[Music] Every year, violent collisions kill 40,000 Americans and injure another 3 million. But there is no such thing as an accident. Every collision has a story as unique as the people involved. Rusty Hate is a leading authority on accident reconstruction. He trains investigators around the world to read the clues and solve the mysteries. All too often, we forget that driving is 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 and you're not in complete control of your faculties, that's just reckless. And when 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 a wreck. Whose fault do you figure that is? Bottom line, alcohol, drugs, speeding, those aren't the only ways to end up facing a reckless driving charge or [Music] worse. After a long day behind the wheel of his truck, Michael Morgan is getting tired and sleepy. It's about 70 mi 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 Shrivever 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. Mom, what's going on? Mom. 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 Shrivever smashed directly into the rear end at almost 60 [Music] mph. I received a call. They have an accident down here. uh car into the back of a tractor trailer. Second vehicle involved aside from 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 Shrivers has been pulled over, too. And Michael Morgan is also still on the scene, uninjured, but numb from what just happened. And all of a sudden, I hear boom. All right. Get out of the vehicle. The collision took place on a straight road under a clear sky, so there is 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 Shrivever is fighting to stay alive. She was not wearing her seat belt. The passenger side of the vehicle was largely intact. the passenger compartment, the inside of the car where the passenger sat was uh very little damage. And of course, what helped the passenger uh immensely is the fact that the passenger is wearing a seat belt. The fact that the daughter survived this crash was due to her having worn her seat belt and the airbags deploying. While airbags can cause some minor injuries, they're going to save more lives and they're going to take them. The deal is airbags and seat belts go together. Airbags are a supplemental restraint to the use of seat belts. Here's a couple of facts from a guy that's got 805. Make that 806 crashes under my seat belt. An airbag deploys at about 200 m an hour right near the steering wheel and 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. Hey, but you think those injuries are bad? Imagine how they'd be without seat belts and airbags. Remember to buckle up. Seat bags and airbags aside, what the Shrivevers have experienced is one of the most deadly and violent collisions possible. What police call an underride. Well, this bar that we're looking at here is called an underride 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 shape, 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 Shrivever's car crashed into the back of the truck. The question now is why. Frank's focus shifts to other physical evidence, the tire 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 Shrivever slammed into the back of the trailer at high speed. One of the first thing I noticed when I got there was there were two tire marks leading in an arc from uh 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 in 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 uh to the front end. Uh very intact. Could have started the car up and driven it away if you needed to. That third car belongs to Denise French. According to the police officer who first arrived at the crash, 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? I I don't remember. I I don't think so. You don't think so? The interesting fact is the driver of the vehicle uh who's 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 rush her 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 of people in accidents vary from hysteria to very calm acceptance of what happened to not believing what happened. Everybody who's been in an automobile accident has that moment of I don't know what's going on. Some people that's extended. Uh 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. I 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 crash. Behind me, they're going back and forth like they were weaving on the highway. Carl Davis and Maryanne Mallaloy were coming back from a halfway house where they volunteer every week. About 10 minutes after leaving, Carl noticed the headlights of a car that was being driven very strangely and dangerously. I don't know. She's going to going to cause an accident. According to both witnesses, French passed them and went on to actually bump the Shrivever'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 behavior is very erratic. The drivers going at high rate of speed, weaving from lane to lane in between cars and at one point even pass cars on the shoulder of the roadway to get around them. So, they described very erratic behavior. That's not normal behavior uh for a lot of people. Well, I was on the passenger side and he kept telling me to look at the lady. You know, she's weaving back and forth. She's she almost hit us. 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, an overtaking speed of only about 12 mph. The speed across the ground is one thing. It's that closing speed that's going to 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 of 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 of her 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 uh 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 uh sugary sodas, hard candy, there were 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 of 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 going to draw on their experience. They're going to draw from the physical evidence, and they're going to bring it all together. But if something doesn't add up, there's usually a reason. As Frank wraps up his onseen investigation, an officer comes to tell him bad news. Barbara Shrivever has just died of her injuries. Just got confirmation from the dispatcher. The woman in a car accident 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 Shrivever, all the attention's focused on the other driver, Denise French. 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. Barbara Shrivever and her daughter Brooke were driving home on an unremarkable evening. They never made it. Shrivever'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 Shrivever died as a result of her injuries. Now, his job's going to be to figure out why Denise French's car ran into Shrivevers. 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 Shrivever family. Frank Carson gets a phone call from the hospital. Denise French, who had passed out shortly after the collision with Shrivever's car, is awake again. At the hospital, French reveals that she is a type 1 diabetic. What happened? You've been in an auto accident. I'm I'm a diabetic. Diabetes is a disease in which the body does not produce or properly use insulin, a hormone that is necessary to convert sugar, 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 the sugar level drops too low in their bloodstream, they don't get that sugar that they need from hard candy or soda. They'll start feeling agitated, they'll start uh 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 at home doing the dishes. It's possible an insulin imbalance led to this tragedy. But one thing doesn't add up. French'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 here in front of her. So the first thing that you think of is there's some negligence involved. Here's a person who's been a diabetic for 20 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. The driver told me that uh she had missed her exit where she was going to. She had gotten lost. So, she decided to uh keep going and she started feeling bad and she thought that she would get off at the next exit to try and find someplace where she could stop and take something to eat perhaps to to get over this feeling to see what was wrong with her. And that's what she remembers. But Denise French 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, her insulin intake. The fact that she isn't doing this basic activity may add up to outright negligence in terms of this crash. Denise 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° 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 or hypertension and she was prescribed medication to help control that. One's a diuretic and the other type is called beta blockers. Beta blockers work by regulating the uh way the heart beats. Lowers the heart rate so your 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. masked the normal clues that they would have and that appeared to have been the case with this lady. Frank Carson's conclusions are simple. The beta blockers masked the normal warning signs of a diabetic crisis and left Denise 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 set in, French begins zigzagging all over the road. Speeding up from behind, she rear ends Barbara Shrivever, 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 Denise French. As for the doctor who prescribed the beta blocker, the Shrivever 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. Planning 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 cuz we're going to 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 rollovers, but they don't always come together to make a rollover occur, just as you'd expect. 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 should invite Judy next door. And then suddenly in mid-sentence, their whole world is violently turned upside down. [Music] Despite the fact that he was wearing a seat belt, 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? Were 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 on 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 either a violent steering action or hit something that cause them to to trip and roll over. 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 the road in a violent steering maneuver. I'm looking for damage to the the vehicle itself. Uh that'll show me what direction it was sliding and 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 Wright 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 ft from the wreck. [Music] just immediately leading up to where the pickup truck was was paint transfer on the ashalt. And that that's pretty typical of a a vehicle that's it's on its roof. Before that, I saw some tire marks and that's uh typical of a 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 ashalt baffle Mark Wright and 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? Have you ruled anything out yet? Yes. Uh, 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. Actually, we've got a tire scrub and a 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 a 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 1/2 mass time 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 or doing damage. We know the mass. We know the weights of the car. So, there's two of the unknowns. The last value, 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 Carl Webster and his daughter Samantha were doing just 50 mph in the seconds before their pickup struck an object in the road, flipped onto its roof, and began rolling across the road. As the onseen 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, and 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, did 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. The next morning, officers search in the fields 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 m 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 a gash in the tire uh and other damage uh to the rim that corresponds to uh rim damage to the front tire of this pickup truck. And also we found an area of cleaning on the um 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, it 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. Collisions with debris in the roadway are 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 and 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 belted 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. Recollection of the the passenger uh was that they were just driving along uh normal. They were just talking and all of a sudden she finds herself in the ditch. I just remember the the truck kind of like bouncing off to one side a bit and then it just started rolling. So she really didn't have a huge recollection of of what even happened. They they didn't see or hear anything. It 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 grass. [Applause] Samantha Webster's description of the crash reminds investigators that rollovers occur in a fraction of a second and at 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 attempt got both front tires off. Yeah. Cheat it more. Cheat it closer to the fog line. Cheat it more. Yeah. Just like someone correcting and bringing it back on the road. We have to get the