Inside the Law. Vikki Petraitis

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СКАЧАТЬ understood the need for humour; to dehumanise the human tragedies. What else could they do? They had to create a safe distance from the carnage in order to do their job professionally.

      But sometimes distance wasn’t possible. I recall a story a cop told me about attending a decapitation on a train line. Someone had picked up the victim’s head and was walking it back to the rest of the body when another officer pulled the dead man’s ID out from his pocket. When he read out the man’s name, the guy carrying the head blanched.

      ‘Hey! I know him! I’ve been to his house for dinner.’ He looked at the head with horror and recognition, his two worlds colliding.

      I did a ride-along with the accident squad and attended a fatal collision at an inner-city intersection. At the scene, a young man lay dead on the footpath, a motorcycle on its side many metres up the road, a bewildered driver shaking his head, saying, ‘They came out of nowhere…’

      The dead man had been riding pillion on a motorcycle. He and his mate were flying through the intersection over a crest in the road, way too fast. A car turning right had hit them. The passenger on the bike was thrown across the intersection and hit a pole. He had a shocking injury to one leg where the car had connected, but the rest of him was deceptively unscathed.

      ‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ I whispered to one of the crash investigators.

      ‘Injuries are mostly internal,’ said the seasoned cop, ‘except for that.’ He pointed to the leg.

      ‘But there’s no blood,’ I said. There was a trickle that had found the crack between the concrete and wormed its way along.

      ‘Once the heart stops, the bleeding stops too,’ he said.

      Some folks learn that in science class. I learnt it on the side of the road, looking down at a body.

      Standing under a streetlight in the dead of night, next to a person who’d been alive an hour earlier is surreal to say the least. And what went through my mind was that while I knew he was dead, his family didn’t yet. And that didn’t seem fair. I knew their lives had just been irrevocably altered; and they didn’t.

      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

       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 СКАЧАТЬ