This is a truly horrific story from Brazil, made all the more terrible by the fact that it is so well documented, and you can watch it unfold close-up, and by the fact that I haven’t been able to find any English-language coverage of it at all. Given the footage below, which shows a close-up of the accident attempted murder as it occurs, it is extremely fortunate that no cyclists or bystanders were killed.
The video below is very, very hard to watch- it shows a peaceful, pleasant-looking dusk ride, with a hundred or more cyclists of all kinds (fewer than half of whom are wearing helmets) riding through a medium-sized street in Puerto Alegre. Young and old riding together on a warm evening: a friendly-looking woman on a trike with her dog on the back, a guy in Red Bull kit, people on cruisers, some hipsters. It looks like a really fun, friendly evening ride.
And then, at 1:00 into the video, a black car literally mows through the cyclists from behind, carrying several cyclists on the hood and windshield, and the rest of the video is of shocked cyclists, twisted bikes, the injured being comforted on the pavement, and finally ambulances, and twisted bikes being carried away. Click below to play the video.
Added: Here is a better video that edits together footage from multiple cameras to provide a complete narrative, with English subtitles, including witness testimony and outrage at the end.
The Puerto Alegre Critical Mass blog has links to more videos and reflections on the incident.
The local news site Zero Hour says police have identified the driver and are waiting for him to turn himself in voluntarily (apparently, as of yesterday, he is not at his home address). It also has a video of the accident from a different perspective, shot from high above out an apartment window. The same video appears in this TV news report.
In the words of our friend Cabelo, who alerted me to this story, “Much light and energy to all who lived through this horrible experience.”
