Inside the Law. Vikki Petraitis

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