Читать книгу Inside the Law - Vikki Petraitis - Страница 10

The wrecked red Holden and, in the background, the police crash truck with its extendable roof light.

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 badly damaged.

Immediately the officers noticed tyre marks on the nature strip next to the car. The scuff marks were fresh and couldn’t have been made by the gold Ford because it had not mounted the curb.

The gold Ford did, however, have flakes of red paint from the Holden lodged in its front grill.

Chris Field checked the nature strip closely and picked up a bit of plastic moulding, which he recognised as part of the bumper bar of a late model Holden – possibly a Commodore.

Something was amiss. Why were there pieces of a Commodore near the wrecked gold Ford – but no Holden Commodore in sight?

He then noticed a dent in the gold Ford that didn’t seem to be associated with the damage caused by the collision with the red Holden. There were pieces of green paint lodged in the dent.

Senior Constable Field put two and two together. He figured that a green Holden Commodore had driven up onto the nature strip after the collision and then, in its haste to leave the scene, had tried to drive forward along the nature strip to get back onto the road. It appeared there hadn’t been enough room to pass between the wrecked gold Ford and a power pole on the nature strip, so the green Commodore had clipped the Ford leaving behind part of its bumper bar and paint work.

Common sense told the officers that the driver of the green Holden Commodore had collected the driver of the gold Ford and driven him away. That made the collision a hit-and-run and the job became a four car, single fatal, double hit-run.

Field immediately put out a bulletin for a late model, green Holden Commodore with front end damage. He then radioed D24 for an officer from the state forensic science laboratory to attend the scene and gather evidence like soil samples and tyre casts.

Field and his team knew such samples may be needed later in court to link the missing vehicle with the accident scene.

The next step in the investigation was to find the owner of the abandoned gold Ford. Registration details were taken from the smashed window of the car and a police check was run on the owner; Garry’s name was soon known to police.

Field sent uniformed officers to the address only to find that Garry hadn’t lived there for some time. Field then ran an information bureau of records (IBR) check on Garry and wasn’t really surprised to find he had a long list of prior convictions – most of which were for driving and drug offences. The IBR check also listed Garry’s known associates.

Four addresses were checked before police officers located Garry’s mother who gave them his current address – he was living with a mate called Nick.

Chris Field left Exton and Hill at the accident scene and went with uniformed officers to the house in Noble Park. Using their powerful police torches, Field and the other officers illuminated the green Holden Commodore in the driveway of the house. It had obvious, recent front-end damage.

It was now six hours since the collision. Examination of the exterior of the Commodore was interrupted by loud barking and the arrival of two dogs – one of them a bull terrier. Field recalls bluffing the dogs with his police baton before making his way to the front door of the house.

A woman came out onto the front porch when the dogs started to bark. Field asked to speak to the driver of the green Commodore.

The woman retreated for a moment, told someone to say nothing, and then returned to tell Field a story. Her boyfriend Nick, and his mate Garry, had been at the pub watching a strip show when they noticed Garry’s car was being stolen from the car park. They’d pursued the thieves until Garry’s car had been involved in an accident. Nick had driven them home and, according to the woman, was going to report the whole thing to the police the following day.

Understandably, Field was sceptical and asked to see Garry. He was led into the lounge room where a man in his mid-20s was lying on the couch covered with a blanket.

Field asked him to stand up, which he did reluctantly and with great difficulty. It was obvious Garry’s legs were severely bruised and one of his wrists was swollen enough to suggest it was broken.

Ironically, as Garry repeated the story the woman had told, and denied any involvement in the accident, evidence to the contrary literally fell from his lap. As soon as he stood up bits of windscreen glass began dropping from his tracksuit.

Field cut him short. ‘Don’t insult our intelligence, mate. Tell us what really happened.’

Garry and Nick finally admitted to their part in the fatal collision but denied, when asked, that they’d been drag racing.

Garry and Nick showed no obvious signs of regret or remorse when told the driver of the red Holden had died.

Chris Field was used to such reactions. He cautioned the two men and took them to the Cheltenham police station to be interviewed. Worried about taking a statement from the injured Garry, he called in the police surgeon. The doctor recommended that Garry be taken to hospital for x-rays. Nick was later released pending further investigation.

