Woman Has No Idea What Happened After Crash | Accident Investigator | Real Responders

a woman is killed when a car plows into the back of an illegally parked truck could there be a medical explanation for this tragic collision the drivers going a high rate of speed weaving from lane to Lane in between cars then the catastrophic rollover kills the driver of a pickup front but spares the life of his daughter riding in the passenger seat there would have caused a violent rotation within less than a second the pickup truck was on its roof and slide investigators struggle to explain what caused the accident and how one person could survive such a devastating wreck and two drivers are involved in the death of a young girl riding her motorized scooter both admit to hitting her but investigators must determine who dealt the fatal blow some people have caught my eye with selecting skid marks with several hundred feet every year violent collisions killed 40,000 Americans and injure another three million but there is no such thing as an accident every collision has a story as unique as the people involved rusty Haight is a leading authority on accident reconstruction he trains investigators around the world to read the clues and solve the mysteries [Music] all too often we forget the Driving's not a right it's a privilege you may have paid for your car your insurance your license but that doesn't mean you own the road so when you're driving you're not in complete control of your faculties that's just reckless and what I'm talking about your faculties I mean more than alcohol and drugs I'm talking about if you're supposed to wear glasses when you drive and you choose not to wear them then you get in the wreck whose fault you figure that is bottom line alcohol drugs speeding those aren't the only ways to end up facing a reckless driving charge or worse after a long day behind the wheel of his truck Michael Morgan is getting tired and sleepy it's about 70 miles to the next truck stop and Morgan thinks that's a bit too far to risk driving any further the trouble is it's illegal to stop for a rest on the roadway if he's caught he could face a hefty fine but given how heavy his eyelids are getting Morgan decides to pull over and take a break for just a few minutes on a lightly traveled stretch of side road he knows that almost 40% of truck accidents involve a sleepy driver and he doesn't want to become a statistic it's a decision Morgan will regret for the rest of his life Barbara Shriver and her daughter Brooke are in a festive mood coming back from the movies but the mood quickly shifts to panic and fear when Barbara notices a car zigzagging and coming up from behind at full speed in a matter of seconds it catches up with them and before they know what's happened Barbara has lost control of her car up ahead Michael Morgan's tractor-trailer comes into view but it's too late the schreiber smashed directly into the rear end at almost 60 miles per hour [Music] I received a call they have an accident down here a car into the back of a tractor-trailer a second vehicle involved sighs the tractor trailer and there may be a fatality involved when accident investigator Frank Carson arrives at the collision scene regular officers have blocked the street and secured the area Barbara and Brooke have already been pulled out of their wrecked car and are on their way to the hospital Barbara is in critical condition she suffered a lot of head trauma and has bleeding under one of the membranes that protects the brain she's also suffered bruises on her lungs as for Brooke she's luckier having escaped with a broken arm nose and facial cuts the car that came up from behind the drivers has been pulled over too and Michael Morgan is also still on the scene uninjured but numb from what just happened when all of a sudden I hear boom get out of the vehicle the collision took place on a straight road under a clear sky so there was no obvious explanation for this tragic event Frank will have to figure out this one from scratch but looking at the car under the truck he immediately realizes why Barbara Schreiber is fighting to stay alive she was not wearing her seatbelt the passenger side of the vehicle was largely intact the passenger compartment inside of the car where the pastor said was very little damage and of course what helped the passenger immensely was fact that pastor is wearing a seatbelt the fact that the daughter survived this crash was due to her having worn her seat belt and the airbags deploying well airbags can cause some minor injuries they're gonna save more lives and they're gonna take them the deal is airbags and seatbelts go together airbags are a supplemental restraint to the use of seatbelts here's a couple of facts from a guy that's got 805 make that eight hundred and six crashes under my seatbelt an airbag deploys at about 200 miles an hour right near the steering wheel on the dash and if you're not wearing a seat belt that's a lot of force you can hit with your upper body and with no restriction no limits even when you're wearing a seat belt you can still suffer some abrasions on the inside of your arms from the rough airbag material itself and in some cases you can even break your wrist why is that because you could throw your arms up in front of your face like our pal the dummy here this action can cause further damage like broken noses and even broken arms maybe but you think those injuries are bad imagine how they'd be without seatbelts and airbags remember to buckle up seat bags and airbags aside what the Shrivers have