Good news -- Texas teenager Jessica Bunch, after four surgeries and something approaching $1million in hospital bills, seems to be recovering slowly from her horrific injuries.

Jessica was standing at a Redbox machine in front of a Wagreens store in Canton Texas on 7 July, and was struck down by a driver who accidentally hit the gas pedal instead of the brake.  Neither Redbox nor Walgreens, despite dozens and dozens of such crashes going back at least five years, cared enough for the safety of customers (or employees) to bother with simple, inexpensive, and effective safety barriers placed between Jessica and oncoming vehicles.

Jessica and her father want to change laws to prevent this sort of accident from ever happening again;  such efforts are already underway in California, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Florida.

You can see more of Jessica's story in the previous blog post, but for right now, I will let Jessica's father, Don Bunch, give you an update in his own words.  You can see his post online (and donate to her recovery fund) at the GiveForward fundraising page "Jessica Bunch -Extended Hospital Relief" HERE


Day 19
Posted by Don Bunch on July 25th, 2015

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Jessica finally got out of ICU on Day 17 and has been moved to a room. She is trying to eat a little, we have got to get the pace picked up a little or they will have to put a feeding tube in.

Hopefully all surgeries are done. She has had four of them, the first was to stop the internal bleeding, and the second was to remove her appendix, gall bladder, and part of her bowel, the third was to reconstruct her pelvis and the fourth was to reconstruct her rib cage. She has been put through a living Hell right here on earth.

I felt so sorry for her, she lifted her gown and looked down at her tummy and started crying, I ask what was wrong and she said that my body is so cut up, I will always have  these scars. I tried to talk to her to soothe the heart ache, but she is heart broken.

Her attitude is a lot better than I ever expected, for someone who was literally crushed to death, she is taking all of this pretty good. She is very optimistic about the accident. She would like to talk to the elderly women that ran over, Jessica says that it will help with forgiving her. I hope this is true.

All in all I’m glad to have my baby girl back. We still have a long way to go, but with the Grace of GOD we will get there.

Thank you so much for all the donations, but most of all thank you for the prayers.

Don Bunch

As we continue to collect more data and continue to analyze the information we have collected,  we are able to observe more trends developing on causes of vehicle-into-building crashes and more about the drivers in those crashes.    We have just finished running accident data by driver age and found that our results run much higher than the expected curve for the age of drivers who have storefront crashes.

As the chart below illustrates, we have compared national figures for the age of licensed drivers (stated as a percentage of total licensed drivers) against the reported ages of drivers involved in vehicle-into-building crashes (when driver age is reported.)  What we have found is startling -- just 19% of the licensed drivers are responsible for something like 45% of such storefront crashes.

Those 19% of licensed drivers who are  responsible for 45% of all storefront crashes are drivers over the age of 60.

By comparison, 44% of licensed drivers who are responsible for just 38% of all storefront crashes are drivers under the age of 40.

While there has been a great deal of research indicating that drivers over 65 are more likely to have pedal error accidents than younger drivers, most of those studies have been conducted by NHTSA or State and Federal Transportation or Highway departments using data collected from reports of incidents which occurred on state or federal roads and highways.  In contrast, most of our data is collected on private property;  parking lots, malls, local streets and driveways, etc.  Significantly, our data also shows that pedal error is the leading cause of vehicle-into-building crashes in such locations -- as high as 36%.

Our data is very different from highway data because pedal error is many times more common in the act of parking or unparking.  Driving into and through parking lots is very much more hazardous than on open roads, as NHTSA pointed out in their report in 2013.  NHTSA noted a study done in North Carolina which showed that injuries and deaths are much more common in lower speed accidents in parking lots and retail storefronts than they are in highway collisios -- mostly because of the presence of unprotected pedestrians outside of stores and vulnerable employees and customers inside the stores.  See the NHTSA study and the North Carolina data HERE.

We have no desire to get into a shouting match with NHTSA, or for that matter with AARP, AAA, and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, all of whom have gone to great lengths to paint the problem in a very different light.  So we will just say that the Storefront Safety Council a very small, all-volunteer organization which would be overjoyed to receive any help or support available from competent parties who would like to help us crunch data, conduct research, or compile anecdotal or media reports on crashes going back to 2004 -- which is what we are trying to do while we attempt to stay current with as many of the sixty or more storefront crashes that we believe occur in the United States every single day.

But we say to those organizations -- if you have better numbers for storefront crashes on private property than we have -- please share them with us.  And if you have them, why in the heck have you not tried to do something to call attention to the problem?

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