At its finest:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/18/AR2006011802616.html?nav=rss_metro

"Our daughter is a complete idiot, not a criminal!"

"We don't feel she was eluding police," echoed Huck's half sister Stacey Cross, 25. "She had no reason to."

What apart from driving a car without a license, creeping out of home at 4 in the morning and having technically stolen your mothers car.

I think noob drivers often panic and do crazy shit when something unexpected happens, so I don't think its that crazy.

Families are usually in denial about any malace of their offspring/siblings.

In any case, you're talking about a family that just lost their 15 year old daughter/sibling. Seems a bit mean-spirited to pick on them.

Must remember to teach my kids:
"You can't outrun radio"

Philo

What a noob. Now a dead noob but a noob none the less.

(I bet I would own her at driving.)

The line between idiocy and illegality can be very thin at times. Especially at 4 in the morning, at 80 miles an hour, when police lights start flashing behind you.

That's part of what driver training is all about, to tell you to pull over when the cops want you to pull over -- instead of trying to power out of there, which is usually the noob's first response.

But 90 seconds is a really long time. That whole "accellerator vs. brake" thing may make the parents feel better, but it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Sadly, I'm afraid it's Darwin award time. But what were the parents thinking?

"But what were the parents thinking?"
Where you going with this one? Parents buying a teenager (who is learning to drive) a car is somehow beyond the pale?

>> But what were the parents thinking?

I'm goddam sure that they were not thinking "Hey lets buy a car for [kid] to learn on so she can sneak out of the house in the middle of the night and drive over to her boyfriends house without a license and then try to outrun the cops on the way home and kill herself."

So what exactly did you mean by your statement?

"But 90 seconds is a really long time."

The pursuit was 90 sec. That is usually measured from the time the cop car pulls onto the highway, not from when the cop gets on the bumper of the speeder. And just to stop a speeder the cops can't go much faster than that, or they get investigated for endangering the public themselves.

My guess? The girl saw the cop beside the road, and tried to get out of sight and off the road before the cop got her back into sight. I've heard stories of people that have successfully done it, so I'm not surprised that she tried...