This is the most powerful photo you will see all week.
The father of a car accident victim hugging the drunk-driving teen who caused the crash.
On May 20 this year, 18-year-old Takunda Mavima was driving home from a party after graduating from high school, when he lost control and crashed into an off-ramp near Wyoming, Mich., the New York Daily News reports.
Tim See, 17, and Krysta Howell, 15, who were in the car with Mavima, died in the accident that night.
At the time of the accident, Mavima had a 0.10 blood alcohol level, reported ABC News. At a courtroom sentencing this week, he tearfully addressed the families of the victims: "I’m so sorry that I took two bright, intelligent, wonderful people out of this world …. I wish … I’m so sorry."
He was sentenced to between 30 months and 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to all charges.
In a moving address to the court, both the sister and the father of victim Tim See spoke on behalf of Mavima, urging the judge to give him a light sentence.
"I am begging you to let Takunda make something of himself in the real world -- don't send him to prison and get hard and bitter, that boy has learned his lesson a thousand times over and he'll never make the same mistake again," Lauren See said in court.
See's father then hugged Mavima as he walked out of court after the sentencing.
To see photos from court visit Huffington Post.
3 comments:
The dad is a better man than me, I would've faked a hug & caved his fkn head in.
Wow I couldn't do that either. I wouldn't kill him, but I would kill myself. If my son died, I could not face another day.
While I (or anyone else, in my opinion) cannot say for certain how I would react in this situation without having actually been in this situation, I can genuinely say I understand the father's compassion and forgiveness toward this driver.
There are several things to take into consideration that we could not possibly know in entirety by merely reading this story. I would think the two victims must bear some responsibility as they chose to get in a car with a driver who had been drinking heavily. Also, it would appear the three were friends attending a graduation party together. This would lead one to believe the father might, at the least, have some knowledge of the driver, and quite possibly could know the driver very well as one of his son's high school friends. This knowledge would give the father a better perspective as to how genuine the driver was in his remorse and how many lessons the driver had actually learned. All these things might, and in my opinion would and should, play into the father's feelings about the driver.
While this father and family were surely suffering an unthinkable loss and absolutely overwhelming pain, life does go on. They chose to move forward and become better instead of bitter. Forgiveness was as much a gift to themselves as it was to the driver.
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