By Uniform Stories
This is a guest post by retired Sgt. Donald Gill of the Puyallup Police Department in Washington State. He is the author of “Small Town Cops.” Check out his Facebook page here.
Summer had invaded my small town. I was working graveyard shifts, alone, doing yet another bar check on one of the eight bars.
I had just entered the Club Tavern in downtown Sumner and made my way through the crowd, working them as I usually did, and saw Luke, a heavy equipment operator I sometimes made small talk with along Main Street when I walked the downtown area.
In the last 6 months, he had visited the bar nearly every night, sitting alone and drinking beer till he could barely walk, then staggering out the back door. Each time I entered the bar, Luke would look at me and when I returned the look, he would look down. I would catch him looking at me again, and again he would always look down. I never asked him why he was drinking so heavily but I would listen if he ever wanted to talk.
I spoke briefly to the bartender and passed behind Luke when he whirled in his bar stool, grabbed my left arm and pulled me towards him.
“It was me,” he said. “It was me that left the footprints in the snow that night.”
“I don’t understand what you’re telling me,” I responded.
“The car, the one upside down along the freeway near the Orting highway overpass, the one with the girl inside,” he said. “Those were my footprints you found in the snow that night, remember?”
Then it hit me. I stepped up to the bar, grabbed a stool and sat next to Luke and began reliving that night.
Dispatch had called me and asked that I check for a possible accident on highway 410, near the Orting highway overpass. I recall hearing the time, 0232hrs. The January night was bitterly cold. Rain had turned to snow and the wind blew. The roads were slick and the ditches full of near-frozen runoff.
A male citizen had called and said there was a car flipped over on its roof in a ditch and police needed to check on it. The caller hung up without giving his name. As I arrived, I found a single car, flipped upside down in a wide ditch full of freezing water. Not only had it flipped, it had spun and was now facing oncoming traffic.
I notified dispatch that I had arrived and to contact state patrol. This would be their report for the taking. As I approached, I used my large flashlight and noticed footprints in the snow leading away from the car. The prints were larger, a man’s, I figured. I waded into the water and to the passenger side of the car where the edge of the ditch had yet to fill with water and saw more snow, more footprints.
My first thoughts were that the driver had gotten out of the wreck and walked away. I knelt in the snow and peered into the car with my flashlight. At first, I saw nothing, but slowly I made out clothing. ‘Laundry’ was my first thought, but then I saw a glint of a small human arm afloat in the water that filled the car.
I grabbed my radio and shouted “I have one person in the car, appears to be pinned upside down, head in the water. Send me a tow and fire department immediately!”
I figured a tow truck would be able to lift the car if I couldn’t free the person. With that, I made a little toss of my radio to the bottom of the car that was facing skyward into the snow. I grabbed the door latch, but it wouldn’t open. I swung wildly at the window, shattering it with my flashlight.
With a quick raking motion, I cleared the remainder of the glass from the window opening and I dove headfirst into the cab of the car and saw the girl inside. She was seat belted into the car, most of her lower body was above the runoff water, but her head and upper shoulders dangled in the water.
I forced myself under her head and shoulders and pushed her head up towards the floor of the car, frantically trying to get her head out of the water. It worked, but I was using a huge amount of force. I reached down, fumbling for my ever-present boot knife, bringing my right boot ever so closely to my reaching left hand.
With a quick flip of the snap, the double-edge, razor shape knife cleared my boot. With a frantic swipe of the knife, I cut the seatbelt holding the girl upside down and she dropped full weight onto me. Her head and shoulders cleared the water, but I now saw the flaw in my plan — I was pinned under her dead weight, under the water, holding my breath.
I had experienced this before as a lifeguard at the high school, so I was able to keep my wits about me. I reached my right hand wildly up, looked for the steering wheel column and found it. I grasped the steering column and in a huge effort pulled my head from the water and with my left hand pushed the girl off me towards the passenger door and the open window.
We both had our heads above water now, but only I was breathing. I worked my way till I was on top of the girl, all the while keeping her head above water. I took a moment and proceeded to breathe three breaths into her mouth. I began wiggling in reverse and pausing only moments to blast more breaths into her mouth.
Then I heard words behind me, outside the car, the voice of a man I had known as a small boy. It was Les, a tow truck driver/owner who had arrived ahead of fire department aid and state patrol. Not surprising if you knew Les.
“I’m going to pull you out by your boots; do you have a hold of her?” Les asked.
“Yes!” I screamed. “Pull me out!”
And with that, Les grabbed my boots and dragged me and the girl out of the car, onto the snow. Les and I worked frantically on her. He compressed her chest and I desperately tried to breathe life into her as snow fell on us and wind whirled about our pile of humanity. Minutes passed by and the fire department arrived, followed by an ambulance. Our job was finished and the girl was now in their capable hands.
The cold and wet hit me, and I began shivering uncontrollably. Les was suffering also. We just looked at each other, an old tow truck driver and a kid cop.
“Yes, I remember that night Luke, terrible night,” I said.
“I didn’t see her in the car when I checked, didn’t see anything,” he continued. “I walked all around that car and believed no one was in it.”
Then Luke said something that explained why he was drinking himself into alcoholism for the last six months. “I let her drown in that car that night,” he whispered. “I walked away and let her drown.”
“Luke, look at me,” I said. “She didn’t drown, she died of a broken neck, and she was gone when you walked around that wreck that night.”
“Are you sure”? He asked. “The paper said she drowned.”
“They had it wrong. I even thought she had drowned. I wrote in my police report that I believed she had drowned, but an autopsy later found she had died from a broken neck due to the whiplash of the crash.”
Luke’s eyes filled with water, “Are you sure, officer?” he asked.
“Yes, the local newspaper read my report and reported it that way,” I told him.
Luke searched me, wanting to believe.
“There was nothing you or I could have done. Her fate was out of our hands,” I said. Luke pushed his beer from in front of him, pulled out a $20 dollar bill and placed it under the half-drank glass of beer. I stood as he did and we shook hands. Luke walked out of the back of the bar that night. I never found him in a bar again drinking.
I lied to him that night. I wasn’t about to let that traffic fatality claim yet another life. I may not have been able to save that girl that night but damn it, I wasn’t going to let Luke drink himself to death over it either.
