Beneath contempt

Bad things happen every day. But every now and then, something happens that's so deplorable, you can't believe it happened in your own community. It leaves you thinking: "Nobody around here could behave like that; it must have happened somewhere else."

So it is with the story the Columbia County Sheriff's Office tells regarding charges filed against 25-year-old Kyle Richard Post of Martinez: hit-and-run; leaving the scene of an accident with injuries; driving under the influence; reckless driving; driving on the wrong side of the road; serious injury by a motor vehicle; and falsely reporting a crime.

Is there any traffic violation there that Post hasn't been charged with? If he is guilty of any one of the charges, he ought to have the book thrown at him.

Guilty of all of them? Then put him away for as long as the law permits, and then some. And don't allow him near a car ever again, much less drive one.

To be sure, Post is presumed innocent until proven otherwise, but that doesn't change the nature of the despicable acts that sheriff's Capt. Steve Morris describes: Post's father notified police Monday night that, following a quarrel between the two of them, his son drove off intoxicated through the back yard in the father's 1995 Honda Accord.

Police say the younger Post then hit a bicyclist, Havendra Sinha, a retired marketing executive, while driving on the wrong side of the road and - instead of stopping and tending to the 63-year-old man - he continued to drive for another mile or so with Sinha lodged in the windshield.

Then, says Morris, Post apparently left the vehicle behind an elementary school, then fled on foot to a gas station, where he called police to report that he was the victim of a carjacking. Fortunately, Sinha was still alive when he was airlifted in critical condition to Medical College of Georgia Hospital.

It's hard to imagine a person so selfish, self-centered and insensitive to other people's suffering that they would behave in the cruel and cowardly way Capt. Morris describes. It's more like the conduct of a weasel than a human being.

How can anyone with an ounce of compassion, or common sense, drive around with a man stuck in the windshield, then phone police - not to report and get help, but to tell a lie about being carjacked to cover up the incident?

Such conduct is beneath contempt, and being drunk is no excuse. If the charges are true, then throw away the key.