Trooper Down! (11 page)

Once a call comes into the highway patrol's telecommunications center that an accident has occurred, a trooper in that assigned area is notified by radio and sent to the location. He generally has few details about the wreek and may be receiving second- or third-hand information, relayed by another law enforcement agency before it reaches the highway patrol office.

“I've had a telecommunicator tell me that a car was on fire and I've raced to the scene only to discover it was an overheated radiator,” said a trooper. “Other times you're told when there is property damage involved or a personal injury. But you still don't know what to expect until you get there.”

When he arrives at the accident, the officer's first responsibility is to check for injured. All troopers are trained in first aid, and a growing number of officers are certified emergency medical technicians. In most cases, ambulance personnel arrive before the trooper, freeing him to begin investigation of the mishap.

Basically, his job is to determine what happened. Who was driving? How fast? Any witnesses? Were the car's occupants wearing a seat belt? Had anyone been drinking? Have any laws been violated? Who's at fault?

Physical evidence must also be collected in order to support any charges filed. Skid marks are measured, auto damage recorded, and signs of alcohol or drugs noted. The trooper draws a rough diagram of the accident, gets a statement from the driver (or drivers) involved, and puts this information, along with other details, on an accident form which he fills out by hand at the scene. A copy of the report must be mailed to the Division of Motor Vehicles in Raleigh within twenty-four hours. The trooper retains a copy of the report, and a
third copy is sent to the highway patrol district office. If an arrest is made or a citation issued, the officer must include that fact on his report as well. An additional report is filled out if the accident is caused by a fallen sign or damaged roadway, and the Department of Transportation is notified. The trooper also has to get traffic flowing freely again around the accident scene. Poor weather conditions can make this part of the job miserable.

“I remember directing traffic one night on the interstate after a bad wreck,” said a western North Carolina trooper. “It was snowing and sleeting and the windchill factor had the temperatures down to about thirty below. I couldn't stand in one spot too long because my feet would literally freeze to the pavement. My face was uncovered and I got so cold that my eyelashes froze and I couldn't blink. I finally had to go sit in the patrol car and get warmed up so I could continue working.”

Sometimes figuring out exactly what caused an accident is difficult and frustrating.

“I was called to an accident scene in Haywood County on Interstate 40,” said another trooper, “and when I got there the car was sitting in the eastbound lane smashed to pieces. There were three girls in the vehicle, all badly injured. They had been on their way to college at Western Carolina University. One was pinned under the dashboard and later died. I went to the hospital and interviewed the two who survived, but neither could remember what happened.

“One of the girls said she thought she recalled seeing the back of a tractor trailer just before the crash. But there were no skid marks, no witnesses, and very little physical evidence at the scene. Whoever the girls hit didn't stop.

“It bothered me a lot because, as investigating officer, it was my responsibility to explain what happened, and I couldn't. I even put an article in the paper asking for information. I also contacted tractor-trailer firms to find out if any of their carriers had reported a recent accident. But I came up with nothing.

“To this day, I don't know what happened. It was the strangest wreck I ever investigated.”

When all else fails, veteran troopers say they use the SWAG method to determine what happened at an accident—“Scientific Wild-Assed Guess.”

Accidents involving alcohol occur in about 50 percent of all fatalities
reported. As a result, many officers develop a low tolerance for drunk drivers, having seen firsthand the destruction an intoxicated driver can inflict on himself and others.

“I don't get personally angry at drunk drivers,” explained a trooper with twelve years experience, “but I don't take any crap from them either. What pisses me off is when they say, ‘Man, you're taking my license away and I'm gonna lose my job, etc.' The way I see it, I'm not doing a damn thing except trying to protect the public. Whatever damage is done to the drunk driver is damage he brought on himself.”

After investigating numerous accidents where innocent people were killed as a result of a drunk driver, this same trooper says he has given up social drinking and will arrest anyone—from a relative to a fellow law enforcement officer—for a drunk-driving offense. That kind of attitude helps explain why North Carolina ranks among the top three states in the country for number of drunk driving arrests.

State law dictates that an individual with a blood alcohol level of 0.10 or above is considered intoxicated. Punishments for convictions of DWI (Driving While Impaired) are harsh by national standards, including fines of up to $2,000 and two years in jail. Get arrested for drunk driving in North Carolina and your driver's license is automatically suspended for ten days, at which time the court determines your fate. Anyone who refuses to take a DWI test can have his or her license revoked for a year.

Yet drunk drivers continue to drive, making up the largest percentage of violators arrested by North Carolina state troopers. On any given weekend, it's not unusual for a highway patrolman to spend the majority of his shift in the breathalyzer room at the local courthouse, administering breathalyzer tests to DWI violators he has arrested.

The number of drunk driving arrests varies greatly from trooper to trooper. Officers who are “high arrest” men average anywhere from twenty to thirty drunk drivers a month, depending on the area in which they are working and other factors such as weather conditions, what shift they're on, and the number of special assignments they pull that take them away from the road.

One of the toughest assignments any trooper encounters on patrol is breaking the news to family members that a loved one has been killed or injured in an auto accident.

“I try to get relatives to come to the hospital without telling them
anything specific,” said one officer. “Of course, the first thing they want to know is the condition of the victim. I tell them what I can, but I'm not qualified to pronounce people dead, even if I'm sure that's the case. My duty is to notify the family and then be there to answer questions and provide support.”

In certain cases, notifying relatives can prove especially painful, as it did for this trooper:

It was about one o'clock on a Sunday morning. The driver had gone down a rural road at about ninety miles per hour, run off the shoulder, and hit two trees. The car exploded and caught fire with the driver pinned inside. He was burned beyond recognition.