wheels off the road and then have to bring them back on. So, we get the left the right steer, but it's got to be off the road. We need that change in friction surfaces on the on all the tires. As you can see, this one just slid. As long as this one just slid, we're not going to get Yes, we got more dig from the front tires on the first. That's the way it should work. That was three complete turns and it landed on its feet just like a cat. Look at the big impact on the passenger side on the off side to the roll. That would not be very friendly for the passenger. No, that's this is ugly. Rollovers are incredibly violent events. is 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, seat belts are going to save your life. They're going to keep you in the car and protect you, keep you from moving to the roof when the roof's 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 survive. We were able to conclude that coupled between the the seat belt uh is 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 in the initial roll over to hold the passenger in place. But uh on the second impact when the uh pickup truck actually left the road and went into the ditch, uh 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 uh assist her in not sustaining any serious injuries. Typically if a person's ejected they come to an immediate deceleration because they hit another stationary object. Uh that uh individual then will sustain 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 because the person was perhaps sliding along the grass and those types of deceleration forces that one associates with severe 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 m 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 roll is so violent, it smashes the roof and rips her seat from its moorings, providing a momentary slack 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. Uh, I got to the scene, something really caught my eye was the length of the skid marks. [Music] 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 she'll never get there. Stacy's scooter drifts into the wrong lane of traffic with tragic consequences. [Applause] [Music] The information we had was that it was a a young girl was dead at the scene from being hit by uh at least two vehicles. When you find out that young life this uh is gone, it really affects you. You still got to put your emotions aside and do your investigation and but again the the kids are the worst. John Heinman leads the vehicular crime unit at the local police department. When he gets to the scene, Stacy 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 Jon has his work cut out for him. Hi, I'm Sergeant John Heyman with the Phoenix PD'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. We'll get going. Which vehicle were 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. Uh it was the first vehicle that the GoPad hit and you were driving the SUV. Yeah, it's right behind her. Okay. But I'm going first do my 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, uh she told me she was going down the street approximately 30 mph, the speed limit, saw this go, she pulled off to the side, but not in time. The go sideswiped her, causing the goped to go to the right or the go fell to the ground. Jackson insists that she did all she could to avoid the collision and so I veered off and had to swerve off of the road. Emergency workers on the scene suggest that Stacy 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 skull causes massive injury in the nerves and the blood vessels throughout the brain. There's massive swelling in the brain because of the injury uh to the small nerves and the blood vessels. That swelling or edema within the brain can actually increase the pressure inside of the brain to 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, Heineman 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 driver's explanation that the scooter and the car came in contact. There was alcohol, but we didn't drink. Heman also has witnesses. Bridget Turnbull and her brother James were walking down the street when they saw Stacy pass by on her motorized scooter. James gives the most detailed testimony. As soon as the goped rider passed by him, he looked back, knew he was going to hit this car and saw the collision with the uh sedan and the goed. The witnesses appear to confirm that it was young Stacy who hit the car just as the driver said. The next interview is with Kathy Morgan, 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 Stacy. Kathy, as you were behind your friend, how fast were you going? Just I was going the speed limit like 30 or 35. She said that she was going the speed limit. Maybe just a little faster, but no more than 10 miles faster. 30 to 40 miles max. I mean, I 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 girls 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 automobile they're just accidents. Um, and criminal charges aren't warranted because it's just just an accident. Well, they're not accidents or collisions or crimes. And again, 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 investigator's mind, that physical evidence is adding up quite differently than what at least one of the people involved is saying. Something that really caught my eye was the length of the skid marks. Uh look, several hundred feet in length. Knowing this was a residential street with a 30 mph speed limit. 200 ft of skid marks is going to put this speed up around 60 mph of this vehicle. Twice the speed limit uh that 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 going to go in a straight line. She'd let her foot off the brake. She probably could have steered, regained control, and avoided the crash. Looking at the evidence on the road, uh the skid marks, I knew that driver was reacting to something and they hit her brakes hard and had she been going that speed limit, she would have stopped in ample time to avoid the impact with the young girl on the road. Now, whether that would have saved Stacy's life is a crucial issue here. The little girl did hit her head on the pavement after bouncing off the car, but Heman 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. 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 Heinman 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, uh took the SUV and did a series of skid tests. uh three of the skid tests at 50 mph, 60 mph, and uh 40 mph. Took the all three tests, uh came up with my values that I needed for the investigation. Drivers don't realize what a difference 10, 15 mph makes when it comes time to break. It can be the difference between a good scare and a guilty conscience. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take this car and I'm going to 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 a skid. At this point, it's John Heinman's opinion that Kathy Morgan, the driver of the SUV, should be charged with vehicular manslaughter. Miles, Kathy, I had a chance to look at the investigation. I know the Gopad's on the wrong side of the road, but I have an issue with your speed. I told you I was going the speed limit. You're not going 30 or 35. Just your skid alone has you at 60 to 65 miles per hour. It was not. There was nothing I could do. It wasn't my fault. It's going to be a homicide investigation. What? And the case is going to be sent to the county attorney's office. I didn't do anything. I didn't mean to hit that girl. Young girl died. That had they been going 30 mph, the speed limit, nothing would have happened. They would never even impacted that victim. So, we got a obligation to the victim uh to set forth the criminal proceedings and um put the criminal justice system in in motion. You know, maybe 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 going to have to show that it wasn't the first impact and fall to the ground that killed the little girl, but rather the second impact with the SUV. To do that, he's going to go to a biomechanical expert for a headdrop test. Biomechanical experts examine how both internal and external forces impact the human body. The head drop test will help determine if the force of Stacy's fall after the first collision with the car caused her fatal skull fracture. John, what we have here is a drop tower. This will allow us then to look at the question in this case of whether or not falling over could have produced the uh head injury that we see in the victim. And this is what it looks like. What we saw in in the headdrop 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 um major head injury, certainly not a fatal one. Remember that Stacy was wearing a helmet, which significantly reduces the impact in the injuries caused by the fall alone. And that is only one of the elements that leads Carrie Knap 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 round 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 of high velocity, high energy focal strike, and that would be strike by the following SUV. But for the county medical examiner, things are not so clear. In the autopsy report, he disagrees and writes that the fall alone after the collision with the car could have caused Stacy's death. It will be the county prosecutor's job to decide if even with conflicting medical opinions. He will charge Kathy Morgan for reckless driving. As for John Heman, his investigation is finished, and he can now replay the tragic chain of events that led to Stacy Wilson's fatal accident. The 14-year-old was enjoying her first ride on a motor scooter when something went terribly wrong. For some reason, she ends up crossing the center line and running into the oncoming car of Stephanie Jackson. She is knocked off her scooter and her head hits the ground hard. Coming from behind at 60 mph, Kathy Morgan hits the brakes, but is unable to stop before running over her body. Stacy dies of a severe skull fracture, but in the end, the county prosecutor decided not to charge Kathy Morgan for a vehicular homicide. While she was clearly speeding, the inconsistency between the biomechanic and autopsy reports left doubt as to which collision actually caused Stacy's fatal injury. However, the city had enough information to develop a ban on toy vehicles in the roadway, and a lot of other cities and states have followed suit. As for our two drivers, well, hopefully they're going to follow the rules of the road and this will change the way they drive. Remember, speed [Music] kills. Every year, violent collisions kill 3,000 Canadians and injure another 200,000. But there is no such thing as an accident. Every collision has a story as unique as the people involved. Rusty Hate is a leading authority on accident reconstruction. He trains investigators around the world to read the clues and solve the mysteries. You can be driving carefully, the road clear, the weather perfect, but you can still be involved in a collision. The other guy doesn't do something he is supposed to do or does something he isn't supposed to do. You can still be in a crash. Now, there are a lot of things you can do to avoid a collision. First among those is to drive defensively and anticipate problem situations. On a beautiful May, Laura Smith, a single mother, is taking her son Jason to his grandparents summer house for the week. Happy. It's only an hour's drive from home. The day looks perfect for a relaxed trip out of town and a swim in the lake. Then, seemingly out of the blue, a motor home in front of her breaks hard. Laura has no choice but to break. Also, meanwhile, a bus driving behind Laura is coming up fast and desperately trying to keep from slamming into her, but to no avail. Laura's small passenger car folds up like an accordion between the two large vehicles and immediately bursts into flames. Firefighters arrive on the scene and do their best to extinguish the blaze, but it's too late for Laura and her son. Despite the fact that it's his day off, accident investigator Dawn Carroll is called in by his supervisor. It must have been a major accident for me to be called off duty to respond to the scene. The scene is one of the worst Dawn has ever seen. The small passenger car is still sandwiched between the two larger vehicles and has been burnt down to its chassis. Dawn also learns that both mother and son have been confirmed dead. Although investigators may be used to dealing with the gruesome task of road accidents, the sight of the burnt bodies is devastating. It's always tough when I respond to accidents such as this because I have several small children of my own and anytime a child is involved in a crash and in this case burned so horribly. It It's very tough. It's now Dawn's task to find out exactly why and how this terrible accident occurred. At the scene, he has three vehicles involved in the collision. Determining what part each of the drivers plagued in this tragedy is the first step. I saw that the driver of the motor home appeared to be in shock, so I decided to go to the bus driver, Miss Albbright. Are you okay? I'm okay. Monica Albbright explains to