Driver Utterly Loses Her Mind After Crashing Into Four-Year-Old And Mother

I’ll try my best to walk you through what happens here, with help from Yimeng Evening News’s June 20 edition (story is pasted onto this Youku video, which appears after the jump, uploaded three days ago and currently with 1.3 million views).

At 10:30 am on June 17, last Sunday, a woman surnamed Wang went out on her electric bike with her four-year-old daughter sitting on the back and her son riding a separate bike. They were heading east when, out of nowhere, a rapidly approaching car hit them head-on. By all accounts it was a horrific accident. The video picks up from here.

The driver is apparently a university teacher, Zhang Yan, who works at the College of Shandong Provincial Medical College of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Her students say she teaches human anatomy, psychology and psychiatry, which is all very normal. What she did after she hit the mother and child, however, was anything but.

First, Zhang is hysterical as a bloodied child is pulled from underneath a vehicle. Then, one hears someone from behind the camera say, “She’s taken off all her clothes.” The scene cuts, and then it gets really bizarre. We see someone — Zhang, it turns out — laying in front of an ambulance, blocking its advance. After the camera pans a couple of times, we see Zhang fling the clothes off her body (she has, indeed, already taken them off at least once). When a 60-year-old neighbor approaches her, according to Yimeng Evening News, she shouts, “I will kill you!”

After the four-year-old girl is loaded into the ambulance, Zhang appears to get up and reach into the ambulance to pull her out. Why she does this is no longer the right question. She flings herself on the ground again, sans clothes.

I can’t speculate on the trauma a person’s psyche suffers after witnessing a crowd pull a young girl, bloody and unconscious, from underneath a car. But it does seem reasonable to say, in this case, that that trauma caused Zhang to lose her mind, at least temporarily. UPDATE, 11:25 am: We’re reminded of the case of Yao Jiaxin, who hit a pedestrian with his car in April 2011, then stabbed her to death when he realized she was copying his license plate number. He did it because he didn’t want her to “blackmail” him for money (he would have paid for all her medical expenses, too). Just something to think about — could Zhang have subconsciously desired the little girl’s death? We prefer to think she went insane. 

The most recent update, yesterday from Qilu (Shandong) Online, is that Zhang remains detained under criminal charges while an investigation is pending. Updates will follow, Qilu tells us.

The four-year-old died at the hospital. Her mother remains in critical condition.

(H/T Alicia)

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