experienced is one of the most deadly and violent collisions possible what police call and under I've well this bar that we're looking at here is called an under eye protection bar the truck drivers commonly call it an ICC bar because it's mandated by federal law what it's designed to do is to keep the car from running underneath the tractor-trailer and if the car has a blunt front end it works pretty well unfortunately the modern vehicles getting more aerodynamic more low to the ground more wedge-shaped and they tend to run underneath the ICC bar rides underneath it the ICC bar ends up in the passenger compartment and injuring the drivers and passengers a little bit more at this point Frank Carson knows the obvious the Shrivers car crashed into the back of the truck the question now is why Frank's focus shifts to other physical evidence entire marks there are plenty of those in this case and they are giving a pretty clear picture of what happened in the final few seconds before the schreiber slammed into the back of the trailer at high speed one of the first thing to notice when I got there was there were two tire marks leading in an arc from one of the lanes in the roadway right underneath the tractor-trailer so the first thing you know is that at some point because the tire marks are an arc that the driver of the vehicle lost control for some reason there were two other tire marks that belong to the third vehicle and those marks led from what was the point of impact to the place where the vehicle came to a final rest there was a third car stopped at the scene and it could offer clues to what happened Frank goes to examine it the third car had very little damage to the front end very intact could have started the car up and driven it away if you needed to that third car belongs to Denise frame according to the police officer who first arrived at the trash French was acting very strangely she was eerily calm and seemed completely detached from what was going on but there was no smell of alcohol on her breath or in her car were you in this accident you don't think so the interesting facts is the driver of the vehicle was conscious and talking to the officer at the scene when they arrived lost consciousness before the paramedics arrived which indicates she had some type of altered level of consciousness or some medical problem going on French loses consciousness before she's able to provide any useful information to the investigators unable to revive her emergency personnel on the scene rushar to the hospital at this point they are unclear what caused her to collapse it could be a reaction to drugs or alcohol or she could have simply fainted as a result of traumatic shock the post-traumatic reaction people at accidents vary from hysteria to very calm acceptance of what happened to not believing what happened everybody has been in an automobile accident as a moment of I don't know what's going on some people that's extended you also have that situation people are on different types of medications the reactions vary and part of the job that we have is determining when they reacted how they reacted and why they reacted that way yeah but with Denise French on her way to the hospital Frank is running out of leads fortunately police soon get a break two witnesses arrive who claim to have seen everything they report that Denise French was acting strangely well before the crime either gone back and forth like they were even on the highway the Carl Davis and Marianne Malloy were coming back from halfway house where they volunteer every week about ten minutes after leaving Carl noticed the headlights of a car that was being driven very strangely and dangerously accent according to both witnesses French passed them and went on to actually bump the Schreiber's vehicle Barbara then lost control of her car and crashed into the back of the truck the witnesses that I was able to talk to saw the striking vehicle being driven prior to the collision and described the driving behaviors very erratic the drivers going at a high rate of speed weaving from lane to Lane in between cars and at one point even past cars on the shoulder the roadway to get around them so they described very erratic behavior that's not normal behavior for a lot of people look at the lady you know she's weaving back and forth she almost hit it one thing's for certain in this instance the woman hit the car in front of her what we did here was a crash test where we had a closing speed and overtaking speed of only about 12 miles an hour the speed across the ground is one thing it's that closing speed that's gonna tell us how bad this crash was and imagine if this was a higher closing speed crash the rear end of the struck car the car being overtaken coming off the ground and going out of control it can be pretty disastrous one vehicle rear-ended another vehicle caused the driver to lose control and unfortunately went underneath the rear end of park tractor-trailer we know how it happened but then we have to look in the aspect with what the driver what the witnesses are telling us we need to try and figure out why it happened why this woman was driving erratically why she lost control our vehicle why she lost consciousness at the scene after having talked to the police for a few moments that have a profound effect on how we decide to pursue the legal matter and the charges against the person Carson's first step in finding an explanation for Denise French's erratic actions is to examine the inside of her car there are no signs of alcohol bottles or drugs but something