In Heatherton, Tony Hill and Geoffrey Exton supervised the removal of the smashed cars – the gold Ford was sent by tow truck to the state forensic science laboratory while the other cars went to local police compounds to be sealed until examination by police mechanics attached to the accident squad. Using a geodometer, they measured the distance between the vehicles and the skid marks at the accident scene in order to prepare a scale map of the incident.

Police then began the painstaking examination of the evidence to put the puzzle together. From the witness statement of the driver of the white station wagon, they knew there’d been at least one other car on the road.

Chris Field appealed through the media for the driver of the car that Garry was trying to pass, before the collision, to come forward.

The man rang police the next day. He said he’d been driving along the road in Heatherton when he saw two cars in his rear-vision mirror speeding up behind. They were going so fast, he said, that he was sure they were going to crash into the back of his car. He had seen (Garry’s) car swerve onto the wrong side of the road, to go around him, and hit the oncoming red Holden.

The man told police he had ‘freaked’ and was unable to stop – in fear of what he would see. He went home, had a stiff drink, and telephoned police the following day to offer his assistance. He was a valuable witness.

Garry was charged with: culpable driving causing death; recklessly causing injury to the wife of the deceased, negligently causing injury to the wife of the deceased, and recklessly placing the wife in danger of death; recklessly placing the woman and her son (in the other vehicle) in danger of death; failing to render assistance at the scene of the accident; failing to give name and address at the scene of the accident; as well as driving in a manner careless, driving in a manner dangerous, driving while disqualified, crossing double lines, and exceeding 60 km per hour.

Garry’s alleged speed according to complicated calculations performed by accident investigators was 100 km per hour.

When his case finally came to court, Garry pleaded guilty to the charge of culpable driving – giving him an automatic one-third reduction of any possible sentence.

Senior Constable Chris Field said that Garry ‘cried like a baby’ when the judge gave him a 30-month jail sentence.

The full penalty for culpable driving was (then) 15 years in prison, but drivers never got the full term. Field explained he always tried to distance himself from the sentencing process because he felt the sentence was society’s responsibility. He said he merely did his job, which finished when he gave evidence.

He did note his disappointment, however, that a man like Garry was given such a relatively-light sentence considering his list of prior convictions.

Garry had lost his driver’s licence almost as soon as he got it. In 1987 he’d been convicted of unlicensed driving and exceeding .05; his blood alcohol reading was .170. He had also been convicted of dangerous driving and speeding. A year later he’d been convicted on a number of theft and drug trafficking charges. In addition to his considerable list of prior convictions, Garry continued to offend after the fatal collision.

It was the variety of the work in the accident squad that enabled Chris Field to thrive in what was often a traumatic job. The squad was largely independent, which meant an investigation was followed from beginning to end. Field and his fellow investigators attended accidents, gathered evidence, took their own photographs, attended post-mortem examinations, collated evidence and appeared in court as expert witnesses.

Job satisfaction aside, they still had to maintain a safe psychological and emotional distance from the carnage. Often, throughout a shift, they’d catch sight of a speeding driver through the station window and say, ‘There goes another customer’.

An altered TAC (Transport Accident Commission) campaign poster, on the office wall read:

If you drink and drive, you’re a bloody idiot customer.

Seeing so much death on the road – mostly because of alcohol and speed – the officers felt that messages of road safety too often mean little to the public.

Accident investigator, Senior Constable Chris Field.

‘People think it won’t happen to them,’ Field said. ‘But my job proves it can and does happen to anybody.’

It’s easy to see how the officers become hardened. Time after time, they are called to ‘accidents’ involving drunk young men with prior convictions who wrap their cars around power poles.

One incident that stood out in Field’s memory was a triple fatality where one young man’s body was found in a particularly stupid place. Investigators called to the scene found two dead young men in the front seats of the car. Empty beer cans had spilled out of the wreck onto the ground.

The vehicle’s rear-end was jammed against a stone fence and it wasn’t until the wreck was finally moved that police found a third body – in the boot of the car.

Investigations revealed that the men had gone on a beer run to the bottle shop, then loaded their purchases into the boot. The third victim had jumped in there ‘to be with the beer’. For a lark, his friends had sped around the streets to throw him around inside the boot. They were all drunk and they all died.

Chris Field said that it was always the death of children that broke through the team’s emotional barriers, because kids were always innocent victims.

