When a white Toyota Camry driven in tandem by two brothers — ages 6 and 4 — sideswiped a car and plowed into Kiara Bowling as she walked a friend's dog in East Oakland, it created a question California's justice system is barely built to answer: who is accountable when the driver is too young for kindergarten?

Bowling, a 31-year-old Cal State East Bay student, remains at Highland Hospital with multiple brain bleeds and facial fractures, but has begun responding to basic commands, her family says. The children who were behind the wheel will almost certainly never see a courtroom: California law presumes kids that young cannot form criminal intent. That leaves any legal reckoning to land on the parents and in civil court — a displacement that two legal analysts describe as nearly without precedent.

The collision happened around 9:15 a.m. Thursday near 35th and Mangels avenues, close to Interstate 580, according to Oakland police. Surveillance footage reviewed by KTVU showed Bowling stepping off the curb moments before the Camry — driven by the two boys — clipped an oncoming vehicle and veered into her. The dog she was walking, an emotional support animal named Grizzly, was injured but later recovered.

How the children reached the driver's seat is its own indictment. A source close to the family told KTVU that the 6-year-old found the car keys in his sleeping father's pocket, woke his younger brother, and used a kitchen chair to unlatch the front door. The Camry, the source said, is the car the father uses to drive for Uber.

Bowling's relatives have declined to direct anger at the boys. "There is no ill will," her sister, Christina Blackmon, told KTVU. "We all know children do not know how to operate a vehicle." Her aunt, Karon Markham, framed it as a warning to other parents: "When you have young children, you should always be present, because young children are going to try anything and everything."

But witnesses were less forgiving of the adults. "These parents need to be held responsible," Lavelle Shah-Marquis told NBC Bay Area. "That was my main concern."

The legal machinery, however, was not designed for a case like this. As KTVU reported, California criminal law presumes that young children are incapable of forming criminal intent, and a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old sit far beneath the age at which the state's juvenile courts would take jurisdiction at all.

"This is such a one-off," legal analyst Steven Clark told NBC Bay Area. "I've never seen anything like this in my practice of 40 years." Clark said the matter is likely to be resolved through social-services investigations and civil litigation rather than any criminal prosecution of the children — with "a level of accountability here civilly."

Where responsibility can attach is to the parents. KTVU legal analyst Michael Cardoza said that while the boys are unlikely to face charges, the adults could face legal scrutiny including potential criminal charges for child neglect, along with civil liability. Neither analyst pointed to a clean statutory answer — because there isn't one. The presumption that protects the children from prosecution also removes the most obvious defendant, leaving prosecutors and a possible civil claim to work backward toward the sleeping parents and an unsecured set of keys.

That gap is the story beneath the "victim stabilized" updates. A pedestrian was critically injured by a moving vehicle in broad daylight, and the person operating that vehicle is, in the eyes of the law, not a driver at all. Accountability doesn't disappear — it shifts, from a criminal court that cannot act to a civil and social-services process that moves slowly and rarely makes headlines. Bowling's family, meanwhile, has set up a GoFundMe to cover medical costs while she fights through a recovery her sister described as far from over.

"I know we're not out of the woods yet, but we all have a lot of faith," her friend Jyorti Arora told NBC Bay Area. "She's an incredibly strong woman, so we're very grateful that all of her vitals are stable."