I'm in charge of going out to all the major traffic collisions in the Los Angeles area, meaning accidents with more than three or four fatalities, or any other type of major profile case--a school bus crash, for example. If an accident occurs and it meets certain criteria, they call our team to respond. Then they shut the whole freeway down and we come out and we do our thing.

We just finished a case where a mass transit bus that was going down the Hollywood Freeway had a minor impact with another car that caused the bus to swerve out of control. It went through a wall and onto the other side of the freeway, at which point a motorcycle slammed into it. The motorcyclist died and then a pickup truck came in and hit the bus and that driver died and the passenger had major injuries. So we had only two fatalities in this accident but, because it was a big type of liability case, we came in to investigate, so hopefully there's no question about what happened and what caused the collision.

In each case, we interview all the witnesses, all the drivers that were involved, the passengers, and we get detailed explanations of what happened in the accident from everybody. Then comes the big mess of collecting all the physical evidence on the roadway. We document it, mark it, and label it. We have a California Department of Transportation person who checks the scene to see if there's any roadway defects. We also have a motor carrier specialist who checks all the vehicles for any mechanical defects. And this is very important because a lot of times in these accidents people will claim that the reason they had the accident wasn't because they were drunk, but because all of a sudden the steering went out, or you know, some such shit.

It can get very complicated. Sometimes, you'll get to a scene and there'll be bodies everywhere-- there'll be five or six dead bodies--and two or three of them will be ejected out of the vehicle, one or two may be in the vehicle, and no one's alive. There's no witnesses; all you have is pretty much dead bodies, demolished vehicles. It might happen on a remote stretch of road at three o'clock in the morning, so no one saw it happen. There may be one person alive and that person is totally intoxicated. Well, was he driving? He's outside the car, he's the only one unhurt, and you have to make a determination of who was driving, 'cause if the drunk guy was driving, he's got a possible six counts of murder looking at him.

A lot of times, we just go by looking at the injuries to the bodies and the people who are deceased. I have to do the unpleasurable part of going to autopsies, because you can learn so much from injury patterns on a person's body. They tell you about the occupant kinetics--the movement of bodies in the vehicle during the collision sequence. A dead body may have a gash on the head which matches up with the rearview mirror, or something of that kind, and you take all that into account and rule each person out and then the person that you have standing that's walking around, he may have a deep red mark over his left shoulder which would match up with the seat-belt coming across his left shoulder. Or maybe he has a bloody nose which matches the blood on the airbag which is deployed. I mean there's so much to look for that even though there's carnage and it's really sad, especially when you see children that are laying on the side of the road dead, I like to think of it as: okay, let's figure out what happened here.

Fortunately, we have some real high tech surveying equipment which we use to document the scene. We pinpoint all the locations of everything: where the vehicles are, where the skidmarks are, where the glass debris is--I mean everything. Then we take it all back to the office and plot it out using a computer-aided drafting program. We make like a computer model of the scene. Then we make what's called an exemplar vehicle--which is like a computer model of the vehicle--and we'll move this exemplar along the skidmarks that are on the roadway.

So we can basically reconstruct the whole accident in our computer. I mean, you can actually see the collision unfold. A normal person can go and look at it and say, "Wow, that's exactly what happened. The car was hit here and it rotated in this direction." It's pretty cool. It's a lot of work, but it's well worth it for all these major cases we do, because, say, for court purposes, if we're gonna prosecute a drunk driver who just ran over a family with a mom, dad, and lots of kids, we want to make sure that it's an open-and-shut case.

One of the reasons I was chosen for the team is because I have a civil engineering degree. There's an awful lot of math and physics involved when you're reconstructing the accident--regarding conservation of momentum and stuff. Everything that happens, as far as we look at it--as far as the vehicles, the people inside--everything is governed by the law of physics. It's based on Newton's three laws and so forth. And the more accidents you go to, the easier it becomes to determine what happened because you start seeing so many similar patterns. You know that if a big-rig tractor combo comes over and changes lanes and hits a smaller compact vehicle, for example, that most likely it will happen in the truck's blind spot, and that the car will rotate in a certain direction when it's hit at a certain place. And so forth.

I've been doing this for about three and a half years now. But, you know, I didn't have any master plan to do it or anything. My whole life has pretty much just been going where it leads me. Things just happened to work out this way.

I went to school at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut and I was told that I had to pick some type of major and most of the majors were engineering majors so I said: civil engineering, well that sounds good. So I went through and got my education in civil engineering. Then, for the next seven years, I was on active duty in the Coast Guard and I never used my civil engineering stuff. Not once. Most of what we did was look for boats carrying drugs. I used to have command of an eighty-two foot ship there, but with each promotion, they want you to move, so you learn how the whole operation works. Eventually my wife didn't wanna move, so I quit. We've since gotten divorced. Oh well.

Anyway, after that, I chose a career in the California Highway Patrol because I'd enjoyed law enforcement in the Coast Guard. I became an officer out in Palm Springs, in the desert. I had a special assignment with our canine drug interdiction team. One of my primary duties was to stop the flow of drugs coming through the desert. The Penn Freeway which I worked on was a primary shipment point for drugs coming into the Los Angeles area. We basically stopped carloads full of drugs--you know 150 to 200 pounds of marijuana at a time--a couple hundred pounds of cocaine and large amounts of PCP and so forth.

