In March of 2024, a 78-year-old woman in San Francisco named Mary Fong Lau was driving her Mercedes SUV around 70 miles an hour in a 30-mph zone on the wrong side of the road in a residential neighborhood known as West Portal. But she didn t get very far. Within seconds, she obliterated a family of four that was waiting at a bus stop to go to the zoo.
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00:00:55.840In March of 2024, a 78-year-old woman in San Francisco named Mary Fong Lau was driving her Mercedes SUV around 70 miles an hour in a 30-mile-per-hour zone on the wrong side of the road in the residential neighborhood known as West Portal.
00:01:12.480But she didn't get very far. Within seconds, she obliterated a family of four that was waiting at a bus stop to go to the zoo. Watch.
00:01:19.280una san francisco police have arrested a woman for vehicular manslaughter for a crash that killed
00:01:24.960three people including a young child it all happened saturday afternoon while the victims
00:01:29.680were waiting at a bus stop near the west portal muni station ktv's ali rasmus reports on the
00:01:34.900latest developments in that story including the criminal charges the driver is now facing
00:01:39.440people in the west portal neighborhood of san francisco left behind flowers candles and stuffed
00:01:45.200animals at the site of this horrific crash. You can't help but notice the stroller in three pairs
00:01:50.380of shoes at the site meant to represent the three people who died. Saturday afternoon, an SUV driving
00:01:55.980eastbound towards the West Portal Muni station crossed over into the westbound lanes before
00:02:00.320striking the side of the library and skidding directly into a bus shelter where a family was
00:02:05.660waiting. I was just right around the corner when it happened, heard a horn go, and then an almighty
00:02:13.260crash. I mean, everybody in the neighborhood was out because it was so loud. I think it's brutal,
00:02:19.620just brutal. According to the safety advocacy group Walk SF, a father and toddler were killed
00:02:25.180when the SUV struck them. A mother and baby were seriously injured. Over the weekend, we learned
00:02:30.120the mother died from her injuries at the hospital. The baby is still in critical condition. The driver
00:02:35.240of the SUV was hospitalized. This morning, San Francisco police announced they arrested the
00:02:40.600driver identified as 78-year-old Mary Fong Lau. Now, the report mentions three fatalities,
00:02:47.260but in the end, the whole family, the entire family was wiped out. A 40-year-old man,
00:02:51.480his 38-year-old wife, and their two children, a three-month-old and a one-year-old. The whole
00:02:56.380family killed. And after the crash, witnesses reported that Lau seemed to be in a daze.
00:03:02.140Then, when police arrived, she began giving inconsistent statements about the cause of
00:03:05.780the crash. This is from the San Francisco Standard, quote, Mary Fong Lau told a witness at the scene
00:03:11.440of the crash that she was trying to park her SUV when she accidentally moved her foot to the gas
00:03:15.560pedal, according to a police affidavit. When that happened, she didn't know what to do and couldn't
00:03:19.800stop, the documents state. But while receiving treatment at San Francisco General Hospital,
00:03:24.100Lau told police that her 2014 Mercedes-Benz GLK 350 had malfunctioned, causing it to suddenly
00:03:31.540accelerate before crashing into a bus shelter and library. Investigators did not find issues
00:03:36.800with Lau's car, and tests taken in the hospital found no drugs or alcohol in her blood, according
00:03:41.360to records. Now, based on these facts, in any sane, functioning system of government, Mary
00:03:48.540Fong Lau would be sentenced to prison for the rest of her life. She'd never be able0.85
00:03:54.040to drive again or interact with the public in any way. It doesn't matter that she didn't
00:04:00.160intend to kill anyone. She made the decision to get behind the wheel of a car that she clearly
00:04:05.760could not control. She killed an entire family. So for the safety of society at large, we need0.99
00:04:14.360to punish that decision as severely as we possibly can. And in the interest of justice,
00:04:18.640if you kill an entire family, you need to go to prison forever. It doesn't matter why you killed
00:04:22.220them or how you killed them, whether it was on purpose or not, there must be the most severe
00:04:27.700possible punishment for something like that, if you have any sense of justice in your society at
00:04:33.400all. But in the end, guess what punishment Mary Fong Lau is going to receive? Well,0.96
00:04:40.100turns out that in addition to receiving no jail time, she's not even going to lose her license.