does catch his attention one of the first things I noticed when I looked inside of the vehicle there was a lot of sugary sodas hard candy there are pastries in the car and all over the place in the glove compartment in the center console on the front seat on the back seat and there are a lot of people have a sweet tooth but they don't normally keep that amount no sugary candy with them we all have certain experiences that bring about certain stereotypes we expect to see the sports car pulled over by police what doesn't fit that stereotype would be a middle-aged woman driving what would appear to be recklessly down the road for police on the scene they're gonna draw on their experience they're gonna draw from the physical evidence and they're gonna bring it all together but if something doesn't add up there's usually a reason as Frank wraps up his on-scene investigation an officer comes to tell him bad news Barbara Shriver has just died of her injuries just got confirmation from the dispatcher the woman ain't got our cards then just died okay what Carson still can't figure out is why her car got bumped in the first place with the death of Barbara Shriver all the attentions focused on the other driver did nice print it's not clear why a middle-aged woman traveling alone would suddenly start driving erratically it's also not clear why she seems unaware of the consequences of the crash depending on answers to those mysteries Denise French may be headed for prison coming up startling new information in Denise French's medical records forces a dramatic turn in the investigation the driver told me that she started feeling bad and she thought that she would get out get off at the next exit and later investigators replicate a deadly rollover crash hoping to find out how one passenger walked away unharmed [Music] Barbara Schreiber and her daughter Brooke were driving home on an unremarkable evening they never made it driver's car piled into the back of a tractor-trailer after being hit from behind by a driver who was weaving all over the roadway it's now Frank Carson's job to find out why Frank's just learned some unfortunate news Barbara Shriver died as a result of her injuries now his job is gonna be to figure out why Denise French's car rented Shrivers now what he determines will help a prosecutor decide if criminal charges should be filed against French but more than that it can help provide much-needed closure for the Schreiber family Frank Carson gets a phone call from the hospital Denise French who had passed out shortly after the collision with Shrivers car is awake again at the hospital French reveals that she is a type 1 diabetic we've been in an auto accident diabetes is a disease in which the body does not produce or properly use insulin a hormone that is necessary to convert sugars starches and other food into energy as a former emergency medical technician frank carson has seen his share of diabetic episodes when your blood sugar level gets very low most people realize that as hunger or if you get really hungry you get the shakes with a diabetic the reaction can be a little bit different again Frank Carson's medical background helps him play out possible scenarios that would explain her actions before the crash and her attitude afterwards he starts to wonder whether she was having a diabetic crisis normally if diabetics at the sugar level drops too low in their bloodstream they don't get that sugar that they need from part candy or soda they'll start feeling agitated they'll start becoming disoriented perhaps hallucinating and eventually they'll become they'll begin to lose consciousness and pass out and then it becomes a real health crisis for them whether they're driving or whether they're home doing the dishes it's possible an insulin imbalance led to this tragedy but one thing doesn't add up Frenchy's car was full of soda and snacks that would have temporarily brought her levels back up and not a single bottle or bag had been opened for someone that's lived with this disease as long as this lady has and made the plan she obviously has made carrying this around with her it doesn't make sense that she wouldn't take advantage of the solution it was right her in front of her it's the first thing that you think of is there's some negligence involved here's a person who's been a diabetic for twenty years and may not have been managing their condition as well as they could have frank carson has collected all the clues that the crash scene can offer with denise french awake the next answers will have to come from her he goes to interview her at the hospital but what he hears only deepens the mystery denise French doesn't believe she had a diabetic crisis [Music] the driver told me that she had missed her exit where she was going to she gotten lost so she decided to keep going and she started feeling bad and she thought that she would get off at the next exit to try and find some place where she could stop and take something to eat perhaps to to get over this feeling see what was wrong with her and that's what she remembers but Denis fridge also admits something very important to the outcome of this investigation she says she doesn't keep a log of her daily diet her blood sugar level or insulin intake the fact that she isn't doing this basic activity may add up to outright negligence in terms of this crash do these French may be looking at a charge of reckless driving causing death but as Frank Carson assembles the evidence to present to the prosecutor he uncovers something startling it might even mean a 180 