Things you don't think about but do happen

From an article in the New York Times, June 30, 1986, A Rural Phenomenon: Lying-in-the-Road-Deaths by William E. Schmidt.

Every two weeks, on the average, somewhere in North Carolina, usually late at night along a rural highway, somebody gets drunk, lies down in the road and is run over and killed.

''In most cases, the victim is intoxicated almost to the point of being comatose,'' said Dr. Lawrence S. Harris, a state medical examiner who is one of the authors of a report, ''While Lying in the Road - The Prone Pedestrian.'' The report documents 136 such fatalities in North Carolina over five years ending in 1984.

There are probably scores of people across the country who are killed that way every year, mostly on warm summer nights in the poorer rural reaches of the South and the Southwest, said Dr. Harris, who teaches pathology at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C.