00:04:47.320This is reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle, quote, a woman who prosecutors said killed a
00:04:51.120family of four while speeding down a residential San Francisco street will likely face no jail time
00:04:56.020or community service mandates after pleading no contest to four felony counts of gross vehicular
00:05:01.240manslaughter. Judge Bruce Chan said his duty was to balance the deaths with the other factors of
00:05:07.020the case, including Lau's age, her lack of criminal history, and her remorse. Chan indicated his
00:05:11.040sentence would likely be two to three years of probation, during which time Lau would be
00:05:15.380prohibited from driving, imposing prison time on Lau would be sentencing her to die within the
00:05:19.580state prison system, Chan said. Meanwhile, survivors of the slain family accused Lau of transferring
00:05:24.860her ownership interest in several properties to new limited liability companies and selling
00:05:29.700properties to third parties, including her son-in-law, transferring millions of dollars0.73
00:05:33.420to avoid potential financial penalties from the civil suit. So to recap, the woman is desperately
00:05:40.780trying to hide her money so that she doesn't have to pay the relatives of the family that she just1.00
00:05:45.740slaughtered. She admits that she was driving the wrong way in a residential neighborhood at more
00:05:50.460than double the speed limit. And yes, she killed an entire family, including two small kids.
00:05:56.080After all that, the judge doesn't want her to die within the state prison system because she's old
00:06:02.040and allegedly remorseful. Yet she's frantically stashing her money away and she's changing her0.94
00:06:08.720story several times. And at one point she blamed her SUV for malfunctioning. But you see, she's0.73
00:06:14.260she's very sad. Therefore, she doesn't have to suffer any meaningful consequences whatsoever.
00:06:21.480If you kill an entire family, but you're sad about it, well, okay, that's good enough.
00:06:27.440No home detention, no fines, no prison time. And when she's 82 years old and a considerably
00:06:34.340even worse driver than she is now, she can get back behind the wheel of her Mercedes SUV and0.99
00:06:40.140mow down more families. Now, as you might imagine, there's a lot of debate online as to how exactly0.58
00:06:46.840this kind of sentence or lack thereof is even possible. One prominent left-wing commentator
00:06:52.160wrote, quote, this woman killed a family speeding down a residential street and she's not even0.97
00:06:56.400permanently losing her driver's license. American car culture is demented. Ah, yes, car culture1.00
00:07:04.140is to blame. But you know, more observant commentators noticed that the judge, Bruce
00:07:10.560Chan, may have given a light sentence to Mary Fong Lau for a very different reason, namely
00:07:16.100ethnic solidarity. It's hard not to conclude that the Cantonese judge is looking out for a member0.64
00:07:22.120of his community who can't even speak English. We've talked about this phenomenon many times0.91
00:07:27.280on this show, most recently in the context of the black judge who cut a black rapist sentence in0.65
00:07:32.700half, even though he showed no remorse and indeed promised to commit more crimes as soon as he
00:07:38.580could, at a certain point, it's hard to think of another explanation for what's going on here.
00:07:46.020But whatever the motivation, it's not an exaggeration to say that if certain kinds
00:07:49.860of criminals don't even lose their license, much less their freedom, after annihilating entire
00:07:55.180families by going double the speed limit on the wrong side of the road, then for all intents and
00:08:00.680purposes, traffic laws are null and void in major American cities. If you can commit homicides
00:08:07.620behind the wheel with impunity, then you can speed as well. You can do hit and runs. You can
00:08:13.260get into road rage incidents all you want. You can ignore traffic lights and stop signs.
