As a UC Davis medical student who rides my e-scooter to campus every day, and an MD-PhD candidate who hopes to curb the crisis of motor vehicle crashes — the leading cause of death globally — I was devastated to learn of the violent death of my colleague, Dr. Geohaira “Geo” Sosa, a first-year psychiatry resident physician, on Thursday, August 29 near the corner of Folsom and Alhambra in East Sacramento.
Having often ridden past the spot where she was slain, it seems likely that while she was on her scooter in an unprotected bike line, a driver struck her while turning their box truck into a parking lot.
However, when our UC Davis Health community received an email notifying us of her passing, I was disappointed to hear our leadership refer to it still as an “accident.”
Perhaps this is an unimportant semantic debate in the wake of a life upended, but having studied the impact of media on our perception of health at Harvard Medical School, I know all too well that the language that we broadly use to refer to these deaths influences our perception of their causes. In fact, when it comes to automobiles, American adults hold uniquely different attitudes toward car-related risk, rule-bending and consequences compared to other subjects, leading to a phenomenon Texas A&M researchers have referred to as “windshield-bias” or “motonormativity.”