Tragic accident.............

Chef --

As a SE at a tiny paper, I dealt with more than my share of these. Sorry you had to see that.

If you can take one positive from the experience, when the thoughts come into your head, try also to remember all the cops, nurses, volunteer firemen, etc. on the scene, there trying to help. They, like those on the news side, go out knowing they'll see things like that, and keep coming back because they all feel that in their own way, they're doing something good.

Human life is fragile, but human nature can be enduring. Won't make the pictures in your head go away, but it will help you sleep.

And like 3BF said, a six-pack of beer.

 

Long ago, covering cops one day when called out to follow up on accident along a highway frontage road.

Involved a pickup full of kids had been bumped by, I thnk, a semi, from behind. Truck was all smashed. Ambulances had been there. I kept wondering how this happened on frontage road. Traced backward from the truck, debris, toys, back to the highway. The accident had actually happened on the highway. Where the truck was was where it had stopped from the impact about maybe 70 yards away.

There had been like 2 or 3 kids in the cab with an adult driver, and another 4 or 5 in pickup bed. All I could picture walking back toward the truck were the kids flinging out of that truck bed as it bounced its way to the frontage road.

Reading the first post just brought that back to me.

 

I saw and caught wind of my first dead body around this time about 10 years ago. Everyone had gone home and I was sent out with our photographer to cover an apparent drowning, only the body had been in the water for about four days. It was just like Silence of the Lambs, the mouth was all stuffed up with leaves and sediment and whatnot, skin a mottled grayish-purple. I couldn't sleep for about two days.

 

Chef, getting it out is a good thing.

This just points out how dangerous it is to stop or walk by the side of an interstate. I don't know how troopers do it.

As a kid, I remember my Dad stopping to help after he saw a guy wrecked into a guardrail on a turn and the back of his car was sticking out into the freeway.

My dad parked down the road and we watched through the back window as he ran back to the car. We cringed every time a car came past. We could see my dad at the car and then couldn't anymore.

Next comes a semi who didn't see the car till too late and plowed into it. Glass and metal goes flying. We were all in shock but my dad came walking to us. He got the guy out just in time.

"What happened," we asked?

"Just some drunk idiot," he said.

Everyone was OK.

 

In Massachusetts, you are allowed to drive in the breakdown lanes during rush hours on a couple highways. Someone tragically got slaughtered a few years back when an out-of-towner (who missed the few signs noting this rule) was slammed into by someone doing 50 on Route 128. I can only imagine the scene.

I've covered a couple death scenes; thankfully, I've never seen a body. If I did, I might be out of the news side, permanently.

 

During my news-side days, had to cover a motorcycle vs. semi accident in which the rider's head ended up in a tree. Handled that. Did a car accident that involved two burned corpses. Handled that.

Then came the murder of a middle aged woman: Some neighborhood woman she had quarrels with - along with her two preteen sons - beat her to death with large tree branches as she left church. On Sunday morning. As the fellow parishoners watched. Not much was recognizable from her head.

That's what did it in for me.

Chef, the fact that you feel so shaken by something that happened to strangers says a lot about you. I know that's small solace, but you'd be surprised at how many would just shrug that off.

 

I'll add to that: Anybody who puts dogs in the bed of a pickup, ESPECIALLY unchained. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

 

I passed a truck on I-81 the other day that had a dog leashed to a fucking trailer hitch.

 

Was Clark Griswold at the wheel?

 

What's worse is when sports and news intersect in things like this, like an athlete getting in a car wreck. Man, just before the holidays too. Chef, hang in there.