By Richard Weir
Boston Herald
An alleged boozy, wrong-way driver’s crash into a state police cruiser early yesterday morning marked the 23rd time in the past year and a half that a driver charged with OUI has been nabbed for hitting a state police vehicle - an alarming statistic that has state police brass fired up.
‘Enough is enough,’ said Lt. Colonel Tim Alben, commander of the Massachusetts State Police division of field services.
‘We are tired of our people being killed and maimed while they are out there doing their job. This isn’t what we pay people to do. We don’t pay them to get killed or hurt in accidents like this by impaired drivers.’
The 12:13 a.m. crash in Dorchester during which the driver allegedly tried to flee comes less than five days after a trooper suffered a fractured leg when a hit-and-run driver plowed into him in a Mass. Pike tunnel in South Boston.
Since Jan. 1, 2010, 45 state troopers have been struck and injured, either while in their cruisers or on foot, by out-of-control drivers. More than half of those accidents involved drivers impaired by alcohol.
One crash claimed the life of Sgt. Douglas Weddleton, who was killed last June in Mansfield while he was on a traffic detail.
Surprisingly, the rising number of drivers striking state police troopers comes at a time when the state’s and nation’s roadways are actually becoming safer.
According to data from the National Traffic Safety Administration, traffic deaths in Massachusetts dropped 24 percent from 1994 to 2009, falling from 440 to 334 fatalities. Nationwide, deaths have declined by 17 percent in that same period, from 40,716 to 33,808.
‘We see this frequency of impaired drivers hitting our troopers while they are out on patrol at the same time we see fatalities dropping,’ said Alben, who is in charge of all uniformed state police operations. ‘It’s a real conundrum to figure out what’s at the root cause of this. . . . It’s hard to fathom that this is going on.’
Alben said it’s not for a lack of enforcement. With the start of the warm weather, state police have ramped up the number of sobriety checkpoints and are in full swing for the Memorial Day weekend.
But at 12:13 a.m. yesterday, Cara Della Barba, 28, of Weymouth drove a 1998 Nissan Maxima the wrong way on Morrissey Boulevard, ‘steered toward the cruiser’ and crashed into its left fender - despite Trooper Brian Quigley flashing his emergency lights in an effort to avoid the collision with the oncoming car, police said.
‘The operator of the suspect vehicle then drove over the divider island and tried to escape, but due to extensive damage to the vehicle’s transmission, the operator was forced to stop,’ state police spokesman David Procopio said in a statement.
Procopio said Quigley, who was on routine patrol and heading northbound on Morrissey Boulevard near Freeport Street in a semi-marked cruiser when he was struck by the southbound car, was taken by ambulance to Boston Medical Center. He was treated there for a lower body injury and released, returning to his barracks to write his report on the incident.
Della Barba failed a field sobriety test and was charged with OUI liquor, wrong-way operation, negligent operation of a motor vehicle, leaving the scene of a person with injury in an accident and marked lanes violation.
She was released from police custody on $5,050 bail.
A relative who answered the phone at her Weymouth home hung up on a reporter and no one answered her door.