Don that traffic was moving smoothly until out of the blue, the motor home appeared to decelerate rapidly, forcing both Laura and her to break sharply. She tried to stop in time but just couldn't. When I heard this Albright statement, I was first thinking that maybe she was following the small passenger car too closely and that's why she wasn't able to stop. But I also considered that something happened with the motor home. Maybe an animal ran out in front of the car. Maybe the motor home had a mechanical problem. Next, a patrol officer informs Dawn that Mr. Peterson is ready to make his statement. Mr. Peterson told me that a small red car passed him quickly on the left side directly in front of his motor home and then started to drive more slowly and then for no reason the car slammed on his brakes. Peterson insists to Dawn that he reacted quickly but couldn't manage to steer clear and hit the red car lightly from the rear. He thought he had avoided the worst but a second later he felt the impact of Lura's car from behind. He claims that the errant car stayed in front of him maybe a few seconds, but then the driver accelerated and disappeared. When I heard Mr. Peterson's story about the red car that the other driver didn't report to me at all, I thought at first that maybe Mr. Peterson may not have been telling me the truth about it. So, I knew I had to go look for damage on the front of the motor home. on this uh basically yellow and black transfer marks. I'm not sure what it's from, but it's not something I would expect to find on this uh pristine bumper. There's some indentations on the bumper like it hidden other vehicle, but uh these yellow and black transfer marks are uh very suspect and possibly from another vehicle. Dawn moves on to the scene investigation, looking for any other clue to confirm the presence of the mysterious fleeing car. The road is a mess of debris, but there's also a lot of skid marks, which is no surprise in a pileup like this. Miss Albbright told me it was like a domino effect where the motor home break, the small passenger car break, and then she had to break. There was no advanced warning. Then Don picks up another clue. Just ahead of the motor home, he notices four sets of skid marks. A quick look clearly tells him that these marks are still hot and that they don't belong to any of the other vehicles involved. I thought that there definitely was a fourth vehicle involved and then I contacted my dispatch center who put out a be on the lookout broadcast to look for this vehicle that was involved in this crash. If another car participated in the chain of events that led to the fiery deaths of Laura and Jason, why did he or she flee the scene? And what caused the accident to happen in the first place? The road evidence and Mr. Peterson's testimony lead on to consider a brand new theory about the accident. I thought there was a possibility that this may be an actual staged accident that occurred because this type of accident fits the profile. Every year in California alone, there's some $200 million in fraud perpetrated as a function of stage crashes. These aren't accidents. These are intentional events. What you got is a criminal that'll drive around and pull in front of a commercial vehicle or an expensive car. Someone that looks like they have insurance. They'll stop suddenly. They'll get rearended. Now, what you got is everyone in the rear-ended car is injured. They'll bring together a group of doctors and lawyers and of course witnesses who'll make this a very multidisciplinary, a multi-jurisdictional effort. That's what makes this such a difficult case to prosecute. [Music] A terrible accident on a busy roadway has claimed the lives of Laura Smith and her 5-year-old son, Jason. Investigator Don Carroll has been brought in to reconstruct the chain of events that led to their deaths. As a next step, Don requests a full mechanical examination of all the vehicles, but his priority is to find the red car that reportedly fled the scene of the accident. This type of accident fits the profile, in which case a car slams on its brakes in front of a very expensive vehicle, either a commercial vehicle or a motor home, a luxurious motor home, because that is where there's deep pockets, where there's a lot of insurance money that's possible available to them to collect. To follow up on the criminal angle, Don turns to an old colleague, Marty Gonzalez, chief investigator with the California Insurance Fraud Department. Stage collisions are are very prevalent not only here in California and in the Los Angeles area, but in a lot of states all over the the United States. Um, and the reason they're done is bottom line is money. But even if Mart is sure that this is a staged accident, he also knows how hard it will be to prove it. Basically, the way they work is there's a person commonly known as a stager who who has an inn with a lawyer or a doctor, typically the lawyer, and this lawyer will pay this person to bring them cases. The stager's job is to go out and plan these accidents and recruit people who are willing to participate and be in the car when it's going to get hit at 60 70 m an hour by another car or by a large truck or a big rig. And they go out and they plan the accidents. While Marty investigates possible criminal rings having links with staged accidents, Dawn receives the mechanical report. The examination of each vehicle involved in the crash shows nothing unusual. The same day, the autopsy report also comes in. Even for the two veterans, the details are extremely disturbing. When I attended the autopsy, the medical examiner told me that the mom and the child did not die as a result of being hit in the rear by the bus. They died as a result of the fire that erupted after the crash. And the medical examiner told me that because there was still basically soot inside the trachea, which means that they were trying to breathe. And I I I was hopeful that it was an instantaneous event, but it in this case, it was not. Typically, there are three problems. One is that the amount of oxygen in the air in a in a closed space fire decreases because the fire is consuming so much oxygen. The second problem is that often times in car accidents when things are on fire, they release chemicals into the air that can injure the lungs directly. And lastly, the heat from the smoke and the heat of the environment can cause direct thermal damage to the lungs themselves. A car doesn't burn for no reason except in the movies. Here, Laura and her son were particularly unlucky. The bus hit the back of the car and that's where the fuel tanks located. It ripped the fuel tank open. fuel and air and a source of heat, probably from the bus, the engine, the brakes, something like that, caused the fire. This chain of events coming together left Lauren and Jason with little chance of survival. As the weeks go by, the chances of finding the suspect vehicle begin to rapidly decline. Dawn and Marty exhaust every angle of the investigation, going over the crash scene reconstruction, looking for anything that they might have missed. But the case is also widely covered by the media and that's how police get the break they've been hoping for, an anonymous tip. There was a lot of publicity on TV about the accident because of the fire. And it was not too long after that the police department received a call from an anonymous person saying that they believe that the accident was staged, that it was done on purpose, and they knew the people that were doing it. With all of the roadway evidence, the statements given by Miss Albbright and Dave Peterson, and now the tip off, Dawn and Marty are certain they're on the right track. But they are about to tackle the hardest part of their job. They must prove who was behind the wheel and that he or she intentionally set up the crash. We utilize a variety of of investigative methods, some with information from insurance companies or other law enforcement agencies. Sometimes we we end up having the opportunity to do undercover investigations and those are obviously um very beneficial to us because we can be right there with the suspects and we're getting firsthand information whether they're making admissions to the person thinking the undercover officer is a friend or a a co-criminal so to speak. Um it it's some of the best kind of evidence we can get. The investigation leads to Norman Miller, a young man from the area who has been involved in staged accident cases before. Over the course of the next few months, the undercover agent reports back with names, dates, and even a boastful admission from the suspect that he had messed up the accident that killed Laura and Jason. The operation is closing in on Norman Miller. But one key element is missing. The car Miller used to commit his crime. When I looked at the yellow and black marks on the right front bumper of the motor home, I measured the height of it and I measured the length of it cuz I wanted to find a bumper that was the same height and the same distance between the various marks. This information on the exact dimensions of the bumper becomes critical when the investigation finally leads authorities to the discovery of the suspect vehicle in a remote parking lot. The red car fits perfectly with Peterson's description. Feeling the heat, Norman Miller flees the state, but the police eventually track him down in Arizona. With all the pieces of the puzzle in place, Don Carroll can finally say exactly how this tragic chain of events unfolded. On a sunny afternoon, accident stager Norman Miller spots a motor home which he believes has all the makings of a lucrative accident. Moments later, he pulls in front of the motor home and stops, causing the rear-end collision he hoped for. However, this also causes a collision with two vehicles behind the motor home, resulting in the death of Laura Smith and her young son, Jason. After months of investigation, officer Don Carroll accumulates the evidence necessary to bring Miller to trial. The case against Norman Miller is rock solid, and he ultimately acknowledges his role in the accident. He pleads guilty to manslaughter and is sentenced to 11 years in jail for the death of Laura and Jason Smith. Somebody that slam on their brakes in front of another car to try to cause a crash is is the lowest of the low. People just do really crazy and stupid things for the sake of a few dollars. Hit and runs are difficult crimes to solve. We're looking for evidence on the body, off the roadway, and when we find the car, we'll be looking for it there, too. Pain chips are a big clue. Stuff off the body and off the road are going to give us clues like DNA and microscopic evidence. You may want to run. You may not be able to hide. Once they find the car, we're going to be able to tie this vehicle to that wreck pretty much every time. It's Kevin Pinsk's fth birthday, and his entire family has gathered to celebrate at a local restaurant. [Music] But just as they're ready to bring out the birthday cake, Nadia, the grandmother, realizes that she has forgotten the candles, she excuses herself and hurries next door to buy a box at the convenience store. But after about 20 minutes, Nadia still hasn't returned. The family begins searching up and down the roadside outside the restaurant, calling Nadia's name. After searching the neighborhood for nearly an hour, it becomes obvious that she's nowhere to be found. All her son, Alex, can do now is contact the police to report a missing person. Later that afternoon, officers answer a call from a pair of local teenagers who claim to have found a dead body. It's lying on the side of the road a short distance from the restaurant where the Pinsky celebrated earlier that day. Accident investigator Lenny Simpson is immediately called in to head up the investigation. When I arrived at the scene, saw the body of an elderly lady. Didn't take long at all for the police to link the missing person, Nadia Winsky, with the body that was found at the scene. It was obvious this was not a mugging. It was not an assault. It was a hit and run. Police catalog more than 100 pieces of evidence at the crash site, including the packet of candles. Her body was so deformed from injury, you would immediately make associations with people, you know, and with family members, you know, so it got very close to the heart. Nadia's body is found on the other side of the parking lot, several hundred meters away from the restaurant and the convenience store. The family is devastated and can't explain why she would have crossed the road or wandered away. We don't know if she became confused, disoriented, or what occurred, but she did not go directly back to the restaurant. She attempted to cross the street, and when she crossed the street, that's when she was struck. After speaking with the family in more detail, Lenny learns that Nadia Pollinsky suffered from a number of medical conditions, including severe hypertension. While talking to the family, I questioned them as to whether she had