degree turn in terms of the possible reckless driving charge as always Frank Carson asks to see the medical records of the drivers involved in the accident and that's where he finds an explanation not only for French's behavior behind the wheel but why she couldn't feel a diabetic attack coming on in the first place she had within the past several weeks been diagnosed with high blood pressure hypertension and she was prescribed medication help control that one's a diuretic and the other type is called beta blockers beta blockers work by regulating the way the heart beats lowers the heart rate so blood pressure lowers because what beta blockers do is they will tend to mask or not allow the diabetic to realize that they're having their diabetic crisis masses the normal clues that they would have and that appeared to have been the case with this lady [Music] Frank Carson's conclusions are simple the beta-blockers masked the normal warning signs of a diabetic crisis and left a nice French helpless to prevent it put her behind the wheel in this condition and it's almost inevitable that something bad would result in this case the outcome was tragic as symptoms of disorientation and fatigue said in French begins zigzagging all over the road speeding up from behind she rear ends Barbara Shriver who crashes into a parked tractor-trailer her daughter survives but Barbara dies as the result of massive internal bleeding no charges were filed against the driver of the rig or Denis French as for the doctor who prescribed the beta-blocker the Shriver family ultimately decided not to sue driving requires your full attention you're operating heavy machinery in this case this woman learned a hard lesson about the interaction and the side effects of even over-the-counter drugs read the label that label is going to tell you what's going on and it can save your life coming up a young girl is killed when her motorized scooter collides with two vehicles witnesses say she caused the crash but investigators suspect she wasn't the only reckless driver involved a deadly rollover kills one man but leaves his daughter unharmed investigators struggle to determine the cause of the crash and how anyone could have survived letting a crash test is no small undertaking we usually spend a good bit of the day equipping the cars and in this case it's particularly challenging because we're gonna be trying for a rollover rollovers aren't as easy as folks think you may have an SUV you may have wet roads you may have a lot of conditions that folks think of as relating to rollover but they don't always come together to make a rollover occurred just as you'd expect the same thing occurs to investigators in the field they may be really good investigators and I may have a really good crash crew and all of those things should work together but sometimes for the investigator in the field there are convoluted factors that make their investigations pretty difficult Carl Webster and his daughter Samantha are trying to find something they can agree on together they're planning a surprise 60th birthday party for Samantha's mother but just drawing up a guest list is a monumental challenge we could invite Judy next door and then suddenly in mid-sentence their whole world has violently turned upside down [Music] despite the fact that he was wearing a seatbelt Carl Webster is killed instantly his upper body crushed as the truck rolls over and slides off the road outside on the grass his daughter is virtually unscathed but in a state of shock having survived one of the strangest accidents investigators here have ever seen as Samantha is rushed to the hospital accident investigator Mark Wright arrives on the scene he and his team of specialists are responsible for putting the pieces of this puzzle together why did the pickup flip over where any other cars involved and how could one lucky passenger escape with only minor injuries right now all he has to go on is a mangled truck and a trail of debris there are a number of conditions that can bring out a rollover driver behavior reckless driving would be one a roadway condition or even a mechanical issue might cause one of these very violent events and when you're ejected in a rollover you're four times more likely to be killed than if you stay inside the car in this case the ejected occupant actually survives and the person that stays in the car is killed and that's just one anomaly here for the investigators though the key is to start with figuring out how this crash happened they don't generally just roll over for no reason there's usually a either a violent steering action or hit something to cause them to trip and rollover when I look at the pickup truck I'm looking for scuffing on the actual tires themselves and scrapes on the rims to see what may have contacted the road in a violent steering maneuver I'm looking for damage to the the vehicle itself that'll show me what direction it was sliding and the orientation of the vehicle and then helps me to know what to look for on the road as well unfortunately the inspection of the truck offers mark Reich no obvious explanation as to why this pickup suddenly began tumbling out of control his next step is to begin the painstaking examination of a field of debris that stretches back almost 200 feet from the wreck [Music] just immediately leading up to where the pickup truck was was paint transfer on the asphalt and that's pretty typical of a vehicle that's it's on its roof before that I saw some tire marks and and that's typical of a hard steer maneuver just before that there