Trooper Down! Page 9

  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.

  *

  There were two kids riding in the back of the truck. The father, who had been drinking, was driving. The truck hit a bank, overturned, and threw both the children out. One child, a ten-year-old girl, was pinned between the rear wheel and the fender and was lying in the dirt when I got there.

  She was still alive but the truck was on top of her chest, wedged between two trees, and there was no easy way to get her out. We hooked cables to a wrecker and tried to move the truck, but that only made the pressure on the little girl worse. She began to cry and said she couldn’t breathe.

  The medics had arrived by then and gave her oxygen but the truck was still across her chest. I was getting desperate, trying to think of the best way to help her. I even climbed a tree to attach a cable so we could h
aul the truck straight up, but that didn’t work either. We couldn’t cut her out from under it because it was too dangerous to use a blowtorch around the gas line. I didn’t know what to do next. I thought she was dying. It was the most helpless feeling I’ve ever experienced.

  As a last resort, we decided to dig her out. I took off my gun and blackjack, got down on my knees, and began digging in the dirt with my hands. Everyone pitched in. We just kept going until we were finally able to pull her to safety.

  Amazingly, after we got her to the hospital we found she wasn’t too seriously injured. The dirt beneath the truck was soft enough to create a slight crevice and that small space is what saved her life.

  *

  It was cold that morning, with fog so thick you could barely see past the hood of your car.

  I got called to a wreck on a rural paved road about eight-thirty that morning near Interstate 40. When I reached the bridge that spans the interstate, it was lined with people. Ahead, I could see the top of a Trailways bus. The remainder of it was covered in fog.

  I walked down the bridge abutment and saw a man lying on the shoulder of the road. He had a broken arm and cuts on his head. Other people from the bus were nearby, many of them complaining of injuries.

  When I went around the bus I discovered it had landed on top of a car. Under the front wheel was a nine-year-old boy. As I went past, he looked up, grabbed me by the arm, and said, “Mister, would you get this bus off of me? I can’t breathe.”

  His mother was in the front seat, impaled by the gear shift. There was a small child on top of her. Both were dead.

  In the fog, the mother’s car had rammed a tractor trailer and bounced backwards, causing the bus to run over top of her.

  I talked to the little boy and told him I would do what I could. But I wasn’t sure what to do. The wreck had caused a seven-car pileup and the interstate was completely blocked.

  I walked to the other side of the bus and stood there thinking. I am not a long-distance runner, but suddenly it came to me that I should run down the highway. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I was sure it would come to me soon.

  About a mile from where I left the bus, I saw a wrecker. The driver spotted me as I came toward him and he climbed out of his truck to unhook the vehicle he was towing. Together, we got the wrecker through the traffic and back to the scene of the accident.

  It took two and a half hours, but we finally got the bus lifted off the little boy. After we moved him, we found his seven-year-old brother beneath him on the back seat, dead.

  The nine-year-old boy was the only survivor in the car. Later, I found out that his father was an alcoholic, and so he really had no family left at all.

  That was one accident that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

  *

  The public astounds me with their desire to see blood and bodies. I worked a bad wreck one time, and within fifteen minutes after I arrived, there were two hundred people milling around. The rescue squad couldn’t get through for the crowd.

  I got so pissed off that I tried to set up a barricade with a rope. But people kept coming through. I couldn’t even push them back.

  Finally I yelled “You S.O.B.’s get out of the way!”

  It made me furious because I believe that at a time like that, everyone should show a little respect.

  *

  You never forget your first fatality. That night, I had turned onto the Blue Ridge Parkway and met a brown Mercury coming off a ramp. The driver was an elderly man and the passenger was his wife. As I went across a bridge, I heard the sound of air horns blowing on a tractor-trailer rig. I turned around and was heading [back] in the direction I came [from] when I saw the back end of the tractor trailer sitting in the middle of the road. The front end was over a bank.

  The old man and woman had pulled out in front of the rig and been hit.

  I jumped out of the patrol car and, using my radio, called the police and told them to get us some medical help fast.

  The truck driver had gotten out of his rig and was running toward the couple when I got to them. We found the old man under the steering wheel, dead. The woman was leaning toward him. The impact had crushed the car against her side.

  When I moved her away from the steering wheel, I could tell she was hurt real bad. As she looked up, you could almost see the words, “Help me, help me,” in her eyes.

  I called to the truck driver, “What can we do?”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Neither of us had the equipment or the skills needed to save her. I knew the ambulance would be there, but when?