One Christmas Eve Field was called to investigate a two-car collision near a small country town in Victoria. Five people had been killed. It transpired that a woman had been driving to New South Wales to visit her mother-in-law for Christmas. She was following her husband and father-in-law who were travelling in their own car. Her passengers were her two children, aged six and two.

Inexperience of country roads and possibly fatigue were blamed for the woman missing a bend and colliding head-on with a car containing two people – also on their way to visit relatives for Christmas. The scene was utter carnage.

Not only did Field have to investigate all aspects of the accident, he had to deal with the distraught husband who had pulled his car over when he noticed his wife was no longer following him.

The hardest part – and the thing that stayed with Field – was seeing the tiny bodies of the two children and then noticing the car full of Christmas presents with cards handwritten in a childish scrawl: To Dear Granny.

Field finished his lengthy investigation at 3am, returned home to catch a couple of hours sleep and was woken by his own small children opening their presents.

‘All I could think about were those little kids who wouldn’t be opening their presents that morning. It ruined Christmas.’

The tendency of some cars to burn following a collision, meant Field had many tragic cases stuck in his memory.

In one, a woman died on impact when her car hit a tree. The vehicle’s roof had folded in, trapping her baby in its capsule in the back seat. Bystanders had rushed over to try to free the baby, but soon smoke began to billow from underneath the car. The would-be rescuers tried desperately to shield the trapped infant with blankets but were soon driven back by the flames.

Field shrugged sadly. ‘There was nothing anyone could do.’

In another accident, a man lost control of his car on a corrugated country road, and careered into a small bridge where he was trapped. A private security officer saw the accident and stopped to help. He couldn’t free the man’s leg which was caught under the dashboard, so he began running to get help at a nearby farmhouse. He heard the man yelling and turned back to see smoke coming from the car’s engine. The security man continued running to the farmhouse but help didn’t arrive in time.

When Field attended the scene, the driver’s charred body was found with his arms raised defensively in front to shield his face.

The security man told him, ‘I would have given a million dollars for a fire extinguisher that day’.

Not all road fatalities are added to the state’s annual road toll – some are suicides and some are murder – but any involving a car or a road may be investigated by the accident squad.

Field said investigators must have an open mind.

‘It is easy for experts to tell the difference between someone who has been hit by a car, and someone who was run over to make it look like an accident.’

Pedestrians hit by cars typically suffer similar injuries, quite different to someone who is run over while already on the ground. Damage to the victim’s legs at the height of the car’s bumper bar is usual, as are head injuries where the victim is thrown up onto the bonnet and perhaps smash the windscreen.

Investigators get the occasional case of murder. Field says it is not unheard of for a husband to line up his car with the biggest power pole or truck he can find and, just before impact, unclasp his wife’s seat belt, ramming only her side of the car. He kills her but walks away relatively unscathed.

These cases are difficult but not impossible to prove.

Chris Field says that the function of the accident squad is to investigate any road fatality with three or more victims; any case involving police – on or off-duty; and any case of criminal negligence. Field said police are just as accountable as everybody else and the accident squad is always called in as an independent investigator when police are involved in serious collisions.

Field occasionally lectured at the police academy and told new recruits bluntly of their responsibility on the roads. Field called it ‘double jeopardy’ if police are involved in a collision. He said not only are they investigated by the accident squad, but they are also investigated by the police internal investigation department. The case is then passed to the state Ombudsman for independent review.

Field said these exacting standards meant that the public could be assured that police neither receive nor expect special treatment.

The success rate of the accident squad is high. In fact 95 per cent of hit-and-run cases are solved with the examination of physical evidence and the help of witnesses.

Senior Constable Chris Field was understandably cynical about the general messages of road safety. He conceded that innovations such as speed cameras have slowed traffic down, but sadly concluded it was the ‘hip pocket’ effect rather than drivers behaving better because they should.

‘Road safety is ultimately society’s responsibility. If society believes that drink driving is wrong, then its members will actively encourage each other not to drink and drive.

‘I remember when it was considered normal – even humorous – for a drunk to stagger to his car and drive home. This attitude has clearly changed. Death on the roads is no longer considered an inevitable part of driving.’

But one thing that Chris Field was certain of: as long as people continue to flout road rules, drink and drive, speed, and drive while tired, the accident squad will never be short of customers.