was actually a circular scratch on the road surface there was actually two of them and they look like two circular wheels two circular impressions imprinted on the asphalt baffle marked right at his team of investigators everything else in the debris field clearly came from Carl Webster's truck but the source of these marks and the role they played in the crash is a complete mystery so mark you've got a complex scene here with a lot of physical evidence have you sorted this out of you ruled anything out yet yes I looked at the vehicle itself and I've ruled out that it's been involved in a collision with any other vehicle have you got a working theory so far yes I do I actually we've got a tire scrub and a circular impact mark on the ground which does not come from the involved pickup truck so I my theory at this point is that it's hit something to cause it to go out of control and you haven't found that yet no we have not while the team searches for anything that may have left the impressions in the road mark Wright sets out to find the speed of the pickup truck at the point of impact with no evidence to suggest Carl Webster was impaired knowing his speed will allow investigators to better understand the crash they'll know how suddenly a hazard would have appeared to Webster and why a minor impact produced such a devastating crash energy is equal to one-half mass times velocity squared it's a very elementary equation that a lot of accident investigators learned in high school and middle school but probably thought they'd never use again turns out for accident reconstruction this is a very useful model we know the energy we can figure out how much energy is used up skidding the car doing damage we know the mass we know the weights of the car so there's two of the unknowns the last value of speed that's what we're a lot of times solving for and if we know these two we can get to that one mark determines that Cara Webster and his daughter Samantha were doing just 50 miles per hour in the seconds before their pickup struck an object in the road flipped onto its roof and began rolling across the road as the on-scene investigation wraps up mark Wright is left to wonder about just what Carl Webster hit and whether he saw it in his final seconds or was oblivious to the danger so you're driving down the road and you're faced with debris you have two choices you can swerve or you can hit it swerving can cause its own problems depending on your speed the roadway conditions the type of vehicle you're in a swerve could put you out of control on the other hand hitting it may be the lesser of two evils so in this case that our driver actually choose to hit what was in the roadway we can't really tell for sure until we know what it is he hit [Music] the next morning officers search in the field surrounding the crash site for any object that may have come into contact with the pickup truck an object heavy enough to initiate a rollover on impact but small enough to be invisible to a driver at night we found this tire about 350 meters off the roadway in a farmer's field and what we were trying to do is determine did this tire have anything to do with the actual collision what we did find was a gash in the tire and other damage to the rim that corresponds to rim damage to the front tire of this pickup truck and also we found an area of cleaning on the leaf spring itself it's actually damaged so we've been able to determine that this tire was impacted by the front tire of the pickup truck and then contacted the leaf spring on the pickup truck the tire would have caused a violent rotation in this case a rotated counterclockwise within less than a second the pickup truck was on its roof and sliding how this tire wound up in the middle of a high-speed road may never be answered but it's now clear that it caused the rollover that took Carl Webster's life although the front end of the pickup was able to skip over the tire the rear end could not and the force of the impact with the back wheels was enough to send the truck tumbling across the road but this discovery only gives rise to more questions with one mystery solved mark Reich must turn his attention to Samantha Webster's miraculous story of survival coming up investigators examine Samantha's still buckled seatbelt if she was wearing it just how did she end up outside the truck and if she was actually ejected from the truck just how did she survive reenacting a destructive rollover just might give investigators the answers they need and later two drivers admit to hitting a young girl who was driving her motorized scooter down the middle of the road but their stories and those of eyewitnesses clashed with the evidence police find at the scene I was gonna keep looking at an investigation involved high speed grossly over 230 miles per hour [Music] collisions with debris in the roadway or daily occurrence a lot of times they end up causing pretty dramatic crashes in this case we have a truck that hits a spare tire that's left in the roadway results in a really really bad rollover the driver staying in the car is actually killed in the passenger who was ejected walks away with minor injuries usually it's the other way around this is a pretty amazing case the forces experienced by occupants in a rollover are catastrophic anyone unrestrained is powerless to keep themselves in the car ejected through a window victims often suffer severe head and neck injuries when they hit the ground or are killed when the vehicle itself rolls over them even if they're built to be in like Carl Webster they