Played music with Brad the Drummer at his house for a while, but closed it off early. Unfortunately, on the way home I saw where someone had driven a Ford Explorer into the crowd at a car show I like to attend occasionally. (There was a Denver Post story that used to link here, but the story is no longer on the Post website.) Rumor has it that he did it on purpose, being drunk and upset that he was asked to leave the car show. Original estimates placed his vehicle at 90 mph, but the news article says 60 mph. Either way, it was enough to get the Explorer airborne over the landscaping before it landed on several classic cars, injuring eight people.

I haven’t slept well since.

It bothers me that the thought to do something like this even occurred the driver of the Explorer. No matter how drunk or pissed off he was, it shouldn’t even be conceivable to drive an SUV into a crowd of people at a high rate of speed. It’s amazing to me that no one was killed, though one man was pinned under the vehicle and in critical condition when taken to the hospital. (According to the above story, he pulled through and is stable, thank God.)

It also bothers me that the passenger in the vehicle has still not been apprehended, according to the Post story. How hard can it be for the police to get the driver to tell them the name of his passenger? Or perhaps he has been apprehended by now, but the news has been overshadowed by the nearly 100,000 acres of wildfires burning in nine different places in Colorado as I write this.

I can’t help but wonder whether the events of September 11th influenced, however slight, the mindset of the driver. If we had not been inundated with visuals of commercial airliners crashing into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, would he have even thought of using his car as an airborne weapon?

That sounds alarmist to me, and I don’t intend that to be the case. I’m just trying to make sense out of something that makes no sense at all to me.