By Joseph A. Slobodzian
Philadelphia Inquirer
PHILADELPHIA — The howl of a revving automobile engine. A speeding car appearing suddenly about 15 feet away. A pair of hands turning the steering wheel toward him. The sickening moment of impact.
In a terse, edgy monotone, police officer Joseph Glovacz yesterday told a Philadelphia jury of the 35 seconds during which his life almost ended.
“I felt and heard the bones in my leg snapping, and the skin of the left side of my right leg broke open,” Glovacz, 45, testified during the first day of the criminal trial of driver Kendall Hudson.
Hudson, 20, is charged with attempted murder, assault and related charges in the Feb. 21, 2007, incident in Northern Liberties, which prosecutors say was an attempt to disrupt the arrest of his twin brother, Lydell.
Assistant District Attorney Bridget Kirn told the Common Pleas Court jury in her opening statement that Hudson aimed his Dodge Intrepid at Glovacz and three other officers on the scene because of Lydell Hudson’s arrest.
“He had his foot on the gas pedal and anger in his heart,” Kirn said, adding that prosecution witnesses will prove Hudson intended to kill the officers.
Defense lawyer Ronald A. Smith told the jury that Hudson would testify in his own defense, and he maintained that the incident was an accident, not attempted murder.
“He did not intentionally set out to murder four people and came up one step short - at age 18,” Smith said. “This was what we call an accident . . . an unfortunate accident in which good officers were severely hurt.”
Glovacz, a 12-year police veteran, was a narcotics officer in the 26th Police District. He was in plainclothes and on the street with partner Joseph Ruff about 11 a.m., Feb. 21, 2007.
It was a sunny and unusually warm winter morning, the officer recalled, and the sun was turning the remnants of an earlier snowfall into mushy piles of snow and puddles of water.
It was also quiet, so quiet, Glovacz testified, that he and Ruff were driving back to the 26th District to talk with their sergeant about staking out another part of Northern Liberties.
The police radio interrupted the trip, telling the officers about a foot pursuit nearby at Third and Wildey Streets, Glovacz said. By the time they arrived, he continued, there was already a group of officers on the scene. Lydell Hudson - who was ultimately not charged - was handcuffed and in the rear of a patrol car parked on Wildey, just east of Orianna Street.
Glovacz said he was standing on the southeast corner of Orianna and Wildey with Ruff and two other officers when he heard the revving engine of the approaching car.
When the crash was over, Kirn said, Glovacz was on the ground near the car, his right leg mangled and bloody. (Another officer, Joseph Goodwin, was struck and rolled off the hood - and would be out of work for three months.)
It took five operations, a 15-day hospital stay and 19 months of physical therapy before he returned to full duty in September, Glovacz said.
At Kirn’s direction, Glovacz stood, pulled up his right pant leg and pulled down the knee-high compression stocking that prevents swelling. From the right knee, a large scar curves to above the ankle, ending on the rear of the calf in a still-prominent bruise.
The bruise was an open wound for a full year, Glovacz explained, and the scar a relic of the titanium rod to which surgeons bonded the shards of his lower leg bones.
Glovacz is to return to the witness stand today for further questioning by Smith.
Smith, trying to buttress his accident defense, yesterday emphasized the slushy road conditions and also a part of Glovacz’s original statement to detectives, in which he said he tried to “step on the curb” to avoid Hudson’s car.
Despite that statement, Glovacz insisted he was on the sidewalk when struck. Crime scene photos showed the car came to a stop against a utility pole, the front passenger-side tire on the sidewalk.
Copyright 2009 Philadelphia Inquirer
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