can be crushed if the roof caves in on them but investigators are stumped by Samantha Webster's remarkable story of survival her physical injuries suggest she was not in the wreck that killed her father police hope she can tell them exactly how and when she escaped the truck the recollection of the passenger was that they were just driving along normal they were just talking and all of a sudden she finds herself in the ditch I just remember that the truck kind of like bouncing moving off to one side a bit and then it just started going but she really didn't have a huge recollection of what even happened they didn't see or hear anything was just on the roof and off the road she doesn't know how she got out of the pickup she was just out and in the ground Samantha Webster's description of the crash reminds investigators that rollovers occur in a fraction of a second and it speeds beyond our level of perception coupled with the incredible forces she experienced it's little wonder samantha is unable to describe her experience in detail to understand what she may have gone through will require duplicating a rollover on a closed stretch of highway [Music] first attempts got both front tires off I've cheated more you didn't eat it closer to the fog line cheated more then just like someone correcting and bringing the back on the road we have to get the wheels off the road that have to bring them back on so we get the left the right steer but it's got to be okay we need that changing friction surfaces on the phone on all the tires you can see this one just slid as long as this one just slid we're not gonna get it we got more dig from the front tires on the first [Music] that's the way it should work now it's three complete turns and landed on its feet it's like I look at the big impact on the passenger side on the off side of the roll that would not be very friendly for the passenger rollovers are incredibly violent events once where I had four or five inches of headroom all of a sudden now on this side I find I have next to none but still in all seatbelts are gonna save your life they're gonna keep you in the car and protect you keep you from moving to the roof when the roofs on the ground and and that's the best protection much better than being out on the road the damage done to the SUV during the rollover test only reinforces the unlikelihood of Samantha Webster's miraculous escape but Mark Wright has spent the better part of an afternoon examining the wreck of the pickup and he now has a theory as to how Samantha was able to beat the odds and survived we were able to conclude that coupled between the the seat belt it's attached to the B pillar and when the vehicle rolled over the B pillar was compromised and that created some slack in the seat belt and that along with the seat braking itself created more slack so the seat belt did its job initially and the initial rollover to hold the passenger in place but on this second impact when the pickup truck actually left the road and went into the ditch there was enough slack that the passenger was ejected through the passenger side window fortunately for her the ditch was soft grass the ground was moist and and it was able to assist her in not sustaining any serious injuries typically if a person is ejected they come to an immediate deceleration because they hit another stationary object that individual then will sustained massive acceleration deceleration rotation forces on the brain leading to eventually brain death in this scenario what happened was that there was a slower deceleration as the person was perhaps sliding along the grass and those types of deceleration forces that one associated with severe that brain injury did not occur Mark Wright arrived on the scene of a fatal rollover and found more questions than answers but with the last piece of the puzzle in place he is finally able to say exactly how this tragedy unfolded Carl Webster is driving his pickup at about 50 miles an hour suddenly he hits a fully inflated tire lying in the middle of the road the front end of the pickup immediately bounces raising the rear wheels when they touched back down the left rear spring cuts into the tire forcing the truck onto its side and into a deadly rollover Samantha's life is saved in those first milliseconds by her seat belt which holds her firmly in place but the role is so violent it smashes the roof and rips her seat from its moorings providing a momentary slide in the belt this allows Samantha to be ejected out of the passenger window and onto the soft roadside grass had she stayed in the truck she would have most likely been crushed to death although grateful to have survived Samantha Webster doesn't dwell in how lucky she is her own survival is a daily reminder of the night she lost her father the other interesting aspect of this crash was that spare tire in the roadway you have to wonder how many people drove by that without hitting it drivers have a responsibility to secure the load in their vehicles they also have a responsibility to get things out of the roadway that come off their vehicles when it's safe to do so in either case we wouldn't have known all of that had it not been for the good work of Mark Wright and the other investigators involved next a young girl is struck by two drivers while riding her motorized scooter both say they couldn't avoid the collision the physical evidence says otherwise I got to the scene something we would caught my eye was the lightning skid marks I'm sure you've seen it before a kid as young as 9 or 10 on a scooter zooming