When I was around 19 or 20 I had a kid / car “contact” that I never considered an official “collision”, but…
I was driving on a warm, sunny Saturday afternoon at around the posted speed limit (45 mph) on a secondary road with no traffic and no distractions. Not a care in the world, nor another car on the road. Some teenage kids off to the side of the road ahead of me were riding minibikes, but they weren’t crossing the road (I could see them doing donuts off to my side of the road, and staying on that side). As I drew even with them, one of them messed up his maneuver and instead of completing his circle he skidded, right at the side of my car, and onto the roadway. I heard a THUMP that sounded like the hammer of God smacking my car, and felt the car shudder. My heart was instantly in my mouth; I knew the kid was dead. Who could survive a collision that would make a noise like that and shake this big ol’ Chevy, and him with no protection?
I stopped and got out of the car, expecting the worst, and barely able to walk, my knees were shaking so much. As I rounded the back of the car, the kid was standing up, brushing himself off, and picking up the bike to look it over. No damage to him or the bike – and he kind of glared at me like I was at fault for being there! – but I saw where his left side footrest had punched a hole in the rocker panel just below my curb side passenger door. He and his friends boogied off through the woods in less than a minute, and I was left standing there in the road, wondering: how do I handle this? I can’t just walk / drive away from “an accident” (I was such a Do-Bee in those days); how were we going to call the police? I don’t even know the kid’s name or the witnesses’ names; what if he had an injury that he just hadn’t realized, and what about this hole under the door of my Mom’s car?
A few days later when I brought the car back home from school I told Dad everything, and he pretty much went through the same list of things I “should have done” to report the accident, wait for the cops, inform the insurance company, etc. (I didn’t learn to be a Do-Bee in a vacuum.) Later on he recognized my predicament at the time, but he reinforced one thing that he had tried to teach me when I started driving:
Any time you have an accident with a child, and it doesn’t even matter if you’re in a parked car with the engine turned off and the kid simply walks into the side of the car, then you are at fault. I’ve driven extra-defensively around kids my whole life because of this. Can’t trust those monsters.
But to change the context a bit (and the way I read the ‘big letter Q’ before I read the details: I always used to threaten to “stop this car and come back there” to hit the kids. I never tried to do it while driving. That was my wife’s job.