Somber images of nail salon crash give us pause

By now, you might have seen one of the surveillance videos that capture the moments just before an alleged drunken driver crashed his car into a nail salon in Deer Park and killed four people. If you are like many of us, you probably have watched those videos over and over.

And if you have, you most likely have remarked to yourself how utterly normal the scenes appear to be, how unremarkable the images they capture — except for the speeding car being driven by 64-year-old Steven Schwally. 

The videos show a brilliantly sunny day in June, a day brimming with possibility and optimism, the kind of day that brings Long Islanders out of their houses and fans them across the region. They show a late afternoon like any late afternoon in June, at a pair of strip malls like any strip malls in any community on Long Island. Shoppers like any shoppers walk through parking lots like many others, entering and exiting the stores as they and we have done hundreds of times without incident. The familiarity is horrifyingly mesmerizing.

And then Schwally's Chevrolet Traverse enters the scene like a missile. In the first video, he misses two pedestrians by what seems like millimeters with three other people in close proximity also unharmed. In the second, his car careens across another parking lot, flies between two parked cars and yet another bystander, and smashes into the outer wall of the nail salon with such ferocity and such dreadful sound that you can't help but wonder how anyone inside could possibly have survived.

And after the screen fades to black, you are forced to think about the serendipity in life that unfairly takes the lives of some innocents while fortuitously sparing others.

There is much to digest in the images. They make you realize how much we trust one another without thinking about it, how much we believe we are safe without examining our surroundings. When we walk through a parking lot to enter a store and are in a well-marked crosswalk, we note the car approaching out of the corner of our eye and knowing we have the right of way assume it will stop as every car has ever stopped for us before. Until it doesn't. And when we are in a store carrying out our business as we always have, we assume that we are safe inside its four walls as we have always been. Until we're not.

The videos also force us to understand that we can rightly call for stiffer penalties for drunken driving, for taking away the keys of those who are convicted, for putting bollards outside stores, and for requiring that purveyors of alcohol be more discriminating in who they serve and how much they serve them. Yet in the end, we are compelled to understand that sometimes life is as the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska wrote: There but for the grace.