In April, her 23-year-old son, Connor Lopez, was riding his motorcycle in Elk Grove when an oncoming car made a left turn and collided with him.

Lopez, a piano teacher, died in the roadway. The district attorney’s office charged the driver, Harjit Kaur, with misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter — alleging that her failure to yield to oncoming traffic caused the fatal crash, court records show.

She said she was talking to police and one of the officers kept referring to the case as “low-level.” “She took my son’s life, but that’s how they’re seen — low-level,” Lyman said.

It really highlights something someone commented on another post: that we all suppress the knowledge that we’re driving two-ton death boxes. Like, it’s easy to say “she just made a turn without checking carefully enough,” and hard to rectify that with “she killed someone, however unintentionally.”