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Inside the Law. Vikki Petraitis
Читать онлайн.Название Inside the Law
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isbn 9780648293729
Автор произведения Vikki Petraitis
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
I felt so sorry for the young motorist. He looked dazed as the crash investigators inspected the front of his car, the corner that had clipped the leg of the pillion passenger. There was blood on it.
‘You’ll need to hose that off,’ they told him. ‘Otherwise, it will start to stink.’
With a world of stories of varying degrees of horror to choose from, I asked the crash investigators for a story that typified what they did.
In the story that follows, it seems like the biggest threats to driver safety in the early 1990s were drunk or speeding drivers.
While road safety campaigns may have improved driver behaviour when it comes to alcohol, speed is still a problem; and now drugs and other distractions like mobile phones have added a whole new dimension to the work of crash investigators.
6. Four Car, Single Fatal, Double Hit-Run
Nick and Garry were driving their cars too fast – 100 kilometres an hour in a 60 zone – coming up on a white car some distance ahead of them. Garry moved onto the wrong side of the road to pass it, crossing double white lines in the process.
He didn’t see the oncoming red Holden beyond the rise in the road until it was too late.
The crushing collision sent his car spinning back onto the left (correct) side of the road where it came to rest against the gutter, while the other car was slammed to its left and then hit again by another car travelling behind it.
The driver of the red Holden died instantly, leaving his heavily pregnant wife screaming by his side.
Nick pulled his green Holden Commodore up onto the nature strip next to his mate’s gold Ford. Garry was injured, but not badly.
Nick walked back to the other two cars, surveyed the damage and noted that the driver of the red Holden looked dead. He returned to Garry, helped him out of the wreck of the gold Ford and drove him home.
They didn’t call the police.
They didn’t try to help the pregnant woman, nor the mother and son in the white Ford station wagon that had rammed into the red Holden as it spun across the road.
They merely surveyed the devastation they had caused and left the scene, no doubt concocting a story that cleared them of any blame on the way home.
Senior Constable Chris Field of the Accident Investigation Section was called to the scene along with Sergeant Tony Hill and Senior Constable Geoffrey Exton. Chris Field had been working an afternoon shift and had received the call at 8.30pm.
They drove the specially-equipped police Land Cruiser known as the ‘crash truck’. One of this vehicle’s most important features was the light on the roof which could be extended on a pole to a height of 4m to illuminate scenes at night.
The accident scene in the suburb of Heatherton was littered with debris from the mangled remains of three vehicles: a red Holden and a white station wagon on one side of the road; and a gold Ford further down on the other side.
Chris Field, having worked accident investigations for five years, was used to such scenes. His first duty was to speak with uniformed officers already on the scene.
Half an hour had elapsed since the collision and the only remaining victim at the scene was the dead man in the red Holden. His body would remain in the car until the on-site investigation was complete. In death he had, in a sense, become a piece of evidence.
The first officers to arrive at the scene had taped off the accident site with crime scene tape and they brought the crash investigators up to speed. A pregnant woman, from the red car, had been taken by ambulance to hospital for observation and sedation.
The woman and her young son from the white station wagon had been picked up by her husband after giving police a statement. She told them she’d seen the oncoming gold car speeding down the wrong side of the road and realised it was going to hit the car in front of her. She had heard a loud crash and then felt the impact of her car also hitting the red car in front.
The woman explained that she was temporarily dazed after the impact but then heard a woman screaming for help. She and her son got out of their badly-damaged vehicle, went over to the red Holden and helped the woman out of her car.
She told police they thought the expectant mother was the only occupant of the car – until she began screaming for someone to help her husband. In the darkness, they hadn’t seen the woman’s husband who had fallen back between the two front seats.
A man appeared, looked inside the red Holden, told her that the driver ‘didn’t look too good’ and then left.
The woman remembered people coming and going, but delayed shock had set in and her memory of subsequent events was hazy. Her young son had run to call an ambulance from a nearby house.
Officers at the scene also informed the accident squad members that the third car – the gold Ford – was empty.
Chris Field immediately notified the police helicopter to begin a search of surrounding market gardens. He knew the driver could not have walked away from the twisted wreck uninjured. There was a possibility they’d suffered a head injury and had wandered off in a daze, so they had to be located as soon as possible. State Emergency Service officers, together with the police and sniffer dogs joined the search on the ground.
A second possibility was that the driver had deliberately left the scene of the accident to avoid the consequences.
Chris Field and his fellow officers began their investigation. The signs were easy for the trained crash investigators to read. Skid marks told them the direction in which all the vehicles had been travelling, the shape of dents told them the angle of impact and flakes of paint told them which vehicles had collided.
They started with the red Holden, which was a wreck. The front end on the driver’s side was completely smashed in, as was the driver’s side door. The dead man lay back against the seat – his face covered in blood. His feet had been jammed under the pedals on impact. Field concluded the deceased man was definitely the vehicle’s driver.
Field noted that the red Holden had come to rest on the nature strip at right angles to the white station wagon, which he knew had been driven by the other woman. Scuff marks in the grass indicated the direction in which the car was spinning prior to coming to rest.
Field noted gold flecks of paint adhering to the red Holden at the point of first impact. The investigators checked the dash board in case the speedo had jammed on impact to give a clue as to how fast the Holden had been travelling but the needle sat on zero.
The dead man’s seat belt hung slackly around his body. He’d been wearing it and on impact it had locked in position as he’d been thrown forward. But no seat belt could have saved him.
A cursory check of the inside of the red Holden revealed nothing to suggest that the dead man and his wife were anything but a normal, law-abiding couple. There were no beer cans or stolen property or drugs. It was the experience of the investigators that fatal accidents such as this often involve drunk drivers, drug addicts or burglars more concerned about absconding with their stolen goods than keeping their eyes on the road. Every possibility had to be considered.
Next, the crash investigators examined the white station wagon. It wasn’t as badly damaged as the red Holden, but they could easily see the point of impact at the front where the collision had occurred. Chris Field photographed the car from a number of different angles, capturing all of the damage.
When this examination was complete, officers Field, Hill and Exton made their way to the third car further down and on the opposite side of the road. The gold Ford had come to rest against the gutter and it too, was very