Should The Killing Of Nabra Hassanen Have Been Called Road Rage?

The killing of a Virginia teen over the weekend is drawing a new focus on road rage.

Fairfax County police say Nabra Hassanen, 17, was killed early Sunday by an angry motorist after an encounter with a group of Muslim teenagers walking along a road on their way to Ramadan prayers.

Police have arrested Darwin Martinez Torres, 22, on a second degree murder charge. Authorities say he beat Hassanen to death with a baseball bat, then put her in his car, assaulted her again, and then dumped her body in a pond.

The police are investigating it as a road rage incident, saying the traffic dispute escalated into deadly violence. But Muslim leaders are skeptical, and have called on authorities to investigate the killing as a possible hate crime.

For some experts, the case is an odd fit.

"That's beyond road rage I would say," says Mary Vriniotis, a researcher at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center in Boston.

"I don't think most folks who study either auto fatalities or homicides would describe that as a road rage incident," she says.

Law enforcement agencies don't typically single out road rage episodes as a category for data collection, so it's hard to get a handle on what factors lead to deadly outcomes in road rage incidents.

Figures from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) do indicate a rise in traffic deaths attributed to aggressive driving — from 292 fatalities in 2011 to 467 in 2015.

A 2016 survey by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that nearly 80% of drivers expressed anger, aggression or road rage behind the wheel at least once in the last year. It also found that about 8 million US Drivers engaged in extreme road rage behaviors, such as purposefully ramming another vehicle or getting out of the car to confront another driver.

Vriniotis is co-author of a study in 2006 on the relationship between having a gun and likelihood of road rage.

She says road rage incidents are most likely to involve young male drivers, who also engage in other risky behaviors such as drinking.

Those who said they had a firearm in the car were more likely to engage in road rage behaviors likel making an obscene gesture or aggressively following another vehicle too closely.

"Raising the idea that perhaps just having the gun there changes your response to things in your environment that are aggravating to you, like driving," Vriniotis says.

High profile cases can draw attention to road rage. For instance the 2016 killing of former New Orleans Saints football player Will Smith. He was gunned down by a man who had rear-ended his car.

There are lesser-known road rage incidents just about every day. Like the case in California Wednesday where a motorcyclist kicked a car in a fit of road rage, causing a chain reaction crash. The car he kicked swerved into another lane of traffic, hitting a truck that overturned, and injured the driver.

"It's an increasing out of control public health crisis," according to Leon James, a professor of psychology at University of Hawaii.

He teaches a driving psychology class and has written a book on road rage and aggressive driving.

"I believe that it's been increasing due to the fact that society has become a little bit more permissive of aggressiveness or expressions of expressiveness," says James.

It comes down to a lack of civility he says.

"Aggressive driving is eroding our social conscious."

Shaheen Ainpour is an intern for the National Desk.

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