Does Austin Have A Street Racing Problem?

This weekend, one family (including three young kids) lost their mother and another family lost their mother/grandmother because of  illegal street racing.   Fifty-three year old Maria Gaona De Corona and twenty-eight year old Adriana orales-Catalan were innocently sitting at a bus stop when nineteen year old Erick Armando Nuncio-Moreno blasted towards them, possibly at speeds up to 90 miles per hour, and slammed into them and their stop.  Witnesses have reported that Nuncio-Moreno was engaging in street racing at the time.

This is not the first time innocent Austinites have been victim of this careless conduct.  Almost two years ago to the day, I wrote another blog post about the increasing number of car wrecks Austin was experiencing due to street racing.  Later that year, the Austin Police Department announced that they were going to enforce a crack-down on street racing. 

And two years before that,  another 19 year old was among two people arrested when their street racing resulted in two deaths. 

Are these incidents isolated, or is there a real problem?  I’d like to stick my head in the sand and say it’s not a real issue, but in stumbling across an Austin street racing video, I think the problem is larger than many of us would like to admit.  Even more troubling to me, reading the comments to the video, the readers are posting popular locations for street racing even as late as late 2009, and many of those locations are the same places identified by police back in 2006 as most popular street racing sites. 

I just hope that the APD can get a handle on this problem and put a stop to these needless deaths and injuries.