Menace on the streets

On a warm night last August, a 12-year-old boy named Shawn Dunkley took a family friend’s electric scooter out for a spin near his home in London, Ontario. It was a powerful machine, ordered from the Chinese online retailer Alibaba. Dunkley was barrelling—helmetless, despite his mother’s pleas—along the paths of his family’s suburban neighbourhood, only a two-minute walk from his house. He glanced at the scooter’s speed display: 69 km/h. Suddenly, everything stopped. Two passersby found him five minutes later, lying unresponsive a few metres from the pathway. His eyes were open, his expression vacant, his hair streaked with blood. A dead raccoon lay nearby. The best anyone can figure is that it darted in front of the scooter. The passersby called 911 and, within minutes, Dunkley was being rushed to London’s Children’s Hospital. He’d suffered a traumatic brain injury, a skull fracture and spinal bleeding. He was transferred to pediatric critical care in a medically induced coma. A tube…