal asking anybody with video to send it in. If you’ve got it, send it. That’s not snooping, that’s being a good neighbor.
Mayor Lily Wu posted that she’s heartbroken and that her prayers are with the families, especially the children. I believe her, and I’ll take prayers over press-release pieties any day of the week. But prayers are the beginning of a community’s job, not the end of it. The end of the job is answers: who was behind that wheel, what was in his head, why were two juveniles riding along, and how does a truck get onto a field full of children in the first place?
Names haven’t been released until family can be notified, and that’s right. That’s one thing the officials got correct, and I’ll say so plainly. A family somewhere is having the worst evening of their lives, and the rest of us can wait a decent interval before we know who they are.
Here’s what I’d tell the powers that be in Wichita: regular people are watching how you handle this. We don’t want a task force. We don’t want a sensitivity seminar. We want the facts, straight and prompt, and we want whatever it takes so no other soccer complex becomes a place where CPR happens on the grass. You can see with your own eyes what happened here. Now show us you can see it too.
Two people gone, one of them a child, at a soccer game. If that doesn’t still your heart and stiffen your spine, check your pulse.