any health problems. They explained that she had had a stroke uh several years prior and that she didn't have too much of a problem dis being disoriented. However, occasionally she did become disoriented. Especially the elderly suffer from tranch and eskeemic events in their brain where they sort of have a stroke-like situation where they get disoriented and are not sure where they are and maybe their speech lures and maybe that's what happened here. If in fact Nadia suffered a minstroke this would explain why she wandered off and it could completely change the circumstances of the crash. We look at all the information. We look at all the possibilities and one of the possibilities that we look at is if Mrs. Pollinsky was possibly down on her knees or even laying down when this vehicle struck her. It would be very hard for a driver to hit a standing person and not realize it. But unknowingly running over a small body like Nadia's while she's lying down on the ground is a reasonable scenario. These two possibilities would have very different consequences for the driver. Me and my partner. Establishing Nadia's position at the moment of impact is crucial. The autopsy results and the evidence on the car that hit her could provide the physical evidence needed to answer many of these [Music] questions. Okay, this is all about injuries. We're looking at this crash for injury patterns on this particular dummy. What we're going to see is marks on the back, marks on his buttocks, down the legs. This is going to indicate that this dummy was standing up and you can see here with bumper scuffs hit from behind when when the car came through as opposed to for example laying down or or you know sitting in the roadway. You'd have a different set of injuries. And of course we tied those things to marks on the car. You'd be able to tell which way he was facing, how he was moving with whether he was sitting or standing or or even walking or running when he was hit. I have got measurements. Now I have to find the vehicle to make that comparison with. While officers begin collecting and documenting the broken car parts, Lenny examines the crash scene itself. And he doesn't have to look very hard to find a lucky lead. Lucky. The only thing the driver didn't leave is their driver's license. The tire mark itself was an exceptional unusual piece of physical evidence that helped us solve this case. Lenny also has a good idea about how the tire marks were made. Tire mark came from the right front tire of the vehicle. The impact was significant enough that it bent the metal into the tire. The tire then began marking the roadway very shortly after the impact occurred. And this tire mark continued from the impact approximately 2 miles to the driveway and the residence of Mr. Richard Kelly. We served the search warrant on the house and uh once we served the search warrant, we opened the garage door and there was the car. It had the damage that was consistent with damage of a pedestrian impact and it was also uh the tire mark leading right to the tire. Right to the tire. Finding the car moves the investigation into overdrive. Lenny immediately looks for physical evidence on the vehicle, not only to link it to the collision, but also to establish if Nadia was standing or not when she was hit. We also under further examination found clothing fibers that look very similar to what Mrs. Pollinsky was wearing. We also found blood. We found hair and we found marks on the car that were consistent again with a pedestrian being struck. But despite the prepundonderance of evidence, locating the car is just a first step. Next, investigators must put a driver behind the wheel. Just because you have the car doesn't mean the case is closed. What you have to establish now is who was driving the car at the time the impact occurred. Lenny runs a check on the license and learns that the car belongs to the owner of the house, Richard Kelly. Interrogated about the damage to his car, Kelly admits that he thinks he may have hit a dead animal on the road. The physical evidence is immediately sent to a forensic lab for a complete analysis. We would do comparisons, DNA comparisons, as well as fiber comparisons to help us determine that this was in fact the vehicle that did the striking. Then something else catches Lenny's attention that strikes him as suspicious. The entire front bumper of the car was gone. We didn't see it at the scene. We certainly didn't find it at the house. We didn't know where the bumper was, but it was missing. The evidence on the scene leaves investigators skeptical of Kelly's story. But given Nadia's medical history, Lenny needs to keep in mind that she may have been lying on the ground or even already dead when the vehicle hit her. Without concrete proof, one way or the other, the entire case could ultimately be ruled an unfortunate accident. A birthday celebration turns into a nightmare when the body of 70-year-old Nadia Pollinsky is discovered on the side of a road. Accident investigator Lenny Simpson believes he's found the car that hit the grandmother, but he still can't say if she was standing, laying down, or even dead when she was hit. He'll have to wait for the autopsy report to find out. Lenny must put a driver behind the wheel of the suspected vehicle. He continues to search the inside of Kelly's car for more clues. We found a cell phone. We also found a receipt from the restaurant. The restaurant receipt that we found inside the car on the console had the restaurant name, it had the date, and it had the time. The time that the credit card was used to pay for the meal. The credit card belongs to Richard Kelly. This is a very important clue. It places Kelly at a restaurant located only 6 kilometers from the scene just a short time before Nadia was hit. We went to the restaurant. We had a photograph of Kelly. I was able to talk with the waitress that actually waited on uh Mr. Kelly. She positively identified him as being the person that she had waited on, that he had had somewhere between five and six beers to drink in a short period of time. And what we were also able to establish is that he was there with a woman. This woman could have been the last person to see Kelly driving the car before the impact occurred. Following his instinct, Lenny wonders if maybe Kelly called the mysterious woman before they met at the restaurant. We subpoenaed the records for the cell phone, and we were able to establish who Mr. Kelly called, what time they called, and what date they called. The phone record check pays off. Before and after the time of the event, Kelly called the same number many times. This number belongs to Jane Thornton, Kelly's girlfriend. I expected Jane Thornton was the woman who had lunch with Richard Kelly. And to my surprise, I found out that was not the case at all. She was at home waiting for him to come home to uh dinner, but he never came home. And when she found out that he was having dinner with another woman, needless to say, she became very upset. James Thornton is now eager to cooperate. She informs police that Kelly did call her that day and told her he may have accidentally hit an animal. This would seem to support the theory that Kelly didn't realize he'd hit Nadia in the first place. But then Jane goes on to reveal that Kelly pleaded with her to drive by the scene and retrieve any missing car parts. This strikes Lenny Simpson as extremely suspicious. The autopsy report now becomes critical. If the evidence shows that Nadia was standing at the time of impact, it will be enough to bring a hit-and-un charge against Richard Kelly. When you're down on the ground and you're run over, you get you have very different injuries than if you're standing up and you're struck by a car. The autopsy report clearly shows Nadia's position at the time of impact. The fractures to her legs were both above the knee, suggesting a standing position at the time she was hit. Her pelvis, ribs, and skull were fractured on the left side, consistent with a collision of this nature and speed. The injuries inflicted by this violent crash are all consistent with the damage on Kelly's vehicle and responsible for Nadia Pollinsky's untimely death. The autopsy report proved that she was upright, that she was not bent over, and that when she was struck, she was standing straight. It was a hit and run. It involved a death. The person who struck this woman did not stop. I knew this was going to be my career case. The next morning, they'd receive a tip from a concerned neighbor. We got a report from one of the neighbors that lives on the same street as Richard Kelly. And this neighbor explained that he had found a bumper. [Music] Biological matter, including hair and blood, will be sent to the lab for analysis, but Lenny has no doubt about the results. Kelly attempted to hide the bumper so that we could not have it as physical evidence. He was trying to prevent his arrest. After a week of investigative work, Detective Lenny Simpson can finally replay the events that led to Nadia Pollinsk's untimely death. On that fateful afternoon, Kelly heads back to work after having lunch and several beers at a nearby restaurant. As the elderly Nadia Pollinsky crosses the road, Kelly slams into her, sending her body flying through the air and landing on a pile of trash by the street corner. But rather than assist the injured woman or call the authorities, Kelly drives away. Several hours later, he returns to the scene and rather than check on his victim, he hides evidence in an attempt to cover his tracks. The autopsy report shows that Nadia Pollinsky died as a result of several head and spinal cord injuries. Richard Kelly is finally found guilty of a hit-and-run accident resulting in a fatal injury. He was sentenced to 5 years in jail. It became an obsession and that and that was probably because of the family. They had lost uh someone who was near and dear to them and to die such a violent death. was just not fair. So, I felt compelled. I had to absolutely do the best I could ever do to resolve and solve this case. Accident investigators are used to dealing with bloody scenes, dead bodies all the time. But there's nothing like investigating the death of a fellow officer. It's like investigating the death of a family member. And there's no one that can do that job but the accident investigator himself. At the end of a long day, Officer Marty King is patrolling a quiet neighborhood, waiting for his shift to end. Everything seems to be going smoothly when suddenly something catches his eye in the rear view mirror. He swings a quick U-turn and drives back in the direction he came from. As it turns out, Officer Keen has stumbled onto a major car accident involving two vehicles, one of which has caught fire. [Music] He can't wait for emergency personnel to arrive. The burning vehicle could explode at any minute, and he must get the driver out fast. As medics arrive on the scene, the passenger from the other car staggers out into the street, but the driver is not responding. Yo, we got help here. Here, here. Officer Keen is transported to the hospital along with the crash victims. However, for driver Fred Neermire, it's too late. He's pronounced dead at the scene. responding to the scene of a twocar accident. My dispatcher advised me that my best friend Marty tried to save one of the drivers in the accident when the vehicle caught on fire and he suffered smoke inhilation and had to be transported to the hospital himself. Marty Keane, he's my best friend. I've known him for about 8 years. He's the one that got me into doing the accident investigation. In fires, there are two things that happen. You obviously can have direct thermal injuries where your actual tissues are burned up. But what most people die of in fires is smoke inhilation. And there are sort of two things that are going on. One is that you can breathe in smoke, which depending on what's burning can have toxic chemicals in it. And the second thing that happens is fire is hot. And so what you can be breathing in is very, very hot air. And what that can do and often how people die in say flash fires or very very hot fires is they take in one breath full of hot air and their larynx swell shut so they can't get any more air in and that's how they die. As he arrives at the scene, Officer Jones receives more alarming news about the crash. It turned out that the driver of one of the cars was another one of our police officers named Tommy Ericson. Despite my emotional feelings in this, I knew I had to continue with this investigation and complete it. With Marty in the hospital, there was no one left. We were the only two accident investigators. Officer Jones is immediately faced with several critical questions. Were drugs or alcohol involved? Could this event have been caused by a mechanical failure? Or was one of the drivers at fault? All of these answers will be hard to come by and could have major ramifications for the drivers and their families. I've responded to many accidents before, many