NEW SMYRNA BEACH — Sandy Fletcher, a bartender with a dark tan at the Breakers beachfront restaurant here, remembers seeing the commotion in July. Lifeguards had stopped the usual flow of Sunday traffic on the hard sand. Sirens blared. “We knew it was something bad,” she said. Cellphones started ringing. “Then they said it was a 4-year-old.”

Aiden Patrick’s life had ended minutes earlier. Barefoot and smiling, the boy had been running toward his father when a pickup ran him over. He was the second child killed this year on the beaches of Volusia County, around Daytona, and more than a month after his death, many residents are still pretty shaken up.

But the tradition of beach driving lives on. Indeed, what others might see as another accident waiting to happen, most residents here see as a birthright, mixing two of America’s favorite summer pastimes.

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