00:08:19.500The crimes you commit simply don't matter. If you have the right skin color, that is.1.00
00:08:24.420that's certainly the lesson that many americans have been drawing lately i began with the story0.99
00:08:31.060in san francisco because it illustrates one major reason why driving has become so dangerous and
00:08:35.760unpleasant in the united states over the last six years laws simply are not being enforced
00:08:41.460criminals are not being punished and therefore because most people spend a lot of time on the
00:08:46.020road life is becoming measurably worse for millions of people it's just one more way in
00:08:52.740which our living standards have been declining.
00:08:54.860As we've discussed before on the show,
00:09:19.860Test scores have dropped across the country.
00:09:22.740An entire generation of children spent some of the most important years of their lives under house arrest, which is a catastrophe that we'll be dealing with for many years to come.0.53
00:09:32.040These are trends that began during COVID lockdowns and BLM hysteria, but they never actually went away.0.83
00:09:37.700Life never actually returned to pre-COVID levels of normalcy.
00:09:43.140Now, to be clear, it's true that the per capita number of motor vehicle fatalities is still much lower than it was back in the 1980s and 1990s.
00:09:52.740And that's mostly because cars are bigger and have more safety features than they used to.
00:09:58.420You know, nobody's driving a Ford Pinto anymore with the gas tank at the tail end of the car.
00:10:03.180And at the same time, over the past few years, the trend towards safety has been reversing.
00:10:08.600Driving became much more dangerous around 2020.
00:10:11.640And while things have improved somewhat in the past 12 months or so, they haven't improved as much as you might expect.
00:10:17.660And in some categories, like the number of road rage incidents, the numbers are still getting worse.
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00:10:42.740There are almost 36 million small businesses across the country, and over 70% say they need extra capital every single year just to keep up.
00:10:50.100Meanwhile, small business revenue is hitting record highs, but big banks are tightening the screws, approving fewer loans than ever.
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00:11:51.720So let's dive into the specific numbers that I'm talking about, and then we'll try to explain why these numbers haven't returned to normal ranges.
00:11:59.600We'll start with this report from early 2022, which is around the time when media organizations started noticing the problem.
00:13:13.160But there is a more straightforward metric to use, which is insurance rates.
00:13:16.980insurance rates capture the risk from everything, not just fatalities. If an illegal alien is more
00:13:23.340likely to hit your car and then drive off, then your insurance will go up. If millions of inner1.00
00:13:30.020city youths, as we call them now, watch videos on TikTok about how to hotwire your car in 100.95
00:13:36.180seconds, then your insurance will go up. If a career criminal having been released from jail
00:13:41.400by a Soros DA for the 50th time is more likely to shoot you because you cut them off in traffic,0.68
00:13:46.020and your insurance will go up. None of these incidents necessarily would show up in a statistic
00:13:51.260on traffic fatalities, but they would be captured by insurance rates. So what's happening on that
00:13:57.700front? Well, if you own a car, you probably know the answer to that question. This is a report
00:14:02.300from Yahoo News and it was published at the end of last year. Quote, the biggest jump has been
00:14:07.560in the cost of insurance up 60% during the last five years to an average monthly premium of about
00:14:13.160$213. A bill that was once an afterthought now totals nearly $3,000 per year and a lot more
00:14:20.580for vehicles and drivers. Relief is on the horizon. In April 2024, the annual rate of car insurance
00:14:26.340inflation peaked at 23%. It's now at a much tamer 5.3%, and the lower annual price hikes are likely
00:14:34.260to stick. So there's some good news at the end there. As the most recent data in 2025, car insurance
00:14:40.000rates are only growing by around 5% per year instead of 23%. But in general, these numbers
00:14:47.280are still far too high. And they certainly aren't going down or correcting towards pre-2020 levels.
00:14:55.480So why is that? Well, to answer that question, the first thing you need to do is explain why
00:15:00.180exactly traffic fatalities spiked in 2020. Steve Saylor has done a lot of work on this,
00:15:06.420And many researchers have finally come around to his conclusion, which is that during the BLM insanity of 2020, the police, for the most part, stopped enforcing traffic laws, especially in poor black areas.
