Shockingly this type of incident is said to be a common occurrence in China.
Security cameras regularly capture drivers reversing back and forth over pedestrians they have accidentally hit, to ensure they are dead.
And tellingly, there is even a Chinese saying : 'It is better to kill than to hit and injure'.
Geoffrey Sant, a writer on Slate.com, experienced this attitude first hand when working in Taiwan in the 1990s.
A fellow teaching assistant reportedly told him '“If I hit someone, I’ll hit him again and make sure he’s dead.”
And the reason behind the 'hit to kill' phenomenon lies with the financial punishment associated with driving accidents.
Explaining it further, the colleague told Sant:
If you cripple a man, you pay for the injured person’s care for a lifetime. But if you kill the person, you “only have to pay once, like a burial fee.”
Recent reports in the Chinese press detail how a disabled survivor received around £250,000 for the first 23 years of his care.
In contrast a man caught on camera driving over a grandmother five times, only ended up paying around £45,000 in compensation- and shockingly was found not guilty of intentional homicide.
China has reformed Article 6 of its Civil Code, restricting the ability to bring civil lawsuits on behalf of others (such as traffic accident fatalities) in an attempt to reduce hit-to kill cases.