Dad got the whole completed police report yesterday. My gosh, the pictures of the cars are AWFUL! Mangled. I wasn't sure if I wanted to look at the report when Dad first brought it home, but then found myself with some extra time before I had to pick up Hope from the hockey game. I was just going to peek and then ended up leafing through all of the pictures as big tears rolled down my cheeks. Poor boy! I hope you didn't feel any of that. Most of the reports said that you were unconscious in the car but still breathing.
I thought there would be statements from like Susie Fay, the chaplain and others, but that wasn't the case. The key people listed were John Meadows, Coach Katie, me and Dad, and a few other police officers. One witness account that is rattling me right now is one from someone who works at Tippins' who was coming into work on Wagner Rd. that morning. He said your car was in his lane and he swerved to the shoulder to get out of the way and then saw you hit the pick-up in his rear-view mirror. (He saw that others had stopped to help, so he continued on to work to call the police.) When he saw you in his lane, he said it looked like you were trying to pass someone, but that you never swerved back into your lane! What happened? I thought when I read his account that if you would've hit that car, maybe you would still be with us. When you continued past him though, that's when the pick-up was coming over the hill and didn't see you until it was too late. When asked, he said he didn't get a good look at you as the driver to be able to see what was going on. A word I remember him using in the report is that you were totally in his lane. Totally. I am sure I will read and re-read that report many times over. I might not look at the pictures that much though. Too painful.
Dad says that doesn't make sense with the trajectory of the accident, even if you had tried to swerve back into your lane because of the angle you hit the truck and the direction you bounced off. That makes me think it wasn't distracted driving either, because it seems like that would be seconds and this situation seems longer if you were in the wrong lane long enough to almost hit another car and then the witness said the truck was a few car lengths behind him.
This new information just blows my theory out of the water. I was going by the original police report before the investigation that looked like you just drifted over the center line gradually before hitting the pick-up truck. This sounds like you were way in that lane even before the truck came along. Dad wondered if you had some kind of medical episode, like an aneurysm or something (I cannot spell anymore! I will look that up later-I spelled it right!), but if that was the case, why wouldn't you have drifted more? Did you pass out? Black out? Fall asleep? What? Did something go wrong with car that you couldn't control? I will have to think on these things for quite a bit. Dad said he might ask the detective about it. It just doesn't make sense. It just opens up a whole new set of possibilities.
Part of this makes me feel better, to get some more information since the details have been pretty sketchy for the past FIVE months! That's a long time to wait for answers. I am still thinking about this, and if Susie Fay was behind you, I wonder if she saw you in the other lane. I also wonder why she won't respond to us or anything or be available to us on Facebook. I know she said she didn't see the accident happen and just came upon it after it happened, but she was still behind you at one point. I so appreciate all of the beautiful things she said about how she stayed with you and how she felt all the love in your car and felt that angels were surrounding you. I'm glad she was a nurse and a believer. Maybe she was an angel herself. I will have to let you know if we ever hear from her. I found it interesting too that she updated her profile pic the day of the accident, 8/20/2015. She is very mysterious in many ways.
Oh, Lord, please don't let me get pulled away into these details. There are things I want to know, but I don't want to regress in getting out of this pit of grief. Help me to find a good balance.
There are things that we can't know here-the injuries from the accident covered over anything that could have been going on with you physically beforehand. The car was so messed up that there is no way to tell if anything was going wrong with that beforehand. All these potential clues are hidden. Or protected. What are we being protected from? Information that wouldn't help us to know anyway? Information that won't bring you back.
That makes me remember too how there was no phone activity for almost all of 8/20/2015 which doesn't seem possible, according to the T-Mobile records anyway. I was relieved, but it was weird that there was no internet activity, texting or calling AT ALL. Another weird thing was the mistake made in the toxicology report where enough of a sample wasn't taken to give a reliable result. I know they found cannibis in your system but not enough to cause the accident, but that was because of the mistakes they made in getting the sample. Here are the many parts of the accident unaccounted for in a list: no passengers in either vehicle/no eyewitnesses of crash itself, only those who came after the crash happened, no reliable toxicology report, no phone records that show any phone activity, no way to know if you experienced any kind of black-out or medical episode prior to or causing the crash, no way to know if something mechanical went wrong with car prior to or causing the crash, and now this weird eyewitness who puts you in the wrong lane longer than we thought before the pick-up truck came over the hill. It's like any avenue that could explain something is blocked. It's like God covered everything up. Was he trying to protect you or us from more pain?
I just watched a video and read an article about the off-set crash and you had to be on the driver's side of the truck for you to hit how you did and bounce off the way that you did. The other witness' testimony doesn't match up with that if you were so far over in his lane. Even if you were swerving back into your lane, it would've hit differently because you would have been coming from another angle. Dang it boy! I know so certainly that you wouldn't have done any of those things on purpose. Were you trying to pass someone and you didn't get back over quick enough? But that doesn't line up either with what the person in the other lane said who swerved out of your way because why wouldn't you have tried to swerve out of their way?
Want to keep track of these abbreviations from off-set crash video: IIHS-Institute for Highway Safety, NHTSA-National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
I knew the minute I closed this out I would want to add to it-with the other car saying you were totally in their lane and they had to get over to avoid you hitting them, maybe that was the start of the "drift" to the other lane. "Totally" can mean a lot of different things (I have a sneaking feeling that Dad is going to track down the guy who works at Tippins'. I feel sorry for that guy! Dad still might talk to the detective about it again first).
I still had this open to update it. Carter just brought a friend of his up here with him to get money from me to go to Benito's. The kid's name is Drew Ausman and when he came in, Carter told me that his dad was behind you in the accident. Wow! That was a bombshell. All I could say was, "That's interesting." He's coming to Carter's bday party on Sunday, so I hope to meet the dad but I don't know if it would be a good time then to hear his story. It's just interesting that it came about when I had just asked you (and God) for some more answers/information about the accident. Praise God! Love you boy!
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