When I pulled up to the scene, the fire truck was already trying to extinguish the flames. I attempted to get the information I needed by talking with different people and getting the tag number off the car, but even it [the tag] was burned pretty bad. In fact, you could hardly tell what kind of car it was. The wheels looked like they had come from a Dodge, Chrysler, or Plymouth. The metal was still so hot we couldn't touch it, and we knew the boy inside was dead.

I was getting skid measurements to fill out my report when one of the firemen came up to me and said, “Can I talk to you for a minute?” I told him I was kinda busy, but if he'd wait I'd be glad to talk to him shortly.

“I really need to talk you now, in private,” he insisted.

“All right. Come on back to the patrol car.”

I picked up the radio and told the wrecker where to come to the scene, reported what I had to the dispatcher, and turned to the fireman sitting next to me.

“Would you do me a favor?” he asked. “Would you run me up to my house? It's only about a mile from here.”

“Well, I'm kinda busy right now,” I repeated. “I can take you in a few minutes if you can wait.”

“I really need to get there right now,” he said. “You see, when the fire alarm went off, I jumped up, put on my clothes, and raced to get here. I didn't look to see if my son was home. He's twenty years old and I didn't check on him.”

Then he pointed to the burned vehicle.

“What kind of car is that?” he said.

“I don't know. It's hard to tell. It looks like a Chrysler.”

“Those wheels sort of look like the ones he had on his car.”

So I backed up, left the scene, and drove towards the man's house. All the way there, I kept trying to reassure him that his son was probably home safe and sound. But when we pulled into the driveway and looked around, the boy's car wasn't there. At that point, the father began to cry.

“Just try to relax,” I said, “and we'll go back to the scene. Are there any identifying things about your son—a ring, for instance, or a particular kind of wallet he carried?”

“Yeah, my boy had on a high school class ring and wore a belt buckle with his initials that one of his uncles had given him.”

By the time we arrived at the scene, the wrecked car had cooled down. Not knowing any other way to get the information I needed, I crawled into the front seat. There was nothing left of the boy except bones, scraps of cloth—and a class ring that I found on the floor. The belt buckle, with the hoy's initials on it, had fallen off, but I found it on the floorboard and wrapped it in a handkerchief. Then I went back to the patrol car.

The fireman was waiting for an answer. I knew I had to tell him the truth. There's no way to sugarcoat that kind of thing, so I just handed him the belt buckle and said, “It's him.”

Then he asked me if I'd go back to the house and help him break the news to his wife and younger son. I remember going into the home and the man waking up his family. It was three-thirty in the morning and they were startled, of course. State troopers don't normally appear at your house in the middle of the night under happy conditions.

I tried to tell them, as gently as I could, what happened. The mother refused to believe it at first, and the little boy went all to pieces. Apparently, he was very close to his brother.

I got choked up telling them about it because I could feel for them, what they were going through. When I had crawled into that car I had wanted so much for it
not 
to be their son.

I stayed with the family till daybreak, just sitting there talking with them. The mother grew calm after she began to accept the fact her son was dead. The next afternoon, when I checked on duty, I returned to the house to offer my sympathy and find out if I could help them make funeral arrangements.

That wasn't my first or my last fatality, but it was my most memorable.

How do I cope with bad accidents? When it's over, I just want peace and quiet. I don't want to talk to anybody about anything. I'll read, go back through some of my scrapbooks, or sit and think. Later on, I'll talk about it with someone I know. But there's no certain way to deal with the pain. You do what you have to do and go on to the next one.

*

Teenagers who drink and drive bother me the most. I've got kids of my own and everytime I investigate a wreck involving teens, it reminds me of my own children and what can happen to them.

I once investigated a wreck where two cheerleaders—daughters of a doctor and a lawyer—turned their car over and were thrown fifteen feet from the vehicle. One of the girls had been hanging out the window and was decapitated, I found her head in the middle of the road. It reminded me of a mannequin wearing a wig, with every hair in place.

There was a question about both girls drinking because they had just come from a party—a party given by one of their parents. Here was a young girl with a promising future, whose life ended tragically because of drinking and driving. It was also the twenty-third of December, and I thought of all the unwrapped gifts she'd never see and what her family must be going through. That upset me. They buried her the day after Christmas.

*

People told me that Indians don't cry; they keep their sorrows to themselves. But when it comes to losing our children, we're all the same. I remember investigating a wreck on the Cherokee Indian Reservation in which four boys had hit a tree at more than a hundred miles per hour. They were killed instantly.

I went to the funeral and one of the mothers came up and asked me what happened. As I began telling her, she didn't say a word, but big tears rolled down her cheeks. It made me realize that underneath, we're more alike than we are different. We just have so many damn hang-ups, we can't always see it.

*

I was in court one day and got called out to investigate a wreck at a nearby intersection. Three women in a pickup had hit a logging
truck head-on. All of the women were killed. It took two or three hours to extract them from the truck. We were about to tow the pickup truck away when we heard a strange noise.

One of the guys said, “That sounded like a cat.”

I said, “Hiram, there can't possibly be a cat in that truck. It was smashed flat.”

But we cut the top off the truck and looked under the seat anyway. There lay a baby, about nine months old, crying but unhurt. Somehow, it had landed in the cavity under the seat and wasn't harmed, just scared. That entire incident still seems incredible to me.

*

What bothers me most about working wrecks is to see a little kid hurt. If there's anything left in the world that's innocent, it's a child. I've stood at the scene of an automobile accident involving kids and cried. Then I went home and couldn't sleep. Seeing a dead or injured child is something I'll never get used to, though I know it's part of the job.