$10,000 bail for woman charged with causing Leverett Circle truck plunge
A Boston Municipal Court judge today set bail at $10,000 for Vivencia Bellegarde, charged with OUI and ramming into a Boston Globe delivery truck that plunged 40 feet off I-93 onto a Leverett Circle exit ramp, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office report.
The Globe reports the truck's driver is expected to survive his injuries from the 3:13 a.m. ramming.
According to the DA's office, Bellegarde was arraigned on charges of negligent operation of a motor vehicle, operating under the influence of alcohol and operating under the influence of alcohol causing serious bodily injury. She also received a ticket for a marked-lanes violation.
Innocent, etc.
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Comments
Are you kidding me?
Ban her from all driver's seats -- even go-karts at Salisbury Beach.
Welcome to Massachusetts
If we don't expect you to actually learn how to drive to get a license in the first place, why should we bother to take you off the road when you repeatedly demonstrate that you shouldn't drive?
Amazing video
Did the judge even see it before setting bail? Driving is not for Ms. Bellegarde and her licence ought to get revoked for life. She can use a bicycle.
Uh oh
Don't start the bicycle argument again!
Careful there...
I think Hell just froze over. Markkk02474 just encouraged someone to... *gasp* ...use a bicycle!
There is hope yet for this one.
oh c'mon
he just wants her on a bike so he can run her down. Should be entertaining....
She deserves punishment
She deserves punishment, so limit her to a bicycle. She never should have been allowed to graduate to driving a car - just not competent or responsible enough to use one.
Punishment?
So ... all the folks I know in Hipsterland who have beat up bikes they call "drunk bikes" are being punished, how?
Oh, they are punished by being able to drink all they want and either 1) get lucky and leave their bike out all night or 2) get home safely without injuring/killing someone.
Yeah, that's it. Drunk bike = self-flagellation.
I don't think I'd trust her on a bicycle either
I have visions of her rear-ending another bike on the Longfellow and sending it into the Charles River.
Really
How hard do you have to slam into a TRUCK to force it off the highway...
From the video
It appears the truck driver probably turned towards the barrier (probably to avoid her at first), which put the wheels at an angle which allowed them to climb the barrier slightly. That combined with the mass of the truck forced it over the barrier.
IIRC a truck went off the ramp into Boston Sand and Gravel a few years ago as well. I don't think it's matter of force, just lift. As someone who used to drive over that ramp every day, I did wonder how much (or how little) of an upset in the levelness of a car it would take to get a passenger car over the barriers.
I think the car driver should have her feet permanently shackled to a boulder, all the same.
And then...
...maybe that boulder is pushed off the Tobin.
Your point?
You do understand the purpose of bail, do you not? Why would anything in the video influence the judge's decision on how much bail to set?
Wow...
http://boston.cbslocal.com/2013/08/05/boston-globe...
Fuck you, Massachusetts.
Fuck you, Massachusetts.
It's a shame the truck driver wasn't a cousin to one of our politicians. Because maybe then people would actually be held accountable for nearly killing others.
Oh look!
http://www.hairbrained.me/profile/VIVENCIABELLEGARDE
She's hairbrained, alright!
Fuck you, Massachusetts. Fuck
Amen.
I don't know about the last statement(s) on this post.
Given the fact that Boston, and the Bay State, generally, tends to really specialize in graft, corruption and patronage, it's more likely that the truck driver would merely get a slap on the wrist if he was related in any way to one of our politicians, if one gets the drift.
Read that again maybe?
The truck driver didn't cause the accident.
How does she afford insurance??
A multi-page driving record by the age of 25 with multiple suspensions?? I had a scooter violation and a parking lot fender bender from 4 years ago and they jacked my rate up a few hundred dollars a year!
Who keeps giving her insurance? Who is letting her drive their car on THEIR insurance??
10 suspensions doesn't mean 10 horrible things.....
This is not uncommon. When someone doesn't pay certain things on time (excise tax, child support, drug law fines, parking tickets, moving violations, etc), their license gets suspended. If it is reinstated as another payment isn't processed, it gets suspended again, and again, and again.
it's an all-purpose punishment
I'd wager that most license suspensions these days don't have anything to do with failure to obey the laws regarding operating and parking a motor vehicle, nor with failure to pay fines associated therewith. Somewhere in the 80s-90s license suspension became a kind of all-purpose punishment that could be imposed without the bother of a trial, since "driving is a privilege" and privileges can be revoked on a whim.
By contrast, when I was a young'un, a suspended license meant that you had committed some egregious violation of the motor vehicle laws like DUI or reckless driving, or that you'd committed enough minor ones in a short enough timeframe that it was obvious you couldn't be trusted with a license.
I think one of the products of using license suspension as punishment for things that have nothing to do with driving is that it cheapens it and a lot of people are obviously no longer taking it seriously.
If that's true
Then it appears that the only thing that you can't have your license suspended for is hitting and killing someone with your car.
*facepalm*
http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverag...
“A Cadillac-driving OUI suspect — charged with running a Boston Globe delivery truck off Interstate 93 and onto the Leverett Connector — was carrying three EBT cards, mocked a cop ‘for paying for food when she gets it for free’ and threatened to put a voodoo curse on him, according to a police report.”
consider the source
The Boston Herald is of course reporting objectively ...
They are reporting the Police
They are reporting the Police Report verbatim.
Globe has basically the same story now
Here.
As for the newsworthiness of all those extra details, well, yeah, I probably would have posted them, too, because they paint a much more interesting picture of what this woman allegedly is.
Is it worse?
Or is it just race/class-baiting?
What relevance does her extra EBT cards (what if they are her invalid aunt and mother's cards that she uses for them to get groceries?), her belief in voodoo, or her outrageous statements have to the story?
Nothing.
They are just salacious crap added on top to feed the regular Herald reader's appetite for junk news at best. At worst, they are race-baiting in its most insidious form (don't believe me? try reading a few choice Herald commenter responses on that story).
In other news
Rupert Murdoch did not comment on whether he has offered her Alan Colmes' job.