Family Fights Ruling That Blames a Dead Couple for Part of a Drunk Official's Crash
A drunk, speeding township employee with no headlights killed an elderly couple crossing a Shanxi highway — and the accident ruling assigned them 'secondary responsibility' for their own deaths. Their review application, now accepted by police, is the story China is arguing about.
On the night of August 13, an elderly couple was pushing a handcart across a national highway at the entrance to their village in Pu County, Shanxi, when a car traveling with no headlights — driven drunk, and speeding — struck them from behind. Guo, 53, died at the scene. Her husband Zhang, 57, died in hospital. The driver, identified in police documents only as Du, is a rank-and-file employee of the Xueguan township government. He was criminally detained after the crash.
The accident responsibility determination, issued by Pu County traffic police nine days later, is why the case is now national news. It assigned the dead couple "secondary responsibility" — a share of the blame — for crossing the road without confirming it was safe, under the article of China's road-safety law that governs pedestrians crossing highways. Their son Zhang Peng cannot accept the arithmetic. His parents, he says, checked the road several times and deliberately steered clear of oncoming traffic before stepping out. As a post on the case by Sina Hot, liked more than 22,000 times, put his question bluntly: how was a couple on foot supposed to dodge a car coming from behind them, unlit, speeding, and driven drunk? The family has filed a formal written application for review, which the Linfen traffic police accepted on September 12.
The determination is a distinctively Chinese instrument — a police-issued ruling that assigns primary, secondary, equal or no responsibility for an accident, and with it the shape of any compensation and the driver's administrative fate. Assigning a dead pedestrian a slice of blame is routine when they jaywalk into open traffic; applying that logic to people hit from behind by a driver breaking three rules at once is what has struck readers as grotesque, and it is the reason the case tops Zhihu's hot list, where the question of how such a primary–secondary split is legally defensible has drawn the site's lawyers and armchair judges alike.
The review will reexamine more than the liability split. Zhang Peng says surveillance video shows the car's brake lights flare when it hit his parents — and then stay off again two seconds later as it drove out of frame, without stopping, in what he believes was a second vehicle running over his parents. The determination does not mention any of this. Nor, he says, has anyone from the driver's side come to apologize; his parents remain in the funeral home.
A township coordination group is mediating civil compensation while Du's criminal case proceeds — drunk driving causing death carries a prison term in China, and the "public employee" dimension has kept the case hot in a week when another viral story. For now the family's hope rests on the review: if the traffic brigade rewrites the determination to wipe out the victims' share of blame, it will be a rare public demonstration that a ruling can be corrected when video contradicts it. If it stands, the case will keep feeding China's running argument about what a responsibility determination is actually for.