Miranda Bowman was getting a ride home from her grandfather in his pickup truck when he suddenly suffered a fatal heart attack. Well, let’s back up. First, he started complaining of chest pains and dizziness, and Miranda kept him engaged in driving by asking him to name the things he was seeing as he drove down the road while she tried (and failed) to get service on her cellphone, which is just the first sign that this 12-year-old is made of stone cold sugar and spice. When her grandfather suddenly and tragically died in the pickup with his foot jerking down harder on the accelerator, Miranda unbuckled her seatbelt, jumped under the driver seat and pressed on the break with her hands. But when she realized the car was hurtling too fast and would fishtail or potentially flip over on the highway, she steered it towards a cluster of trees on the side of the road, thinking that by steering the car into them, “I can’t hurt anybody else, I can only hurt myself.” To recap, a child who had just suffered a sad and horrifying loss of a family member had commandeered a pickup and was thinking of how to best protect the other people on the road instead of her own. The car ran into the trees, where she kicked the door open, freed herself, and ran back up to the highway where other cars had already alerted emergency crews. “I’m very amazed by her, very impressed by her,” Miranda’s mother, Stephanie Bowman said. “Where she got it from God only knows.” Miranda says she got it from watching a lot of Law and Order, so maybe it’s time the rest of us started catching up on that show …
