By Katie Kennedy
The Baton Rouge Advocate
Anne Boussert remembers her son as a brilliant man who graduated from LSU with a perfect 4.0 GPA before heading west to the University of California at Berkeley to pursue a doctorate in chemistry.
Benjamin Boussert had turned down Harvard and MIT to attend Berkeley, his mother said. The 27-year-old Baton Rouge native had just completed his doctorate and planned to go into public policy, advising legislators on issues related to environment, medicine and energy.
Boussert’s promising life was cut short on July 16, 2005, when he and two other UC Berkley graduate students died in a fiery freeway crash.
Police suspected two other motorists were driving recklessly and sideswiped a big rig.
The rig lost control, crashed through the center divider and burst into flames.
Benjamin Boussert’s car collided with the truck. He and his two friends died in the flames.
Though police thought the drivers of the two cars were racing at the time of the accident, they lacked the evidence to prove it.
“Any witnesses who have any information about this traffic collision, we want to talk to,” California Highway Patrol spokesman Officer Trenton Cross said at a news conference in August 2005. “We have had many witnesses come in, but we feel we have not heard from everyone.”
Cross said, “Some of the pieces of this tragic accident are still missing.”
The investigation stalled for more than three years before the missing link came from an unexpected source.
Researchers at UC Berkeley were studying traffic density on the same freeway where Boussert’s accident occurred.
The magnetic sensors used for the study happened to capture the speed of the two vehicles at the time of the crash.
The drivers were traveling at least 100 mph.
While the California Highway Patrol experienced a lucky break in the Boussert accident, most traffic investigations do not benefit from such high-tech help.
Louisiana State Police use physical evidence and experience when investigating traffic accidents, said Trooper 1st Class Russell Graham, Troop A spokesman.
All troopers undergo 40 hours of training at the State Police Academy. Graham said the main components of investigating a scene are damage to the vehicles, and yaw marks, or markings made by the tires, on the road.
Traffic accident investigation is one of the main duties of State Police, Graham said.
Troopers rarely rely on witness testimony, he said. That is used mostly to substantiate what troopers already suspect.
Graham said Troop A also has at least eight troopers who have taken an extensive, nine-week course in traffic accident reconstruction.
They are brought in when on-scene evidence isn’t enough to determine what happened.
These “crash reconstructionists” use land-surveying equipment to take measurements at the scene. That information is downloaded into a crash zone software program to reproduce an exact-scale diagram of the scene for investigators to study. Graham said traffic reconstructionists work the scene of every fatal accident in Louisiana and some serious-injury wrecks.
Lt. Craig Jewell, a traffic reconstructionist with State Police, said judges rely heavily on the information troopers gather at the scene.
In his 20 years of police work, Jewell said, he’s seen at least 100 people convicted of vehicular homicide.
A California judge recently sentenced each of the two drivers who caused the crash that killed Boussert to 8½ years in prison.
Anne Boussert said the sentences were of little comfort to her and her family.
They all feel “a profound sadness that will never go away,” she said.
“The drivers will be in prison,” Boussert said, “but Benjamin and his two friends have lost very promising lives.”
Copyright 2010 Capital City Press