Lending a Hand - Traffic Accident

For a little over four years, I worked with the Traffic Accident Investigation Squad that covered the larger Brisbane Metropolitan area. Our role was only to attend fatal traffic incidents and those where dangerous driving or criminal negligence was concerned.

It was a tough job spending our working days watching people kill each other or themselves on our roads. It was especially difficult when victims were young children and those whose deaths were preventable had an iota of common sense prevailed.

While working, we didn't have time to think about the deceased and broken. We had to do the work measuring the road, drawing a map, photographing the vehicles and interviewing witnesses. 

Afterwards, the reality that someone's life had ended and that their loved ones would be heartbroken and never see them again would come into our thoughts. It was a policing task wherein we were dealing with largely lovely people (the families) and not the usual misfits we'd deal with in other areas of policing. The criminals, wife bashers, sex offenders.

All of us in the section drank too much and sometimes we used humour to get us through the day as shown in this photograph of a very old Holden sedan in which a young person was killed. He let his expectations exceed his ability when cornering and rolled the vehicle. I took numerous photos of the scene, but this one attracted my attention. I thought there was a certain irony in it.

We worked in teams of two and one week we had a young police cadet assigned to us for training. I guess he would have been 16-17 years old and keen about getting experience in traffic accident investigation.

My colleague and I were on a 7 am to 3 pm shift and just after 8 am we received a call from Police Operations that a fatal had occurred. The boss asked us to take the cadet with us, which we did.

We hopped into our F100 Ford truck commonly known as the "Death Mobile" and headed to the scene. A couple of local police was in attendance directing traffic around the scene and it appeared that a guy on a motorcycle had overtaken and hadn't seen (or perhaps thought he could beat) a cement truck coming the opposite way.

Unfortunately for him, he had hit the side of the truck and the scoop had taken off his right arm and some part of the truck had smacked into the right side of his helmet.

The body was lying on the roadway with what was left of his helmet intact and he obviously had a missing arm. 

While I asked the cadet to hold the end of a tape measure, my colleague walked up and down the road looking for the arm. After he found it, he covered it with a piece of rag and came over to us and said to the cadet, "Can I give you a hand?" and passed the limb to the cadet.

He almost passed out. After telling us it wasn't funny and calling my colleague a ghoul, he did what we asked and placed the arm with the body which by now had been covered. He was visibly shaken for a while as he hadn't seen a dead body before, let alone one with bloodied injuries and an arm savagely pulled from its socket. My colleague and I thought it was a great joked but after a short laugh, got back to work.

After we had finished up at the scene, on the trip back to the office, we talked to him about how it was necessary to have some diversion strategies, including humour to survive.

We made sure he helped follow up with several witness interviews, and attended the autopsy of the deceased.

When he left our office and returned to the Police Academy, he assured us he had gained a lot from us and appreciated the experience.

Another day of policing.

Robin