in and out of the streets and intersections makes you ask yourself when are we old enough to be a responsible driver well you'll get an answer in this next story stacy wilson can't believe her good luck her best friend heather has just let her borrow a brand-new motorized scooter for the first time the 14 year old is a bit wobbly on it but gets going okay after a quick loop through the neighborhood she's just a few blocks away from home but you'll never get there Stacie's scooter drifts into the wrong lane of traffic with tragic consequences the information we had was that it was a young girl was dead at the scene from being hit by at least two vehicles and you find out that young life this is gone it really affects you you still got to put your emotions aside and do your investigation and but again the kids are the worst John Hyneman leads the vehicular crime unit at the local police department when he gets to the scene Stacey Wilson's body is still there a car and an SUV have pulled over as well and both drivers have admitted to hitting the young victim it may seem like a simple case of a little girl losing control of her scooter but John has his work cut out for him hi I'm Sergeant John Hyman mechanic Speedy's vehicle Crimes Unit it's his job to uncover the precise chain of events leading up to the accident and make certain that everyone involved is telling the truth which vehicle are you driving I was in the first vehicle the first the sedan yes the first driver I started talking to was the driver of the car involved in the collision it was the first vehicle that the go p-- had hit and you were driving the SUV the first two is I'm interview each separately I'll start with you Stephanie Jackson is the driver of the car she is traumatized by what happened after all she has two children herself when I started the interview with the first driver she told me she's going down the street approximately 30 miles per hour to the speed limit saw this go ped and she pulled off to the side but not in time to go ped sideswiped her causing the go ped to go to the right or the go pet fell to the ground the Jackson insists that she did all she could to avoid the collision and so I veered off and had to swerve off the road emergency workers on the scene suggests that Stacy you head injuries are one of the most common causes of accident fatalities once the head is hit by a moving object it accelerates very quickly and then usually will decelerate after it once it hits the ground very quickly the abrupt acceleration and deceleration of the soft brain within the heart scalp causes massive injury in the nerves and the blood vessels tore at the brain there's massive swelling in the brain because of the injury to the small nerves and the blood vessels that swelling or edema within the brain can actually increase the pressure inside of the brain such an extent that the heart is unable to pump blood flow to the brain adequately in that case what will happen is that the brain will eventually die to verify Jackson's story Hyneman examines her car there are clear signs of the impact a black scratch mark along the side of the vehicle appears to be consistent with the drivers explanation at the spektr scooter and the car came in contact but there was alcohol we didn't drink Hyneman also has witnesses Brigitte Turnbull and her brother James were walking down the street when they saw Stacey pass by on her motorized scooter James gives the most detailed testimony as soon as the go pet rider passed by him looked back knew it was gonna hit this car and saw the collision with the sedan and the goal pen [Music] the witnesses appear to confirm that it was young Stacey who hid the car just as the driver said you see the next interview is with Kathy Morgan and the driver of the second vehicle involved Morgan is also in shock she was following the car in her SUV and saw the car break and pull over the next thing she knows there's a young child lying on the roadway in front of her Morgan hits the brakes but could not avoid running over Stacey yeah as you're buying your friend how fast were you doing just it was going to speed when I like 30 or 35 she said that she was going the speed limit maybe just a little faster but you know more than 10 miles faster 30 to 4 miles max I mean I couldn't see anything in front of me I mean I tried to stop as fast as I could so everyone appears to be singing the same song here they've all got the same story going the little girl's riding this motorized toy vehicle down the middle of the road the two drivers they tried to avoid her they just couldn't case closed right no turns out the physical evidence is telling us someone is responsible for the little girl's death some people think that uh you know these automobiles they're just accidents and the criminal charges are warranted because it's just just an accident well they're not accidents or collisions or crimes in any crash what the drivers say and what the witnesses claim they saw can help investigators determine what happened but the strongest stories are always told by the physical evidence injuries to bodies marks on the vehicles it doesn't lie and in the investigators mind that physical evidence is adding up quite differently than what at least one of the people involved is saying something really caught my eye was the like the skid marks look several hundred feet in length knowing this was a residential street with a 30 mile an hour speed limit 200 feet of skid marks is gonna put the speed up around 60 miles an hour and this vehicle twice a speed limit that