  I held onto her for about five minutes, talking to her, trying to reassure her. She was looking up at me the whole time. Then all of a sudden she closed her eyes and went limp. She was gone.

  That accident happened twenty-five years ago. But I still remember every single detail. And it still bothers me whenever I think about it.

  Sometimes, the accidents troopers investigate are their own. Because of the nature of their work, they are at higher risk for auto accidents than many of the people they arrest. Since 1980, more than 225 North Carolina troopers have been involved in motor vehicle accidents while on duty. Some were seriously hurt or killed. These two officers were lucky:

  It was raining hard that night and I was almost ready to get off duty when I saw one car coming around another one and begin to spin. The first thing I thought was, “Boy, that looks just like a race car spinning out of control.” My next thought was, “Oh no, he’s gonna hit me!” I didn’t even have time to look and see if anyone was behind me.

  When the vehicle struck, my patrol car felt like it did a cartwheel, but actually it bounced up in the air and came down hard before sliding to the shoulder of the road.

  I knew that drunks often survive an accident because they go limp, so I forced myself to slump down into the seat. When the patrol car came to rest, the window was gone and the rain was pouring in. Then I looked down and saw blood streaming from my face.

  I thought, “Damn, I’ve broken my nose. Now I’m gonna be ugly for the rest of my life!”

  About that time, an old man reached into the window, got me by the shoulder, and said, “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Well, do you know so-and-so?” he asked, starting up a conversation. I couldn’t believe it. Here I was bleeding to death and he wanted to gossip.

  Fortunately, an ambulance had passed earlier, seen the car spinning out of control, and turned around, in case there was an accident. I was bruised, had cuts in my mouth and other superficial wounds, but wasn’t injured too bad. The driver of the other car was unhurt. I charged him with no insurance or registration, driving on slick tires, and driving on a license that had been permanently revoked. He also had to pay me $250 for damages to personal property. I recovered with no problem but was out of work for a week. I could have stayed out longer but I wanted to get back on the road.

  *

  My accident happened the first night I was on patrol alone after my six weeks of training. I should have been home but I decided to work a few minutes past my shift.

  I had pulled a car over for having no taillights and was about to get out of my patrol car when a drunk driver hit me from behind.

  I remember my car door slamming back onto my leg and the next thing I knew, I was slumped over the steering wheel. I thought I had fallen asleep. I could hear people talking around me. Someone told me later that I kept asking if it was my fault. Was the accident my fault?

  I had a fractured leg and a few other injuries. I was in the hospital a week and out of work for more than a month. The lady who hit me broke her leg, and the man in front of me hurt his back. She was charged with driving while impaired and having no insurance. But she never paid the fines because she skipped town. That’s why I despise drunk drivers.

  Not all accidents are caused by alcohol or carelessness. Many troopers bel
ieve that fate often plays a part, as it did in this case involving a young girl:

  She was driving a new 300ZX and went off the road in Haywood County over a bank with a 125-foot vertical drop. A passing motorist saw the wreck and called the rescue squad.

  By the time I arrived, there were three doctors at the scene. They worked hard to save her—she had a fractured neck, broken leg, internal injuries. We had a helicopter there from the local trauma center waiting for us to get her out of the wreckage.

  When we put her on the chopper she had a weak pulse, but things had gone well, it seemed, and we were beginning to think our efforts had paid off.

  I radioed the local police department to send someone to the girl’s home and notify her parents there had been an accident. Then I drove to the hospital so I could meet them there.

  When they walked in the first thing the mother asked was, “Is my daughter alive?”

  “At this point, she is,” I said, “but she’s very seriously hurt and it’s touch and go.”

  I attended the same church as this family so I spent the next few minutes telling them to have faith in God, that everything was in His hands.

  They seemed to be comforted from what I was saying. Then the emergency room doctor walked in and told them, “I’m sorry. She didn’t make it.”

  I thought, “What do you do? You try to console people and tell them everything is going to be all right, but you know it’s not going to be all right. All you can do is be there for them.”

  That night, I didn’t sleep. I kept thinking of all the drunks I’ve seen who will never amount to anything, but who walk away from wrecks. Then someone like this girl—young, intelligent, with a promising future—gets wiped out. I know we should value all human life, but it’s sometimes hard not to make judgments about those who live and those who die.

  I’ve seen troopers laugh and make jokes about fatalities. I’ve done it myself. But it’s a defense mechanism, a cover-up to disguise what we’re really feeling. When you get home, that’s when it hits you. You try to sleep and you can’t, because what you’ve just seen—a person’s death—goes through your mind over and over again.