We knew it was looking bad for Alexian Lien even after the beating he took from angry bikers Sunday afternoon. We just didn’t know how bad until we caught Friday’s press conference by Gloria Allred. The celebrity attorney announced she will be representing the “innocent victim” of Sunday’s chaos: biker Edwin Mieses.
It’s true that Mieses has suffered terrible leg and spine injuries stemming from the confrontation on the West Side Highway. It’s also true Lien ran Mieses over when he tried to escape bikers who had surrounded the Lien family SUV.
But let’s be clear: Whatever happened to Mieses happened because an innocent driver looked out at a horde of helmeted men who had brought his car to a stop and then did what most fathers with a child in the back seat would have done: tried to get away. Maybe Mieses was trying to help the situation. But getting hurt the way he did is the risk you take when you make yourself part of a mob that pulls over a driver, slashes his tires and smashes his side mirror.
Oh, yes, one other thing: Mieses was riding illegally, because he had no license.
Allred’s interjection has contradictions of its own. Usually when she parades before the TV cameras, she’s waving the gender card. In this case, she is siding against the one woman on the scene that day. That would be wife and mother Rosalyn Ng, who desperately called 911 four times in the course of eight minutes as bikers swarmed around the car with her baby inside, and who saw her husband dragged from his driver’s seat by a biker and beaten.
Millions have already watched a video of much of what went down. But it would sure be illuminating if those 911 calls Ng made were released, so people might hear for themselves the terror that must have been in this mom’s voice as she made her calls.
The issue here isn’t who the greater victim was that day. It’s who was abiding by the law and who was not. All Allred would say about lawsuits is that Mieses is not yet well enough to make a decision. That plainly puts the threat out there.
We’re not sure of the exact remedies. Maybe we need to improve police procedures. Maybe we need to clarify our civil-liability laws.
One thing we are sure of is this: The city needs to do everything it can to make sure law-abiding people like the Liens are not forced through a second injustice after the brutal attack they’ve already endured.