serious accidents, but I've never actually had one involving a co-orker or even my best friend at this point. The first thing Officer Jones notices is that both vehicles are in the same lane. Sheriff Ericson's car is sitting on the curb while the other vehicle has come to rest in the middle of the lane facing in the wrong direction. When I looked at Tommy's car, it was up against the curb. The front end was smashed on it and and it looked like some fire damage to the front end. I looked over to my left and I saw this small black car on the wrong side of the road in the lane. It looked like Tommy was traveling in and my first impression it was a head-on collision. But as officer Jones examines the stretch of roadway behind Sheriff Ericson's car, he observes some peculiar skid marks that are not consistent with a head-to-head crash. Normally in a situation like this, when it is a true head-on collision, the marks would just be straight. They wouldn't be on an angle like they were on. How about the other car? Then Robert notices something else unusual. While Tommy's car has left strange angled skid marks, he can't find any signs of breaking from the other vehicle at all. This is very puzzling. Why on earth would Neater Meyer just plow straight into Ericson's car head on? Tragically, Robert will never have the opportunity to ask his colleague Tommy Ericson about the crash. The sheriff is pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. When the officer told me that Tommy had died, I was devastated, but I wasn't totally surprised. After the examination of the car, it was difficult for me to understand how anybody could have survived the impact that he suffered on the steering wheel. As Officer Jones crawls around the scene looking for physical evidence, he discovers tiny gouge marks in the roadway. Anytime there is a severe impact, you usually have gouge marks because the front end of a car will go down and will actually impact the surface and it'll cause it to dig in and cause these gouge marks. And it generally tells you the direction the car was coming from or the direction the car was at at the time of the impact. But the gouge marks that Robert sees here are not making sense. From what he can tell, the car that made these gouge marks could not possibly have been involved in a head-to-head crash. The undercarriage of this car had drugged the asphalt in a way that was not consistent with a head-on collision. I thought this was very important to this investigation. The positions of the cars tell Robert that it was a head-on collision, but the minimal brake marks and the gouges in the road suggest otherwise. Robert hopes that the vehicle inspection will shed some light on this physical evidence and the possibility of mechanical failure. But for now, Robert has immediate concerns. He heads to the hospital to check on his partner and the one surviving victim. After a troubling day with many unanswered questions, he's finally given some good news. His partner, Officer Marty Keane, is still unconscious, but recovering from his injuries in intensive care. Expecting to find the one surviving passenger in critical condition, Officer Jones is amazed to see him sleeping peacefully. His name is Arthur Curtis, and his chart notes that he has only suffered one minor injury, a broken nose. I was a little surprised when I found out that Arthur had just had a broken nose. Seeing how both drivers had died in this collision, something just didn't seem right to me. The interview with Arthur Curtis provides more clues. I could smell alcohol on his breath. I asked him if Fred Nemier had been drinking also. And Curtis told me that they had both come from a bar right down the street from where the accident happened. The toxicology report indicated that Fred Ninaire had consumed quite a bit of alcohol. His blood alcohol level was a8, which is considerably over the legal limit. The blood alcohol content could explain the lack of brake marks from Netherm's car. Perhaps he was just too drunk to react to the oncoming vehicle. It may also shed some light as to why Nethermmy ended up in Sheriff Ericson's lane. But it still doesn't explain why the passenger, Arthur Curtis, only suffered a minor injury or why Ericson reacted to the oncoming car so late. It appears that Tommy just locked the brakes up and tried to turn away from it just right at the last minute like he never saw it coming. I had a hard time trying to figure that out. Next, Officer Jones gets Fred Neermier's autopsy results. It notes that Neermier was not wearing his seat belt, leaving his body unprotected against the violent shock of the crash, resulting in a lacerated aorta. Car A hits car B and all that force from car A gets transferred to person in car B. The bodies inside the car keep moving and hit something inside the car and then the organs inside the bodies keep moving and hit something inside the body. So it's boom boom boom. Well, that crash was only at 35. Imagine if it was a lot faster like Sheriff Ericson's. In every crash, there are three collisions. The first one's between the car parts. The next one is body striking structures inside the cars like the steering wheel and the dash. The last one is where body parts strike internal body parts like the ribs. Your heart and your lungs striking the ribs can cause blunt force trauma that can lead to internal bleeding and that's what kills Sheriff Ericson. An offduty sheriff is involved in a deadly car crash that kills him and another driver. The resting position of the car suggests that it was a head-on collision. But the rest of the physical evidence says otherwise, creating a real mystery for the investigator. As a first step, Officer Jones needs to run a complete mechanical check on the vehicles and document the damage from the crash. I'm driving over to the garage now to do the vehicle autopsies on the two vehicles involved in that crash. Right now, the best evidence I have are the three gouge marks in the road. I want to look underneath that vehicle and find out what caused those gouge marks. The brakes and operating systems check out. Okay, so mechanical failure is ruled out. But the question remains, why would two cars collide headon with virtually no attempt to avoid each other? Officer Jones's next job is to painstakingly match the marks on the road with the cars and parts that caused them. This giant jigsaw puzzle should give him a fairly accurate sense of the crash dynamics. While inspecting the undercarriage of Fred Neerm's car, he finds his first important piece of the puzzle. What I discovered is the marks right here in the suspension are what caused the gouge marks. There's actually pieces of asphalt still on the metal components underneath this car. When I looked at the gouge marks again and saw the angle they were coming on, I was able to determine that Fred Nemier's car was actually coming on an angle and not directly headon right there. This is a major breakthrough in the case. With Nemier's angled gouge marks and the offset skid marks from Erikson's car, Robert now has a clear idea of where the cars were at the time of the impact. It appeared to me that Fred Netomire was actually making a left turn or making a long sweeping turn into a driveway access and he turned right in the path of Tommy. That explains to me why Tommy never reacted to this crash. The force generated in a head-on collision would have been so violent that no one would likely have survived the crash. This left turn finding explains why the passenger in Nethermier's car wasn't more severely injured. The impact was absorbed primarily on the driver's side, leaving the passenger side mostly free of this deadly force. The evidence left by the skid marks indicate that Tommy actually swerved to the right just before the collision. This discovery puts Neermmyer clearly at fault, but one mystery still remains. If it was a left turn collision, how did Nethermmyer's car end up in the opposite lane facing Ericson, creating the illusion of a head-on crash? Tommy's car was actually 10 mph faster and 1,000 pounds more than Fred's car. And that explains why Fred's car went so far backwards and wound up in the lane that Tommy was originally driving. It was this weight and speed disparity and the resulting backwards movement that made the crash look like a head-on collision. The pieces are all coming together for Officer Jones. This new theory explains the victim's injury patterns and the absence of roadway evidence as neither driver had much time to react to the other's vehicle. With the final piece of the puzzle in place, officer Jones can now replay the events that led to this unfortunate tragedy. Was kidnapped and little [ __ ] tiny dwarf. Fred Neermmeer and Arthur Curtis spend the afternoon drinking beers at a local bar. Wow. Cut their heads off. Soon after leaving, Neermmyer slows down to make a left turn, but fails to check for oncoming traffic. The impact of the collision lifts Nethermmy's car off the ground, pushes it backward, causing it to land in the center of the lane, facing in the wrong direction. The pieces all fit together for officer Robert Jones. But the solution only came after a lengthy and emotionally draining investigation. Thankfully, Marty Keane eventually makes a full recovery, but sadly both officers thoughts are with the relatives of Sheriff Ericson and Fred Nemmer. No criminal charges were filed in this case. This accident was an emotional struggle for me because a c-orker was killed in the accident. A friend of mine was injured in the accident. Once I completed my investigation, I was relieved to find out that Tommy wasn't at fault in any way, shape, or form in this accident. This was a difficult case for Robert on a number of levels, professionally and emotionally. Don't be fooled by that appearance of callousness and coolness the accident investigators show. Deep down, remember, they're human beings as well. They care about getting that guy off the road that deserves to be off the road because they drive as well and so do their families. [Music] [Music] Every year, violent collisions kill 40,000 Americans and injure another 3 million. But there is no such thing as an accident. Every collision has a story as unique as the people involved. Rusty hates a leading authority on accident reconstruction. He trains investigators around the world to read the clues and solve the mysteries. No two crashes are alike. The primary categories frontal, rear end, rollover, and side impacts. These side impacts are the worst. They can lead to severe internal injuries and even fatalities for the person in that seat. I'm going as fast as It's been another long evening at Grandma and Grandpa's for little Amy Rogers. After all, when you're only 2 years old, time can pass slowly, especially when mommy and daddy aren't happy, and they aren't happy. An argument over an upcoming move has left her parents at odds again. The young family leaves for home, tense, upset, and in a hurry. Well, he's going to have to wait like the rest of us cuz at about the same time as the Rogers begin their drive home, two men several blocks away get in an SUV and head for home, too. Far from having a stressful evening, though, they've been partying at a nearby bar. That was fun, huh? That was a lot of fun. In about 15 seconds, lives will be shattered. And it all could have been avoided if some basic safety rules had not been recklessly ignored. Kenny, sit down. Okay. Let me Let me fix the baby real quick. Yeah, take care of you. You You've had a lot to drink. At approximately 11 p.m. on a hot Arizona night, accident investigator John Heinman is called out to the crash scene. How many victims again? Three victims. Uh the information I received from our our death sergeant uh who got a hold of me that night was that we had uh two vehicles involved uh an SUV and a sedan. Uh there was three victims. It's a very bad one. The SUV is in the middle of the road. The car is on the curb and a traffic light pole has been knocked down. Heman believes one of these vehicles must have tried to run a red light. It's his job now to figure out exactly what happened and who, if anyone, was at fault. When I got that call that there were three victims, uh, immediately knew this was going to be a bad crash. Hey, Doug. Tom. Hey, we got one. Knowing that, Heinman asks his partner, Doug Kramer, to help him. The crash scene is a real calamity, even to a couple of policemen who've seen plenty of crashes. It's not the wreckage, as bad as that is. What strikes Heman and Kramer is that there are bodies everywhere they look. Little Amy's parents are pronounced dead at the scene. Windshield. Yeah. Again, no seat belt here. Both have suffered major head trauma and internal bleeding. In the SUV, passenger Peter O'Sullivan is also dead after smashing his head into the windshield and suffering two massive skull fractures. It appears the only survivor is the driver of the SUV, John Lowry. Looking at what is left of the SUV, Heineman is surprised to learn that Lowry suffered