A cyclist who sparked outrage in Belgium last year after he went viral for kneeing a young girl to the ground during her family’s Christmas Day walk is now suing her dad for sharing the video online.
The footage was filmed by five-year-old Neia’s dad, Patrick Mpasa, during their family walk in a nature reserve in Baraque Michel, Liege Province, on December 25, 2020.
In the video, the five-year-old girl is seen walking by her mother’s side on the snow-covered path as the cyclist approaches them from behind. Just as he rides alongside the girl, he seemingly extends his knee out, hitting the little girl and knocking her to the ground before continuing on his way unbothered.
The cyclist was taken to court in Verviers, only to be given a suspended sentence on the grounds that he had been criticised enough on social media and was ordered to pay the girl’s family a symbolic and pitiful €1 in compensation.
And the best part:
Now, almost a year after the incident, the cyclist is heading back to court to sue the girl’s father for defamation on the grounds that the backlash the video received resulted in him feeling so threatened by the public he was scared to leave his own house.
Act like an asshole, get treated like one. And for the legal action? Dismissed with costs, if there’s any justice left in the world.
Cyclists act like they own the fucking road, anyway.
Sadly, sign of the times – aloof self-pretentious sods who think the world is theirs, intense entitlement sponges, and self-centered twats.
Dad should have shoulder-blocked the prat, as he rode by, but he’d be arrested for that offensive action.
Just pointing out, it’s difficult to ride a bike when you lack functioning knees…..
For a couple years when I was a poor student a bicycle was my usual method of transport in good weather (and I had to use the bus in winter). I obeyed the rules of the road, yielded right-of-way, stopped at stop signs and red lights, stayed off the sidewalk, etc. I avoided busy roads when possible because I understood that I couldn’t get up that hill as fast as a car and I didn’t want people getting backed up behind me (or worse, clipping me we with their mirror as they passed). In short, I didn’t believe, or act like, I owned the road. It’s possible, but for some reason cyclists now seem to think they should have some special consideration, like they’re saving the planet or something (hint, the planet will be here long after you and your bike have turned back into component elements). It’s a problem that’s thankfully rare where I currently live, a combination of long distances between everything, hills, and narrow roads.
Don’t get me started on the NYC bike messengers. I’ve seen the riding the wrong way on a one-way avenue, running a red light and yelling at people in the crossing legally in the cross walk to get out of their way. Assclowns, I’m GLAD email but them mostly out of business.
Mark D
We have a similar story.
My wife returned home last year very shaken. She was at a stop sign at a difficult intersection a mile from our house, on one of our local country roads that is also a popular riding spot for Urban Spandex Bicycle Clubs. One of these guys pulls up alongside and angrily starts pounding on the roof of her car yelling all sorts of profanities. Now, my wife is a petit gray-haired woman who stops to let Squirrels, Turkeys, and Turtles cross the road, so arrived home somewhat confused and upset. We reported the incident to our local police, (small town where they are not very busy, so this sort of thing is acceptable to report) but since we had no idea who the cyclist was, the police had nothing to go on.
Manwhile….. The cyclist had also registered a complaint in the neighboring town when he returned back to his car. Seems he was angry that my wife had passed him a little too close for his comfort…. ” almost run him off the road.” He managed to catchup to my wife at the stop sign so he obviously wasn’t harmed. but he had my wife’s plate number on her Mercedes coupe, so he decided she would make an easy mark to sue.
So to get to the point …. the local DA told the cyclist he would likely be charged with assault and elder abuse if he pressed his complaint, since he was not harmed and “almost run off the road” is not a chargeable thing.
Apparently, the DA also was fed up with the Urban cycle clubs using the small towns as their playgrounds and causing traffic problems on our narrow roads,
Couple weeks ago I was out on my motorcycle enjoying a nice fall ride. This moron on a bicycle goes into the turn lane and blows through the red light, right in front of a cop. Cop proceeds to light up bicyclist and pull him over. I laughed. One of my best friends isav
Gotta love a happy ending.
Right? I managed to avoid pointing and laughing at the guy. Barely.
bicyclists typically don’t slim up and share the road. I’m glad that like mosquitos at this time of year, most of them go back to hell where they should stay
JQ
Many roads around here have signs informing drivers that bicycles may use the whole lane, but they also need some signs reminding bikers that the laws of man may say they’re allowed to ride there but the laws of physics guarantee that they’ll come out a poor second in any encounter with a motor vehicle
explaining physics to today’s crowd must result in a very large sign
JQ
Uh huh.
As noted above I used to cycle a lot, and I was always aware that there’s no such thing as a fender-bender on a bicycle. At best you’ve likely got a fall onto a hard surface, just the way I broke my arm when I was 14. I kept as close to the side of the road as possible, and if I HAD to move away from the curb (debris in the road for instance) I did so CAREFULLY, got far enough over that no one could pass me without going into the oncoming lane, and got back where I belonged as quickly as possible.