was the posted speed John measures the skid marks and as he expected they confirm his doubts the driver of the SUV was well over the speed limit before she ran over the child skid marks on the roadway and police work could call that a clue it's a clue that tells us she was on the brakes trying to stop the car she's probably too inexperienced to realize that skidding you're just gonna go in a straight line she'd let her foot off the brake she probably could have steered regain control and avoided the crash looking at the evidence on the road the skid marks I knew that driver was reacting to something and the hitter brakes hard and had she been going that speed limit she would've stopped in ample time they wanted to impact with the young girl in the road now whether that would have saved Stacie's life is a crucial issue here the little girl did hit her head on the pavement after bouncing off the car but Hindman doesn't know yet which impact actually caused the child's death depending on the answer to that question one of these drivers may be looking at some jail time coming up investigator John Hyneman turns to an expert in biomechanics to build his case against one of the drivers the parents of 14 year old Stacy Wilson are looking for answers after a tragic accident on a nearby residential street the investigation so far has shown that Stacy's motorized scooter ran into the side of a car knocking her backward onto the roadway an SUV following close behind could not stop before running her over after measuring the skid marks accident investigator John Hyneman has determined that the SUV was going nearly double the speed limit a lot of factors can affect how a vehicle behaves when a driver hits the brakes the condition of the road the weather wear and tear on the brakes themselves all of those factors may play a role here since it was a criminal investigation to the SUV and did a series of skid test three the skid test at 50 miles per hour 60 miles per hour and 40 miles per hour took the all three tests came up with my values that I needed for the investigation drivers don't realize what a difference 1015 miles an hour makes when it comes time to break it can be the difference between a good scare and a guilty conscience what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this car and I'm gonna skid at 30 and then 50 see how much difference it really does make obviously the faster a vehicle is traveling the harder it is to control in the skid at this point it's John hyneman's opinion that Kathy Morgan the driver of the SUV should be charged with vehicular manslaughter a miles per hour Cathy Ida a chance look at the investigation I know the go pedals on the wrong side of the road but I have an issue with your speed going to speed limit you're not going 30 or 35 just your skid alone has you at 62 65 miles per hour it's not there was nothing I could do it wasn't my fault this is gonna be a homicide investigation what and the case was gonna be sent to the county attorney's office I didn't do anything I didn't mean to hit that girl young girl died and they've been going 30 miles an hour that speed limit nothing would have happened it never even impacted that victim so we got a to the victim just set forth to criminal proceedings and but the criminal justice system and in motion you know may be harsh but there's consequences with everything the next step is to determine exactly how the victim was killed to get a conviction John's gonna have to show that it wasn't the first impact and fall to the ground that killed a little girl but rather the second impact with the SUV to do that he's going to go to a biomechanical expert for a head drop test mile mechanical experts examine how both internal and external forces impact a human body the head drop test will help determine if the force of Stacey's fall after the first collision with the car caused her fatal skull fracture John's what we have here is a drop Tower this'll allow us them to look at the question in this case of whether or not falling over could have produced the head injury that we see in the victim and this is what it looks like what we saw in in the head drop experiment John was the force that results strictly from a fall and we demonstrated on the basis of magnitude that that would be insufficient to produce any kind of major head injury certainly not a fatal one remember that Stacy was wearing a helmet which significantly reduces the impact and the injuries caused by the fall alone and that is only one of the elements that leads Kerry Knapp to his conclusions that Stacy could not have died as a result of her fall her head injuries reveal another story what you get in a broad-based strike like that is if you get anything you get a very large ground depression and in this particular case what we had is a very very severe skull fracture in this area with multiple depressed fragments that requires not only a lot of energy but a very focal strike there's only one source of high velocity high energy focal strike and that would be strike by the following SUV right in there [Music]

Channel: Real Responders

Views: 221,826

Keywords: patrolling, police, real responders, full episodes, police officer, cops, rescue, accident investigator, accident investigation safety training video, investigation discovery full episodes, law enforcement, everyday heroes, full episode, a&e tv, car accident, motorways, freak accident story, survival videos, cars, truck accident

Id: p-1lrDlac7Q

Length: 48min 0sec (2880 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 13 2019