only minor injuries, not much more than a cut on his face. Apart from the physical evidence, Lowry is the only one who can talk about what happened. Everybody else is dead. [Music] at the scene. We didn't have a uh there was no no independent witnesses to this uh collision and we needed to know who ran the red light. That was a key for us and went to the hospital try and get some information out of the driver before being transported to the hospital. Lowry tells investigators that it was the other car that ran the red light and hit him. A crash at a traffic signal controlled intersection suggests one of two things. First, it could be that the lights malfunction. That's usually unlikely. What's more likely is somebody ran the red light. The question is, is which car? For accident investigator John Heinman, he's going to have to apply his training and experience to sort out who actually ran that red light. At this point, one thing's for certain. He knows he has a side impact. And for occupants in a passenger car, that's the worst kind of crash to be in. On the front of a vehicle, we have all this distance, all this space. We can crush. You've heard of crumple zones. Well, that's what's built into the front of a vehicle. You can't really make the side of a vehicle any wider. We're limited. And the best you can do perhaps is some side impact airbags. There's not much room here. If you're on the side and you're hit on the side, you're the first one at the point of impact. So, in a situation like this where you have a passenger that's thrown all the way over to the driver's side, you can expect to see massive injuries to the head with the brain being jostled around to the vertebral column and to the internal organs where they can be torn from their attachment. You can have severe internal bleeding. As Heinman and his team prepare to start gathering the physical evidence, they're informed of a disturbing new development. for us. Somebody else looking. They were they were at the scene. Uh fire captain approached us, told us they saw the back window been broken. Uh and there may be a fourth victim. Through the broken windows of the couple's car, firefighters notice a child seat and some toys. Heman asks firefighters to search the surrounding area, hoping against hope that it wasn't the tiny body of a child that broke the back window. [Music] And then a scene that seemingly couldn't get any worse does. In the bushes about 100 ft from the crash scene, firefighters find the lifeless body of 2-year-old Amy Rogers. As a parent, uh having young kids, they're the worst, the absolute worst. When you find out that young child, young life is uh is gone, it really affects you. And um you just you still got to put just put your emotions aside and do your investigation, but again the the kids are the worst. One of the first things we noticed was that nobody was seat belted in, not even the infant. If it was just rested in the car seat, the impact allowed the freedom to go out of the car. So it's like this. A driver who would wear a seat belt is three times more likely to restrain a child in the car with them. So you probably wonder what I'm doing here. Well, let's try a little experiment. Suppose you're driving down the road at 25. You're in a parking lot and you have an unrestrained child in the seat next to you. That's not a good idea. Kids out of a car seat, out of a seat belt. Well, 25 m an hour in a parking lot and a little bit of a crash is just about like doing the unthinkable. Throwing your baby from the third floor doesn't make any sense, does it? Well, here's the deal. It's not the fall that's going to hurt. It's the sudden stop at the end. And this fall from this height was just the same as an unrestrained child moving forward and hitting the dash. Put the kids in a seat belt or a car seat. And not just the kids. None of the victims were wearing seat belts. Only Lowry beat the odds. As Heinman continues the onseen investigation, he dispatches Officer Tom Reyes to follow up with the lone survivor at the hospital. The light was green, so I don't know what happened. This guy must hit me came out from nowhere. First he learns that Lowry's blood alcohol is over the legal limit. We learned that his uh blood alcohol concentration was a 0.125. You should obey traffic signals. This was several hours after this uh impact occurred. Whoops. Oh no, I almost missed that one. He was impaired. Uh probably didn't even see the red light. Obviously didn't see the car coming approaching him as well. Lowry sticks by his story that the other car ran the red light, but he's got some incentive to say so. After all, the only other possible witnesses are dead, and he could face four counts of manslaughter if Heman can prove it was Lowry's fault. But Heinman doesn't have that proof yet. So, at this point, Jon doesn't have any independent eyewitnesses to tell him who actually ran the red light. He's got the only surviving driver that's pointing at the dead guy. There's a surprise, huh? who's saying, "Hey, the dead guy ran the red light." What John's going to have to do to get any kind of criminal charges into court is find some objective independent way with the physical evidence to demonstrate who actually did run the red light in this case. That's the trick for investigators. They need to figure out using that investigative technique and the physical evidence how this crash happened. Accident investigator John Heman is piecing together one of the worst cases he's ever handled. Four people are dead, including a 2-year-old who wasn't properly buckled in a car seat. In fact, no one was wearing a seat belt. There is only one survivor in this crash. Belts aside, alcohol is a factor. Lowry was driving impaired. Still in all, Jon has to figure out which of the two drivers tried to beat the red light. In fact, may not have noticed the red light. I think she's over there. The fact that Lowry was driving under the influence makes him more likely to have run the red light. But Heimman will need proof. And right now, this mystery is offering up few clues. John's next step is to start collecting and analyzing the physical evidence here. There there are some car parts in the road, but there are no real tire marks. And tire marks are what the accident investigator is going to use to really piece this together. For him, that lack of tire marks is going to be a real challenge. With no skid marks, at least one thing is clear. Neither driver was on the brakes when the collision happened. That would explain the violence of the crash. Obviously, you know, something that came through our mind was that neither one of these drivers saw each other. They didn't react. Uh, one of the drivers didn't even react to the red light. But then Heineman learned something that could turn his theory about the SUV on its head. Results from the medical examiner come in. It turns out Kevin Rogers was also impaired. Not by alcohol, but by methamphetamine. Did you take something? I took something. I'm with the guys. What do you expect me to do? Knew we had one impaired driver. We kind of had a hunch that he may be the one that ran the red signal. Now, we had two impaired drivers. One with the alcohol and the other with the drugs. So, it's back to square one. If both drivers were impaired, either one could have ignored the traffic signals, but Heman knows only one of them really did. Trouble is, how to prove it. We're just uh kicking around the idea, how can we find out who ran the red light? and just kind of all a sudden it hit us. Hey, let's get the bulbs and had those analyzed. And the key to this investigation was rested on the uh the light bulb that I collected at the scene. When the car knocked down the traffic light, the bulbs in that signal shattered. It occurred to Heinman that by analyzing the filaments in that broken bulb, they could determine which light was on and which was off at the time of the crash. That means investigators will be able to tell who had the green and who had the red when both cars enter the intersection. What you look at from a forensic examination is that you're looking at the coil structure and you're looking at the shape of the overall filament. In the case of the red, what we have is a fractured filament. These are cold break, which means it was off at the time it fractured. and you have a series of small coils that have just broken off. If you go to the green, what you see is the same support, but look at your coil structure. You have stretching. You have a breakdown in the general shape. It's no longer in the nice curved Cshape. This means that it was soft at the time of the accident, which means that it was on. So because of this type of deformation, we are able to say that the green lamp was on at the time that the vehicle struck the pole. The hard filament in the cold red light shattered, but soft filaments in the hot green light only bent. Since the downed pole was facing Alex Rogers car, it's immediately obvious to investigators that he had the green light when he entered the intersection. What happened was we had the sedan uh approaching on a red light. Uh speed wasn't very great. The uh signal turned green for the sedan. Uh went not very fast, 25 30 mi through the intersection and was t-boned by the SUV at a high rate of speed. Uh which we felt ran the red light. With the results of the test on the traffic lights, John Heinman can now replay the sequence of events that led to the fatal collision. Amy Rogers and her parents were on their way back home. They were about to cross an intersection, the same intersection John Lowry and his friend were approaching. The family had the green light. The SUV had the red, but never stopped. Nobody was on the brakes when the vehicles collided. Both drivers were impaired. Lowry because of alcohol, Amy's father by drugs, and no one was wearing a seat belt. The tragic results of all these factors led to four people dead and only one survivor. John Li is the only survivor in this crash. Like is so often the case, a drunk driver responsible for a collision walks away from it, but he won't get away for long. Because the other driver was also impaired, Lowry was not charged with the maximum sentence. He finally plead guilty and received a sentence of 8 years in prison. In the real world, as in dreams, nothing is quite as it seems. Look, I didn't write that Dean Coons did, but I've certainly experienced that as an accident investigator. This job is anything but routine. Every once in a while, you run across a case that makes you say, "And I thought I'd seen everything." Well, this case is a perfect example. On an early April evening in New Jersey, a 911 call comes in. Yes, there's a body lying in the middle of the road at Robinson Way. Looks like got hit by a car. [Music] Accident investigator Andy Rich works for the local prosecutor's office. He gets to the scene not long after the 911 call has been made. There, the lifeless body of young Matthew Nylan is lying on the side of the road. A quick check reveals that Matthew has just moved into the neighborhood to take a new job. He was due to start work the very next day. The human body is usually one of the most reliable and generous sources of evidence for any crash investigator. But in this case, the body actually deepens the mystery because it doesn't show any of the usual signs of a hidden run. You've got a pedestrian, you've got some debris in the roadway. Anything else you're going to work on? Well, right now all I have is a ankle injury. Some blood coming from the ankle. I don't have any typical injuries I would normally see on a pedestrian hit. things like bumper contact to the leg, that sort of thing. Yeah. Lower lower extremity fractures, head injuries, glass in the hair. I don't have any of that. At first glance, Andy has no idea what led to this young man's untimely death. One thing he does know is that the clock is ticking. When when you're dealing with a hit and run, time is a big factor. It's very easy to get rid of a car. You can fix it, wash evidence off. The scene is particularly small and quiet. No witnesses, no bystanders, and little physical evidence. But over by the body, Andy comes across his first clue. There was one skid mark, and it was very close to the body, and it appeared to be fresh. And we could tell a fresh skid mark from a one that may be old. You look at the dirt dispersed around the around the tire mark. Is it covering the tire mark? Uh or is there obviously a cleaning to the roadway where the dirt's been disturbed? There's also you could tell if it's a faded skid mark from one that's has a lot of fresh rubber laid down. This single skid mark tends to support the hidden run scenario. The driver could have stomped on the brakes to try to avoid hitting the young man. A little further down the street, there's another possible clue. Tire prints made in the ground just off the side of the road. The tire prints were on the tree belt. And the tree belt is a grassy area that's between the sidewalk and the street. That