00:15:20.960After all, the police didn't want to be accused of racism and they didn't want to be ambushed and murdered by BLM either.0.71
00:15:28.800They didn't want to pull somebody over and then have that person freak out or pull a gun on them.0.81
00:15:34.380and then they're in a position where no matter what they do,
00:15:38.020either they're going to be dead or in jail.
00:15:41.180So the police drastically reduced their enforcement of traffic laws.
00:15:46.600Researchers at AAA have looked into the data as well,
00:15:50.460and here's what they found, as reported by an outlet called Streets Blog.
00:15:54.180The AAA study verified that the absence of traffic jams played some role
00:15:58.060in allowing drivers to reach dangerous speeds on too wide roads,
00:16:02.020But the researchers also found the most significant differences between their forecast and real-world death totals happen in the dead of night when most roads have always been congestion-free.
00:16:11.300Between 10 p.m. and 1.59 a.m., deaths were nearly 22% higher than expected during the typical morning rush hours.
00:16:18.600By contrast, deaths were actually 6.3% lower than the model anticipated they'd be.
00:16:23.740The late afternoon and evening rush hour, meanwhile, did not differ significantly from the forecast.
00:16:29.660In other words, yeah, the lockdowns ensured the roads were empty so people could race their cars and drive at unsafe speeds without anyone getting in their way.
00:16:36.640But for the most part, the unsafe driving was taking place late at night when the roads would be clear anyway.0.85
00:16:42.460So one conclusion you can draw is that people, especially in black neighborhoods, were driving like lunatics because they knew they wouldn't get a ticket.0.76
00:16:52.120This is an issue that, broadly speaking, persists today, particularly in major cities.
00:16:55.900police departments and DAs are no longer concerned with punishing criminals in order to protect the
00:17:00.800public. As we just established, it doesn't matter how heinous the crime is. Left-wing judges are
00:17:07.360still looking for ways to spring homicidal drivers out of prison, get them back on the road as soon0.88
00:17:12.860as possible. And to be clear, the case I mentioned in San Francisco is not a cherry-picked incident.
00:17:18.940Things like this happen all the time. Earlier this month, there was a similar crash in Los
00:17:23.340Angeles in which an elderly woman killed several people. It was all caught on camera. Watch.
00:17:29.300Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh my God. You can see the car plow straight through the front window of the 99
00:17:37.960Ranch Market here on Westwood Boulevard near Rochester. Minutes later, firefighters scrambled
00:17:43.180to help people who were hurt. Some were trapped underneath the car. The bakery here had been
00:17:48.460crowded this happened around 12 noon emergency crews were able to rescue some of the victims
00:17:53.660for others it was too late three people two employees and one customer were killed we've
00:17:59.260been talking to eyewitnesses here this morning some of them are suggesting that the elderly driver
00:18:04.060may have confused the gas pedal for the break in fact one of them estimates the driver
00:18:08.940was going at least 60 miles an hour when she crashed into the store
00:18:12.700she had hit a lady on a bike down in the crosswalk over there and she must have you know went into1.00
00:18:20.880shock and just took off so she didn't slow down you didn't see her slow down she accelerated0.94
00:18:25.940she probably meant to push on the brake you know according to a local news station quote
00:18:31.200los angeles fire officials said the three people killed two men ages 30 and 55 and a 42 year old
00:18:37.340woman, died at the scene. Two men, both 35, were taken to the hospital in critical condition,
00:18:42.780the AP reports, while two others, ages 37 and 38, were hospitalized in fair condition.
00:18:47.780KTLA's Eric Spillman reported Friday morning that a fire department spokesperson told the
00:18:52.920Associated Press the 92-year-old driver was cooperating with investigators, was not injured,
00:27:05.380Rick, Vicki, the defendants who appeared in court pleaded not guilty today.
