(THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck)
Manitoba RCMP have charged a woman whose daughter and her friends were injured in an off-road vehicle collision in the Pembina Valley.
Police say the crash on June 15 involved seven girls, all aged 13 and under, riding together on the side-by-side ORV when they lost control on a gravel road and rolled into the ditch.
All of the riders were thrown from the vehicle, sending one 13-year-old girl to a Winnipeg hospital with serious injuries. A second 13-year-old girl was taken to the local hospital with minor injuries.
RCMP say none of the youths were wearing helmets or safety equipment.
The 29-year-old woman has been charged with permitting an unsupervised person under 14 years of age to operate an ORV, as the owner of an unregistered ORV permitting it to be operated and having more passengers than allowed on an ORV.
“We take these incidents extremely seriously,” said Staff Sergeant Brent Mattice, area commander for Pembina Valley RCMP. “This could easily have been a much more tragic outcome. These machines are not for unsupervised children. They are not a toy. A fun ride can go bad quickly, as was the case here. The laws are there to keep people safe, and we are enforcing them.”
RCMP say in the last three years in Manitoba, there have been 116 serious injury collisions involving all-terrain vehicles, dirt bikes, and utility-terrain vehicles — 18 of which were fatal.