kind of leads to the scenario that maybe the car goes out of control and then winds up driving off the roadway onto the tree belt. Andy, how's this car involved? Well, we ran the plates on all the cars that were parked on this road, and we found out that this one belongs to the victim. So far, it seems as if Matthew Nyl was leaving his apartment and crossing the street when 50 ft or so down the road, another car went up onto the tree belt. The driver lost control and tried to stop before hitting him, but he couldn't. Instead of sticking around, he fled the scene, leaving Matthew to die. Up to now, there's no indication that this is anything other than a hidden run. But after a closer inspection of the scene, a puzzling find next to the victim's body threatens to deepen the mystery even further. We did find a hat that was next to the body and that was that's also something else that was very odd. It was a 25 mph uh speed zone and I would expect to find a body approximately 40 ft from the hat. Not the hat 3 ft from the body. It just shouldn't happen. Now, the reason that the hat, or for example, a pair of glasses may not end up near a body that's been hit by a car has to do with crash dynamics. I know a thing or two about crash dynamics, but so does Jerry Eubanks. He's an expert in pedestrian crash analysis. Okay, so Jerry, we got the pedestrian set. You're going to be watching for the hat and the glasses. What else? Hat and the glasses and shoes. We got two shoes that are untied this time, so they should go far down line, maybe 40, 50, 60 ft. hat and the glasses should stay in this area of impact. Although if the glasses are hit by the windshield, they'll start traveling down line. So glasses had good indication of the area of impact. Area of impact, not a point of impact. All right, let's make this happen. [Music] So we have the head crash and we find that the evidence we expected to see near the point of impacts here. For example, the hat. We're only talking about it being about 6 ft from the actual marked point of impact. And about 9 or 10 ft away, we find the glasses and one of the shoes. So everything is exactly where we'd expect to find it. Back in New Jersey, Andy Rich has Matthew Nyl's body and the hat Nyling almost right next to each other. Not widely separated as the crash dynamics would suggest. Yet, a 911 caller claimed Nylan was the victim of a hit and run. For Rich, the evidence is just not adding up. The body of 23-year-old Matthew Nyl's lying on the side of the road in suburban New Jersey. We've all seen this before. One minute a healthy young kid, the next minute a grieving family trying to pick up the pieces. Andy Rich is the first stop on that long road. He's here to find out exactly what caused Matthew's death, both for the parents and the authorities. But this case is getting stranger by the moment. Anytime two objects come in contact with each other, there's going to be a transfer of evidence. We walk the grid and we walk up and down the roadway and then we walk up and down the roadway crossways. We change directions and there was there were no parts. There were no automotive parts. There were no paint chips. In fact, the car should not be the only source of evidence in this case. Matthew Nyl's body should also show signs of the collision. Here's why. So, Jerry, accident investigators working pedestrian crashes are going to find evidence from the body on the road, right? Yes. What kind of evidence should they look for? Well, is in this case, we've got clothing fabric. You can find hair, blood, and flesh. Shoe prints also. Do you have to be dragged by the car for this to show up? No. In this case, we had the dummy thrown. Um, and when he hits the ground, we get these larger marks and the smaller mark is a secondary bounce. So just sliding will get that transfer. Yes. After the body gets hit by the car and it's sliding around on along the ground, this guy's wearing jeans. Normally, I would expect to find some gene transfer, blue material that gets rubbed off the jeans onto the pavement. Back in New Jersey, Andy Rich can't find any signs of transfer at the crash site. But then, just as they're wrapping up their onseen investigation, Andy gets his first lucky break. Broken glass has been found on a nearby street. Glass that may have come from the fleeing car. What could have happened here is maybe some headlight glass could have broken, got caught on the bumper. The driver takes a very hard turn and now that glass because of the force from the turning gets thrown off that car a block away. But on closer inspection, Andy's first promising lead quickly evaporates. It looked like uh window glass from the side or the rear windshield of a car, not the front. When a front windshield breaks, it stays together because it's laminated. Whereas when the side windows break, they turn into little popcornsized kernels and you just see these little fragments all over the ground. That's what we had here. You know why a pedestrian would hit and break a side window or a rear window. And I'm looking at it, it doesn't look right. And we interviewed the neighbors and the neighbors tell us, "No, that was there for about a couple of weeks." And the local police actually took a report on it. Andy and his team leave the accident scene. no closer to unlocking the mystery of Matthew Nylan's death. But he can't stop thinking about the case. It's got his mind going. The absence of physical evidence, the hat next to Matthew's body, the strange ankle injury. Something's just not right. And then later that night, it comes to him. As normal, I think about what happened at the scene. You know, did I miss anything? And I started thinking how if I jumped from the roof of the apartment building, where would I land? And I just started thinking about that. It's now the next morning. Rich has been working on the case for more than 12 hours. In the early daylight, he goes back to the scene to take a few measurements at the nearby apartment building. If someone were to jump off the roof or get pushed, they'd land just about where Nylin's body was found. The case has taken a brand new turn. Nylan may have been killed or committed suicide. But Rich isn't concluding anything just yet. Just because that body was found where I theoretically would think it it should have ended up after jumping from that building doesn't mean that that's what happens. But still, Andy now has a solid working theory that can be validated by further examination of the body. Injuries from a fall are very different from those caused by a car hitting somebody on the street. It was important to see what the medical examiner had to say. Hey. Hey, Andy. How are you? Okay. What happened? Well, I want to talk to you about this pattern of fractures on the legs. He's got an oblique fracture in the right thigh, a fracture of the left lower leg, and the interesting pattern of fractures is symmetrical fractures at the ankles. And looking at the X-rays, the way the fractures are situated, to me, it's much more consistent with falling from a height and not from a direct motor vehicle impact. Okay, thank you. The medical examiner confirms that Matthew's two broken ankles are not at all consistent with a hit and run. But those injuries would correspond with a fall from a height. Jud is an expert in collision trauma biomechanics. You see certain types of injuries and are pedestrian injuries. Are they consistent with just that type of event or are they common to other events? Pedestrians have a very unique injury pattern. you see very telltale evidence of contact and specific injury pattern to the lower extremity as well as damage as you proceed typically up one side of the body also to the head area. So it's uh there is a very distinct pattern. Things are finally coming together for Andy Rich, but there are more checks to be made. He gets a warrant to search the roof of Matthew Nyl's apartment building. He wants to verify a couple of things he found on one of Nland's running shoes. What was found on the bottom of the sneaker, wedged into the treads of the sneaker, was a pebble. And also on the top of the shoe was was like a black smear, some type of black transfer. And we noticed on the roof there was tar. There was an impression in the tar that matched the sole of the sneaker. When we went into his apartment, we found medications that's used for to treat uh patients for depression. Everything is now clear to the investigators. This is not a hit and run, just a very sad story. A desperate young man climbs to the top of his apartment building and jumps. His body lands on the side of the road, making it look like he was hit by a car. Investigators do just that. They investigate. And in this case, Andy got to the scene of what appeared to be a hit-and-run crash, and he applied his investigative techniques and he solved the case. A good investigator will do that. He relied on his training and experience. He figured out that this wasn't actually a hit and run, the hit and run it appeared to be. But who made the tire marks? Who made the phone call? We may never know. Ultimately though, the family is going to have to figure out why the young man ended his life the way he did. Next, investigators are baffled when a motorcyclist's fatal injuries seem to have come from something other than a motorcycle crash. We attend the uh the autopsies just to ensure that foul play is not involved. And in doing that, we can uh rule out a homicide because unfortunately it's very common for uh for people to use motor vehicle crashes as a um as a cover up for a homicide. 35year-old Mike Cooper is coming face to face with some hard realities. His job has become stressful and uninteresting, and his marriage of 12 years is coming to an end. I'm going to go get the kids. Now, one of the few things he still enjoys is his bike. After a long ride lasting well into the evening, Cooper is returning home when suddenly disaster strikes on a seemingly harmless corner that he has ridden past hundreds of times. His bike goes down. Trapped under the weight of it, he slides into oncoming traffic and is hit by an approaching SUV. Pronounced dead at the scene, Mike Cooper's body is taken to a nearby hospital. The driver of the SUV, Marcus Schrader, is visibly shaken and waits for a team of collision reconstructionists led by Constable Jeff Vance to arrive. A motorcycle rider himself, Vance will need to answer a series of key questions. What would cause a bike to slide out of control on a quiet residential street? And was someone or something responsible for this wreck? I approach every investigation like there's endless possibilities that that that are the root cause of the crash. Once you make an assumption where uh it's it's a high speed involved. Well, then you have to look at the root causes behind that. What else is going on? Is the accelerator stuck? Uh is there a mechanical defect? Um is it an attempt on the person's life? Uh all of these uh possibilities have to be looked at and ruled out. Jeff Vance quickly takes in the scene. The SUV's front end is on top of the curb with the bike wedged tightly underneath it. Both vehicles lie barely 10 ft past the point of impact. Right away, it's obvious to investigators that Mike Cooper's motorcycle offered him little protection in the crash. There was just some minor uh undercarriage damage to the uh sport utility vehicle and and that only made sense. uh and the uh the motorcycle itself. Um there was some significant forces that actually acted upon that uh which caused the entire frame to twist as well as the engine itself to break the motorcycle and the driver uh within milliseconds change direction and you can only imagine the force on the human body associated with that. But also too, if you can imagine the sport utility vehicle because it is higher, if someone is sliding along, they go underneath it, there's not only a a force pushing them in the opposite direction, as well as there's also a downward force on the occupant and the motorcycle. And this in turn projected the driver approximately 45 ft uh from the area of impact. Constable Jeff Vance has a pretty horrific crash scene on his hands. got a motorcycle crashed head on into an SUV. Doesn't need a physics degree to figure out who's going to win that battle. Now, what he's got left over is the SUV driver who's telling one version of the story. That's the human element, but he still has the vehicles and the environment to deal with. They'll tell the rest of the story. In the majority of investigations, it is the human element that poses the most difficulty for investigators. Survivors involved in fatal collisions can be severely traumatized by their experience. Their recollection of events is often clouded by guilt and remorse. Bring your safety equipment. There's a wide range actually of the way that people react to to a traumatic situation such as this. Everything from uh from a denial such as there's nothing wrong. I haven't done anything wrong. Uh right through to um an absolute collapse