Police Chase Leaves 6 Patrol Cars Wrecked

Six Wrecked Patrol Cars, and the Story the Metal Told

They brought them in on hooks between five and seven in the morning, one after another, and I stood in the bay doorway with a cup of coffee going cold in my hand and counted them as they came. Six patrol cars. In twenty one years running this motor pool, I had never seen six in one night, and I had certainly never seen six from one pursuit.

My name is Glenna Boyer and I am the fleet supervisor for our patrol district. That means I am not a trooper, I have never made a stop in my life, and most of the public has no idea my job exists. I am the person who receives what is left of a vehicle after everyone else is done having an opinion about it.

Here is something people do not know about wrecked cars. They are honest. A car does not have a version of events, it does not have a union representative, it does not have a bad night it is trying to explain, and it does not get defensive when you ask it a question. It has paint transfer, crush patterns, and tire marks, and those things do not change depending on who is asking.

The story everyone was telling by that afternoon was very simple, and it was already on the news. A man had led troopers on a pursuit and had wrecked six patrol cars in the process. That was the sentence. That was the headline in four different places and it was what the department said in its statement, and it was not true.

I knew it was not true by about ten thirty that morning, before I had finished the intake photos on the fourth vehicle, and it took me another eleven weeks to get anybody to look at what I had.

Let me tell you what I actually do when a vehicle comes in. I photograph everything before I touch it. Every panel, every angle, undercarriage, wheel wells. I log the damage in a system that was designed in the nineties for tracking repair costs, and that is the important detail in this whole story, so hold onto it.

That system exists to answer one question, which is how much will this cost to fix. It was never designed to answer the question of what happened. Nobody reads it except me, the parts vendor, and a woman in the county finance office who has never seen a wrecked car in her life.

The first vehicle in was Ro Hasko's. Ro is a twenty six year veteran and his car had a caved in front left quarter, which is exactly what you would expect if he had made contact with the fleeing vehicle. Consistent with the story. I logged it and moved on.

The second and third came in together and that is where it stopped making sense. Two units with matching damage. Not similar. Matching. Rear quarter of one, front bumper and hood of the other, and the paint transfer on both was the same shade of white that every car in our fleet is painted.

That is not a suspect vehicle. A gray sedan does not leave white patrol car paint on a patrol car. Those two units hit each other.

The fourth had almost no impact damage at all and a completely destroyed suspension on the right side, which is what happens when a car leaves the pavement at speed and goes through a ditch. The fifth had gone into a guardrail nose first, and there was no transfer paint on it from any other vehicle.

The sixth was Micah Steed's. Micah is twenty four and had been on the road for about seven months at that point. His car had guardrail damage down the entire passenger side, front to back, which is a very specific pattern that tells you the car was traveling roughly parallel to the barrier when it made contact.

So here is what the metal said, on the first morning, before anybody had asked me anything.

Exactly one of those six vehicles had made contact with the vehicle they were chasing. One. Ro's. Two of them hit each other. One went off the road on its own. Two went into barriers, and at least one of those was avoiding the pileup that the other cars had created behind the suspect.

The man they were chasing did not wreck six patrol cars. The pursuit wrecked itself.

I need to be very clear about something before I go further, because I have had this conversation with people who assume I am building an argument I am not building. Colton Reape ran from a lawful traffic stop at speeds that endangered everybody on that road. He had a warrant, he made his own choices, and he is responsible for them. He is serving time and I think that is correct.

What I am telling you is that the specific claim, the one that made the headline, the one that gets repeated every time these stories run, was manufactured out of an assumption. Six cars were damaged during a pursuit, therefore he damaged six cars. Nobody checked. The metal was sitting in my bay the entire time and nobody checked.

The reason nobody checked is not a conspiracy, and I want to be careful with that too. It is that damage assessment lives in maintenance, and maintenance is a cost center, and cost centers are read by finance people. Crash reconstruction lives in a completely different building and only gets activated for serious injuries or fatalities.

Nobody was seriously hurt that night. Which meant that six vehicles' worth of physical evidence about how a pursuit had actually unfolded went into a repair tracking system, and the safety review went ahead using dashcam video and trooper statements, and those two things never touched each other at any point in the process.

That is the real story here, and it is not exciting, and it is the reason I eventually wrote all of this down.

