Newton Woman, 86, Cited For Crashing Car Into Newton Wellesley ER

NEWTON, MA — Newton Police said an 86-year-old Newton woman was attempting to park in front of the Emergency Room when she went forward instead of back into the parking space, and ended up crashing up over the curb and into the window at the Newton Wellesley Hospital yesterday.

Newton Lt. Bruce Apotheker, spokesperson for the Newton Police Department said he couldn't comment on the details of the case - including what may have caused her to slam into the Emergency Room and shatter the window, because the report was not fully finished. But he did say police cited the woman for a marked lanes violation.

No one was in the area of the building where the gray Kia slammed into the building, shattering a window, according to hospital staff.

"Fortunately there were no serious injuries, the two occupants are just shaken up. It could have been much worse," Brian O'Dea a hospital spokesman told Patch yesterday.

Police said they did not know the condition of her and her friend, an 87-year-old Wellesley woman she was driving to the hospital. Apotheker said when police arrived the women were both already out of the car and being checked out by the ER.

This is not totally uncommon for Newton. Last year a man drove into the Sweet Tomatoes on Needham street and killed two, wounding seven others. In A woman driving a Range Rover crashed through a clothing store display window on the store’s opening day in 2014 at the Chestnut Hill Square. No one was injured there.

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What happened?

Although police said they couldn't comment on why people drive into buildings, Trevor Firth of leftfootbraking.org said he thinks he knows what is happening.

What it boils down to, he told Patch. Is that breaking using only one foot is more complicated than people think and in a moment of panic doesn't always work due to a right foot pedal error.

"Unintended Acceleration (UA) may be described as the movement forwards or backwards of an out of control automobile," he wrote to the Patch.

Pedal error may be described by using various terms such as pedal misapplication, step over, right foot slips off the brake pedal and lands on the gas pedal or things like that, he said. "It happens over 16,000 - 18,000 times per year in parking lots alone," according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data he said. Enough that the NHTSA has named it pedal misapplication and have undertaken a number of studies to determine what is happening.

Firth has kept a close eye on such studies and is working to change the way people learn to drive automatic vehicles and he's pushing for more specific studies about right breaking in particular.

"Right foot braking on automatic vehicles must be banned," he said, citing two types of pedal error that happen in a moment of panic, which lead him to push for a new way of driving.

The first situation is where the driver goes to move the right foot from the gas pedal to the brake pedal but misses the brake pedal and lands on the gas pedal but realizes it and then catches and attempts to adjust before the crash.

The other type, which is the type he said might be at play here, is when the driver attempts to move the right foot from the gas pedal to the brake pedal but the foot misses the brake pedal and lands on the gas pedal. "In this situation the driver is convinced that the right foot is indeed on the brake pedal (but it is in fact on the gas pedal), and continues to press even harder on the brake pedal (now the gas pedal), until the crash occurs," he wrote to Patch.

A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have done a couple studies on what happens with someone's right foot slips off or oversteps the pedal they intend to press. One such study noted that a high stepover rate may be related to pedal misapplication for drivers older than 40.

Also: Kia is no stranger to lawsuits related to sudden acceleration. One lawsuit filed earlier this year says the 2008 Kia Optima model is defective because it had a problem with the fault detection system, which couldn't anticipate "foreseeable unwanted outcomes, including unintended acceleration." That lawsuit also says from 2002, Kia's makers knew or should have known that the electronic throttle control systems should have included a brake override system in some models, according to an article in the Winchester Herald in Tennessee.

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Photo at the top of the Kia into the ER, courtesy New England Fire Photography.