where people can't handle the stress and uh and collapse and also do require medical immediate medical attention. Next thing I know, he slides towards me. I try to avoid him. I don't think he was speeding. It is very common for these people that have, say, for example, seriously injured or killed someone. Person in the car at the time. There is a significant number of them that actually become alcoholics or drug addicts as a result of these crashes because they don't obtain the the the assistance they require even if they're not considered at fault in the crash. In this case, Marcus Schrader appears to be in the middle of the two extremes. After repeated attempts to get a statement, he is finally composed enough to offer police his version of events. To get at the truth of exactly what happened here, investigators will compare Schrader's story with the physical evidence at the scene. Everyone has a different perception of the truth. Uh, and it is unfortunate, but it is in human nature that that um people omit things or or or add things to their to their beliefs that would assist them in in any way possible. So, Jeff, you've had a chance to talk to the driver. What's he told you? He's driving along, minding his own business in the fast lane, saw the motorcyclist lose control, slide into his lane. He tried to maneuver around the motorcycle and swerve into the curb lane. Unfortunately, they hit. So, he fixated on the target. That's not uncommon for a non-professional driver. Professional drivers are often taught to steer toward the dust and debris because the crash has already been there and left. For the rest of us, unfortunately, we tend to follow the action too often, and it's unfortunate for this guy. If Marcus Schrader had swerved to his left instead of his right, chances are this fatal impact would have been avoided. By steering to his right, Shrader inadvertently put his SUV on a collision course with the motorcycle. However, investigators find no evidence his SUV was skidding before impact, suggesting his speed was low and that he had little time to react. Working back from the SUV, they are able to follow debris and scrapes left by Cooper's motorcycle to a tire mark on the opposite side of the road. The absence of skid marks and the trail of motorcycle debris leading up to the point of impact clearly indicate that the SUV did not collide with the bike before it went down. Shrader's version of events appears to be the truth. It appears that Mike Cooper's bike simply fell and slid across the road into the path of Shrader's SUV. The big question is why? So, when you take a look at this crash scene, we're still trying to figure out what would cause this guy to lay the bike down and end up underneath the SUV. Well, one of the issues is speed or potentially is speed. So, Jeff's looking into the coefficient of friction, the stickiness of the roadway and tire combination together with a little bit of math to try to figure out how fast this guy actually was going when he laid the bike down across the center line of the road. From the evidence littering the road, Jeff Vance determines that Mike Cooper was traveling at just 30 mph when he lost control of his motorcycle. slightly over the speed limit but well under the capabilities of both the motorcycle and its experienced rider. It was uh very important to determine how fast the motorcycle was uh driving and maneuvering the corner. He wasn't traveling uh at a high rate of speed. So it always posed the question to me then what would cause it? Um if someone is uh is going too fast for the corner and loses control then it's completely understandable. But if someone's taking a corner around the speed limit, um it just doesn't make sense for a motorcycle to lose control and for the driver to die as a result of it. After hours at the scene, police are still no closer to explaining how or why Mike Cooper lost his life. Coming up, Jeff Vance makes a discovery with tragic implications. We attend the uh the autopsies just to ensure that uh foul play is not involved. It's very common for uh for people to use motor vehicle crashes as a um as a cover up for a [Music] homicide. A motorcyclist is dead after a crash with an SUV. Jeff Vance, the lead investigator in the case, has quite a puzzle on his hands. When a motorcycles in a turn, there's sideways forces and up and down forces acting on the bike. You adjust those forces by your lean angle, adjusting your speed, and braking. Jeff's wondering, did the rider in this case actually do something that upset that balance? He's hoping the body will give him some clues. We attend the uh the autopsies just to ensure that uh foul play is not involved. Uh and we do that through ensuring that the injury profile on the individual uh is consistent with the the damage to the vehicles and the accident scene. And in doing that, we can uh rule out a homicide because unfortunately it's very common for uh for people to use motor vehicle crashes as a um as a cover up for a homicide. The medical exam reveals that the victim's leg was badly scraped and his foot crushed. His skin was literally torn inside out during the slide out and the impact with the SUV. The injury is horrific, but not fatal. A toxicology report shows alcohol in the bloodstream at the time of his death. But the levels are so low, Jeff fans quickly discounts any theory that Mike Cooper was driving while impaired. As the autopsy draws to a close, the medical examiner calls Jeff's attention to the victim's head x-rays. They clearly reveal the cause of death, but they also send the entire investigation back to the starting line. A hole in the skull just above the left eye produced massive trauma and significant blood loss. A helmet was recovered at the crash scene, but this injury suggests a helmet was not being worn at the time of the collision. When could the injury have occurred? Did my Cooper hit something that caused him to lose control of his motorcycle? Or did something or someone hit him? Jeff Vance will need to carefully re-examine the bike to find the answers. When a motorcycle hits a car, you don't expect them to die of a puncture wound to the head, especially if they're wearing a helmet. More typically, you'd expect them to have had injuries to their neck or to their internal organs. Their aorta can even be just torn off, and they can bleed internally and die within minutes. Back at the police garage, Jeff Vance now knows what killed Mike Cooper. A puncture wound to the head. revealing how the wound was caused will determine if the crash was an elaborate hoax to cover another crime or a catastrophic failure of a vital piece of safety equipment. Examining his personal effects, Jeff Vance quickly determines that Mike Cooper sealed his own fate the moment he put on his most important piece of protective gear, his helmet. examination of the helmet itself, the label that was on the inside stain this was a novelty helmet, not meant for for safety purposes. There is no padding on the inside at all, which has no energy absorption material at all. And this would also explain some of the trauma to this uh driver's uh head as well. If you can imagine the motorcycle sliding on its side, moving across three lanes of traffic and and being struck by a northbound sport utility vehicle. So basically, uh, his head went up and struck the the turn signal on the handlebar of the motorcycle because that also hit the sport utility vehicle's bumper. And we know this through the examination with tissue being found on the on the turn signal as well as the uh the damage to his skull. So Jeff's had a chance to look at the bike and he's got the rider dynamics figured out. As the rider went into the slide, he fell to the pavement and the cheesy helmet struck the roadway moving off his head and offering him less protection so that when the bike hits the SUV, the rider goes forward, his unprotected head now hits the turn indicator. What Jeff's got to do next is to figure out what caused that bike to lean and then slide out. While examining the bike, trying to determine what caused Mike Cooper's fatal slide, investigator Jeff Vance is repeatedly drawn to the tires of his motorcycle. Shiny and slippery to the touch, it appears as if the sides had been polished with a product designed to keep car tires from fading or cracking. Could the polish have affected the motorcycle handling on the night of the crash? Being a motorcycle rider myself, I know that the tires aren't that shiny. I went over and felt them and there was a very slippery substance on them. Uh, and it actually went around the whole tread except for the travel portion, a very thin narrow strip on the on the on the um center of the tire itself. I was thinking to myself, that's not right. And and and I thought to myself, well, that will significantly reduce the the speed that this motorcycle will be able to to take the corner. And I was thinking to myself, could this be it? Because I've never come across something like this before. So Jeff, do you have any working theories about why the bike went down? Yes, I found some contamination on the tires are really slippery, and I think that lowered the coefficient of friction between the tire and the road enough for the motorcycle to slide out. Um, can you give me a hand doing a lean test on the bike? Um, just to see where the contamination starts. Sure, let's do that. What can I do for you? Uh, if you just lean the bike over towards me and I'll let you know when the contamination touches the road. Okay, you can go just go up a little bit. Okay, that's perfect. So, what did you get? I got 20° and that's well within the normal range of a of a novice driver. A quick test in the garage shows that a 20° lean angle is all that is required to have the polished area of the tire meet the ashalt on a test track. Can a motorcycle going the posted speed limit through a similar corner exceed that 20° lean angle? The shape of a bike tire is not like what you find on a car. This bike tire is more oval. When you're driving down the road just straight and level, the contact patch is right down here in the center. When you go through a turn, that contact patch spreads around the sides. We know there's a relationship in a turn between lean angle and speed. And of course, the roadway friction. In this case, what we want to do is figure out if a lean angle in this scenario will get us past 20°. That would be about here. A more aggressive turn will be further out on the sidewalk. On a corner with the same curvature as the one of the crash scene, a rider maintaining 30 mph easily exceeds a 20° lean angle while executing the turn. Not a terribly taxing demonstration for our rider. He made it to 20° without any difficulty. But if you change the friction at that point on the tire, you'd probably have this bike slide out. It's interesting. You got to wonder why would someone put that much stuff on that kind of tire on purpose. It seems inconceivable that Mike Cooper, an experienced rider, would put a slippery automotive polish on his own tires where it could actually contact the road. Jeff Vance continues to examine the hours leading up to the crash for any evidence that someone could have deliberately tampered with his bike. Homicide detectives follow up on the suspicions, but they can find nothing to suggest that foul play was a factor in the crash. Instead, it appears that Mike Cooper's zeal to have good-looking tires and a vintage helmet clouded his judgment. Jeff Vance began his investigation with a commitment to finding the cause of this crash and to explain how a low-speed impact killed a fellow motorcycle rider. He now has his answers. After a long ride to clear his head, Mike Cooper is returning home on a road he has ridden hundreds of times before. As he rounds a curve, his lean angle exceeds 20°, putting an area of his tires slick with polish into contact with the ashold. In a split second, his bike is down and sliding into the path of an SUV driven by Marcus Shrader. On impact, his head collides with the handlebars before his body is thrown into the grass on the side of the road. Evidence from the scene, the medical exam, and the motorcycle itself paints a picture of a man who made a series of poor judgments. Using a rubber polish on his own tires, and choosing to ride without a proper helmet ultimately sealed Mike Cooper's fate. I've investigated over,200 collisions now and I cannot think of one of them being an accident. They are avoidable. Uh it's as simple as that. Driver error is a huge factor in all of these. Let it be speed or alcohol or just inattentiveness. There there is not I have not come across a true accident myself. There's no doubt about it that riding a bike requires a different skill set than driving a car and greater concentration. One of the things that Jeff's investigation reminds us is that riders have to be responsible for their own safety and their safety equipment. This guy made a series of mistakes, but sometimes it's only one mistake that could end a life. [Music]