Mark D
Share the Road? Share the load. Tax bicycles.
My point also. Vehicle owners and drivers pay a crap-load of taxes to build and maintain roads and highways. Tax the spandex-brained cyclists, or tell them to sit down and shut up.
@Stencil ..
This has already happened … some years ago in Oregon, for certain bicycles over $600 as I recall, the state imposed an extra excise tax to cover the upkeep of bike paths, etc. The spandex crowd screamed bloody murder // discrimination // unfair government practices, etc., over the whole thing. I don’t recall all the details, but I do remember laughing maniacally at them.
The Netherlands used to tax bicycles. But that was before there were enough cars to leech money from to pay for road maintenance.
Now of course the reason to not tax bicycles is that “they’re green transportation”…
I own one, ride it at times (but not as much as I’d like that because of bad knees, riding it for more than 10 minutes or so HURTS) but I grew up in a gentler, more civilised, era and try to avoid confrontations with others.
Electric bicycles are growing in popularity around here. To the extent they increase the burden on the grid by adding demands the grid was not designed to sustain, it would make sense to license and tax them like mo-peds, but the saintly cyclists (unsurprisingly) disagree
If it’s got a motor, it’s a motor vehicle.
I believe the correct term here is ‘cyclunt’.
I used to run (drive, that is) into downtown Portland B.A. (before Antifa) for various errands – plus a stop at one of (or any five or so) really great diners/restaurants for a quick bite of lunch. Then came B.E. (the bicycle era): the bicycles would travel in the middle of the traffic lanes snarling it as well as slowing it to less than five mph.
The better eateries moved out to the ‘burbs and the more interesting (to me, anyway) stores either moved also or shut down completely.
Downtown Portland (for several other reasons as well) was becoming a retail wasteland long before Antifa and BLM started rioting.
Here on the South Florida gold coast, we have two types of cyclists. Clogging the scenic beach roads are the spandex clad crowd whose herds are as predicable as deer and further inland, in the warehouse districts, you have the illegals who stay out of everybody’s way and are barely noticed.
here in the Netherlands there’s 2 kinds as well.
The spandex clad crowd on their sports bikes who clog the roads, push people out of the way, and are rude to everyone, thinking they’re the next Tour de France team.
And the bulk who are just your every day commuter and shopper using their bikes for transportation and trying to avoid getting killed by the first crowd.
There’s a bit of crossover of course, but that’s mostly teenagers and students who don’t yet know that life is finite so they’re taking more risks than they should rather than do it out of malice or a senses of entitlement.
For a time, while I lived in the DC area, I depended on a bicycle as my major means of transportation, and even then considered the majority of my fellow cyclists to be deranged ninnies. You follow the goddamned rules of the road, with a few adjustments because of your size and low visibility. When there’s a bicycle lane, you freaking USE IT, even if it’s inconvenient. You ride defensively, because EVERYTHING else on the road can turn you into a pancake. And you leave the attitude AT HOME.
Perhaps folks should remember the fine old art of Spoking, where angered pedestrians carry a two-foot length of 2X2 pine, metal pipe, or rebar and insert it through the spokes of offending cyclists as they pass. While I certainly don’t condone causing serious physical injury to anyone, it is a lesson that no one wants to be taught twice.
My general response to this whiner is, as the Marines in “Battle Cry”, by Leon Uris, attributed to the Russian Marines, “Toughsky Shitsky. He should be relieved that it is only his online persona that is (rightly) ridiculed. He could, as MurphyAZ said, be “spoked”.
I remember some years back some idiot female cyclist ran a red light and was killed by a truck because, as others have noted, large motor vehicles can’t stop with only a foot or two of warning. I tried to look it up, but it seems to happen extremely regularly in NYC. (And it seems the cyclist is as if not more likely to be the one running the light.) Of course the cyclists were all up in arms about the driver, even though the cyclist was in the wrong. Personally, I felt he should have sued her estate for mental anguish. He hadn’t gone to work that day planning to have some Darwin Award winner mushed on his grill and was understandably upset by it.
My memorable encounter with bicycle riders that cemented the concept of them being entitled idiots was during a cruise up Skyline Blvd from Los Gatos to Palo Alto on a Yamaha RD350. Heading to a holiday dinner at a sister’s. Steep hill to a quite abrupt crest to discover 3 idiots riding abreast in my lane, probably about 3mph. The problem was the pickup coming the other direction, and all of us passed at the same time. Tiny shoulder that I was not going to hazard at any speed, as the hillside was a rather steep falloff. I passed between the two closest to the shoulder, as I didn’t want to knock the other one into the truck if we touched. I was hard on the brakes, with the rear tire sliding and the front howling as I squeezed between them at maybe 25mph. The handlebars were cut shorter than stock. I debated stopping to complain about their stupidity, but decided that if that incident wasn’t self-explanatory, words couldn’t do it.