00:27:10.600The fifth suspect does not have any record of his arrest just yet,
00:27:15.220but all are accused of working together, charging immigrants hundreds of dollars for illegal licenses.
00:27:21.620A new indictment describes the elaborate scheme targeting people who didn't know how to get a driver's license in Kentucky.
00:27:29.500The document says starting no later than November 1, 2023, Raul Tellez Ojeda, Lozaro Alejandro Castelo Rojas, and Robert Danger Correa
00:27:40.160recruited people who were immigrants and offered to get them a license by avoiding a line and bypassing testing requirements at the driver licensing regional office at the NIA Center.
00:27:50.860Those applicants were allegedly told fees ranged from $200 to $1,500 and were made to believe the process was legal.
00:27:58.420The indictment says the suspects often escorted applicants on the day of their appointment and told them where to wait and when to enter the NIA Center.
00:28:07.140Many of the applicants had difficulty speaking English.
00:28:10.560As part of the scheme, Danita Wilson and Ariel Matthews, who worked as temp workers at the NIA Center,
00:28:15.980are accused of manually changing the status of driver's license records
00:28:20.360so the system would recognize licenses that did not exist.
00:28:24.780So to recap, the names of the DMV workers who are allegedly involved in this scheme
00:28:30.560are Raul Tellez Ojedo, Lazaro Alejandro Castillo, Rojas and Robert Danger Correa.
00:28:44.480I mean, we're at the point where we've imported so many foreigners into this country that they're taking over the DMV and handing out driver's licenses to other foreigners.1.00
00:28:54.380And this is a big problem because, as we've seen, entire families are getting wiped out by foreigners who can't read street signs, who disobey traffic laws, text on their phones instead of paying attention to the road.1.00
00:29:06.820We've covered many of these stories over the past year.1.00
00:29:10.980But admittedly, when it comes to explaining why driving is so terrible now, there are many more factors to consider.
00:29:16.780Even when road rage and commercial trucking aren't directly involved, drivers have become a lot more unpredictable.
00:29:23.820And that's showing up in the data, too.
00:29:25.140According to researchers at Columbia University, quote, roadway mortality was declining in New York State before the COVID-19 pandemic.
00:29:32.060Since the pandemic, mortality increased and did not return to pre-pandemic levels as the pandemic receded.
00:29:39.980That research was published late last year, so as of 2025, we still aren't back to pre-COVID levels of danger on the roadways.
00:29:47.000And here's one reason for that, which you may have noticed in your neighborhood, quote,
00:29:51.900access to shared motorized two-wheeled vehicles, such as e-bikes, is proliferating ahead of injury prevention strategies to address the mortality increase.
00:30:01.840This is a major problem that's getting much worse with each passing year.
00:30:04.700Children, often without helmets, are riding motorized scooters and e-bikes on the roads.
00:30:09.720They're not obeying traffic laws. Many of them don't have a license.
00:30:14.720And predictably, they're getting into accidents with vehicles. Watch.
00:30:19.280In recent years, electric scooters and e-bikes have become more popular.
00:30:23.340As more people ride them, Dr. Chelsea Kadish says more kids are getting hurt.
00:30:28.580I would say over the last few years, it's been increasing exponentially.
00:30:33.400Kadish is an emergency department doctor at Nationwide Children's Hospital.
00:30:36.700She's urging parents to talk with their kids about wearing helmets.
00:30:40.420Right now on the CBS 13 News at 530, frustrations and fulsome over kids riding e-bikes and e-scooters illegally.
00:30:47.460Some drivers are now getting in near-miss accidents with children riding around.
00:30:51.920Your reporter covering Sacramento County, Tori Abedaka, is joining us live,
00:30:54.860getting answers on how the city is now responding to people's concerns here, Tori.
00:31:00.920This area just off of Blue Ravine is really one of the prime spots
00:31:04.900where we have seen dozens of kids riding around all afternoon.
00:31:09.420Some drivers say that the way that these kids are riding those electric bikes and scooters