It was a real learning experience--a long way from civil engineering. Certain things are characteristic of people smuggling drugs. For example, out here in California, most of the drugs that are coming are coming from Mexico. Something that the Mexican drug cartels do is that they generally don't trust anybody to transport drugs for them except Mexicans. So you obviously have something there. That's an indicator. Another thing is that they don't want to lose a brand new car. So most of the time they're going to be using an older car, so in case it's seized, they don't lose an expensive vehicle. I'm not sure why they really care about that when you're talking huge quantities of money involved with drugs, but they do care. So you'll see them a lot of times using older cars, basically from the early '80s. And they're usually mid-American size cars, you know, larger ones so they can fit more drugs in. And then they don't want a lot of people to get arrested, so they'll have only one or two people in the car.

Now, when you stop the car and walk up on it, sometimes there're obvious things like odors, you know, it's pretty hard to mask the odors of things like marijuana, or sometimes even cocaine. So you either smell the actual drugs in the car, or you smell the masking agent, which could be baby powder, or you'll see a lot of, I don't know if you've ever seen those Christmas trees, but they'll have those things hanging all over the place, those air freshener things. Normally people don't have like twenty air fresheners hanging all over their car, but they do that to hide the smell.

Another tell-tale sign is when you stop them and you see that they have only one key in the ignition. You know, most people, when they drive their car they have a whole shitload of keys like I do. You have your house key and this key and this key, all hanging there. Well, most of the time with a lot of these guys it's not their car. They'll go to the border they'll pick up a car and they'll be told to drive from point A to point B.

So you look for things like that. You have two people in a car, you go up and you see some of the indicators, so you get the driver out of the car. That's one of the main things we like to do: we separate the driver from the passenger and you just talk to them a little bit, find out where they're coming from, where they're going, find out what they do for a living. Each of them--the driver and the passenger--you talk to them separately. And these guys, for some reason, they may get their stories straight a little, but they can never totally get their stories straight.

I mean, it's no big secret, but just by talking to people you can learn an awful lot. You find out from the driver what he did and you go talk to the passenger and one guy's going to a funeral for their aunt and the other person's going to a funeral for their grandmother, or one person's going to a funeral and one person's going to a wedding. It's that obvious. They didn't get it together and you're like, "Oh really? The other guy's said he's going to a funeral," and he's like, "Oh yeah, that's what I meant, a funeral." It's actually quite hilarious sometimes, and you know, frequently, I'll come out and just look at them right in their face and say, "Listen, you're carrying drugs. How much do you have in the car?" A lot of times, they just pretty much hold their wrists out right then and there so you can put the handcuffs on them.

All of our canine officers go out on the road and stop car after car after car. You don't have to spend much time with a car to determine whether they have drugs or not. So they'll stop one car and let it go and stop another car and let it go and after about twenty stops, they'll find the right one that has all the indicators. It's not like they do a lot of searches of cars, you can tell enough pretty quickly just by looking and talking. And the whole object is to make a lot of stops, you know, not spend all day searching. You pretty much have to stop people for chicken-shit stuff but there's always a vehicle code violation. In other words, you can't stop somebody for no reason, just if they look dirty. But that doesn't take too much. Most cars have mechanical defects such as cracked windshields or taillight out or something. A lot of times we'll issue a fix-it type ticket, you know, take care of this, on our way to actually going our make the arrest. There's almost always some reason to stop somebody.

That was a real interesting part of my career on highway patrol, spending a couple years in the desert and just making drug arrest after drug arrest. But, you know, I got sick of it. When I get to the point where I think like I've learned about as much as I can, I move on and try to do something else. I'll probably be doing this major accident investigation stuff for quite a while just because there's so much to learn. I go to lots of classes when I'm not doing investigations. Like a couple weeks ago, I went to a automobile vs. pedestrian reconstruction class which is a whole week just on basically what to look for in those type of collisions. I learned what you can tell from where the body gets hit to where it lands and how fast the car was going based on that. As I have more stuff to learn, I'll probably stay in the job.

Sometimes I take it for granted how cool this work is. I think a lot of times, people in law enforcement go through so many divorces and stuff because it is such an enjoyable job and an adrenaline type-job, that you come to love your job more than you love other things. Most people go to a job and it sucks from nine to five and then they come home and their home life is more enjoyable, but this job is real good except it kinda hurts the social life thing because you're on call twenty-four hours a day, pretty much three hundred and sixty-five days a year, you don't get much of a break from it.

And then there is also the fact that obviously you're dealing with a lot of death and destruction. But, you know, it was really hard to look at all the wrecked bodies and stuff at the beginning, but over the years it gets easier and easier. I don't know if I've gotten hardened to it, or if I got more used to it. I just look at it pretty much as part of my job now. And I often say to myself, if that was my family dead, I'd want whoever was investigating it to do as thorough a job as possible just to put the whole thing at rest. So I try to do that. When I see the carnage, I just look at it as evidence, as giving me clues as to what happened in the accident.

Overall, I consider myself very fortunate. I've done a lot of stuff in my career and I've never had a dull moment. I've learned a lot, an awful lot. As far as work goes, I'm happy with what I've done. And I've gotten married and divorced and had three kids too! I've populated the earth. I definitely can't complain.

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