An Italian man recently had to fight charges of manslaughter after his five-year-old son hit an 87-year-old pensioner while learning to ride a bicycle in a Milan park.

What was meant to be a rite of passage for a young boy, turned into a nightmare for his entire family and that of an 87-year-old woman who had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The woman was strolling through a Milan park with a 74-year-old friend when a boy crashed his bicycle into her causing her to fall and hit her head on the pavement. Although the pensioner claimed to be alright, the boy’s father, who was teaching him to ride a bike and had seen the crash, insisted that he call an ambulance. Unfortunately, the woman’s condition abruptly changed for the worse and, despite the efforts of the paramedics, she tragically lost her life.

Photo: Ben Krb/Unsplash

According to Italian news agency ANSA, the young boy “lost control of the bike” and hit the elderly woman “at a moderate speed”. The bicycle did not have stabilizers, which prosecutors later used as a motive to charge the father with manslaughter. They claimed that “not preventing an event” which “one has the legal obligation to prevent” was “equivalent to causing it”.

Prosecutors argued that the father was guilty of not having “adequately supervised the child’s activity,” thus creating a dangerous situation by placing a dangerous vehicle “in the hands of a person incapable of adapting its use to the conditions of their surroundings” It sounds dangerous, until you remind yourself that the ‘dangerous vehicle’ was a children’s bicycle.

Photo: Saul Bucio/Unsplash

If found guilty, the 5-year-old’s father faced prison time, as well as 200,000 euros ($219,000) in compensation to the victim’s family, unless he could prove that he was “unable to prevent the incident”.

Luckily for the parent, Judge Luigi Iannelli in Milan cleared him of any criminal liability, arguing that the minor collision and its impacts could not have been predicted and that the man could not react quickly enough to stop it from happening.