A 38-year-old Auburn man is dead after a deer forced a car into oncoming traffic on I-95 in Gray, Maine, Friday night — the kind of preventable tragedy that happens on roads Washington forgot while it ships billions overseas.
Soda Mao was a passenger in a 2010 Honda Fit driven by 31-year-old Megan Stuart when she swerved to avoid a deer near mile marker 60 just before midnight, according to the Portland Press Herald. Stuart struck a guardrail and spun into the northbound lanes, colliding head-on with a 2016 Chevy Malibu. Mao was killed. Stuart was taken to Maine Medical Center with non-life-threatening injuries. The driver and passenger of the Malibu suffered minor injuries. The Maine Turnpike was partially shut down for two hours. The crash remains under investigation.
Hours earlier and 500 miles south, another American died on infrastructure that barely qualifies as maintained. WTOP reports that 50-year-old Talib Shakir of Northwest D.C. was killed Friday evening when two electric scooters collided at 8th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue SE. He was unconscious and not breathing when police arrived, and was pronounced dead at a local hospital. The woman riding the other scooter was treated and released. That crash also remains under investigation.
Two deaths on two American roads in one night. No terrorism, no spectacle — just the everyday carnage of a country that can't keep its citizens safe on the highways and streets their tax dollars built.
Maine's I-95 guardrails are supposed to keep cars from crossing into oncoming traffic. They didn't. D.C.'s intersection design and scooter regulations are supposed to prevent collisions. They didn't. Meanwhile, Congress has sent well over $100 billion to Ukraine, billions more to Israel, and continues funding a global military footprint across 750 overseas bases — all while the American Society of Civil Engineers grades U.S. infrastructure at a C-minus and calls road conditions a leading contributor to fatal crashes.
Both parties approved the spending. Neither party made America's roads a priority. The bipartisan consensus in Washington is clear: foreign commitments come first, domestic safety comes when there's money left over. There never is.
Mao and Shakir won't make the Sunday shows. No committee chair will hold a hearing on their deaths. The guardrails and intersections that failed them will stay as they are until the next name is added to the list.
The question isn't why these crashes happened. The question is what Washington was busy funding instead of fixing the road that killed them.