I raised it, incidentally. Three years earlier. I had noticed that our multi unit pursuits were producing a specific pattern of unit to unit collisions, and I had written it up, and I had submitted it, and it had been filed. Correctly filed. In maintenance, where it belonged, because that is what I am and that is what my reports are.

Nobody in the safety chain ever read it, because why would they. It was a fleet document about repair costs. It had a line item for bumper covers in it. It never occurred to me at the time to send it anywhere else, and it never occurred to anyone else that a woman in coveralls with a clipboard was sitting on three years of pursuit data.

What forced the issue was Micah Steed.

They moved to discipline him. Failure to maintain control of a police vehicle. The proposed finding was that he had lost control and struck a guardrail during a pursuit, causing significant damage to department property, and that finding was going to sit in his file for the rest of his career.

Micah is a quiet kid. He did not fight it. He came into my bay about a week after the pursuit to sign something about the vehicle and he was so obviously miserable that I asked him what had happened, and he told me he did not really know, that it had all been very fast, and that if they said he lost control then he probably lost control.

That sentence bothered me for two days.

So I went back to the photographs. And then I went out to the actual stretch of road, on my own time, on a Saturday, with a tape measure and a camera, because I have been doing this long enough to know what to look for even though it is not officially my job.

The guardrail damage on Micah's car ran front to back down the passenger side in a long continuous scrape. That is a car that was already traveling nearly parallel to the barrier when it contacted it. A car that loses control and strikes a guardrail hits it at an angle and the damage is concentrated, usually with a deformation point.

His car did not do that. His car was steered into that guardrail, deliberately, at a shallow angle, which is the maneuver you make when you have decided that scraping a barrier is the least bad option available to you.

Then I found the scuff marks in the roadway, which had not been photographed by anyone because there was no reconstruction opened, and which had mostly weathered away by the time I got there, and which I photographed anyway.

Here is what happened, and it took Bettina Klose, our reconstruction analyst, about four hours to confirm once somebody finally handed her the material.

Four units were stacked up behind the suspect on a two lane stretch. Two of them came together. Those two spun and blocked most of the roadway. Micah came around the curve into that, and there was a civilian vehicle stopped in the median, a family who had pulled over when they saw the lights coming.

He had two options in roughly a second and a half. He could take the gap on the left, which would have put him into the median and possibly into the family. Or he could put his own car into the guardrail on the right and let the barrier take the energy.

He picked the guardrail.

The kid made the single best decision anybody made that night, and the department was three weeks from putting a failure to maintain control finding in his file for it, because nobody had connected a maintenance photograph to a disciplinary process.

I took everything to Lieutenant Prosper Kean, who is a reasonable man in a difficult position, and his first reaction was not what I hoped for. He told me, correctly, that I am not a crash reconstructionist and that fleet damage assessments are not evidence in a disciplinary proceeding.

He was right about all of that. And he also, to his credit, walked it over to Bettina himself the following morning instead of letting it die, and he did that knowing exactly what it was going to open up.

Because once you establish that Micah did not lose control, you have also established that four other units created a hazard in the roadway. And once you establish that, somebody has to ask why four units were stacked on a two lane road behind one fleeing sedan in the first place.

The answer to that question is culture, and everybody in that building already knew it.

Nobody wants to be the unit that stays back. Nobody wants to be the one who is not there when it ends. There is no rule that says every available car should join a pursuit, and there was no order given that night for four units to converge, and they converged anyway, because that is what everybody does and always has.

That is the part that does not fit in a headline. There was no villain in the department. Ro Hasko is a good trooper. The two units that collided are both good troopers. Nobody did anything malicious and nobody broke a written rule, and six vehicles were destroyed anyway, and a twenty four year old nearly ate a career ending finding for making the right call.

The review changed the pursuit policy. There is now a hard cap on the number of units that may join a pursuit without explicit supervisory authorization, and there is a requirement that additional units stay back at a defined distance rather than closing.

They also, and this is the one I actually care about, connected the fleet damage system to the safety review process. It took eleven months and a software vendor and an amount of money that would embarrass you. Now when a vehicle comes into my bay from a pursuit, my intake photographs and my damage log go into the safety file automatically.

Micah's finding was withdrawn. He is still on the road. He does not talk about it and I do not bring it up, but he brings me coffee about once a month, which is a young man's way of saying something he cannot say.

Colton Reape pled to what he actually did, which was fleeing and eluding, reckless driving, and the underlying warrant. What he did not plead to, because it was not true, was destroying six patrol cars, and the corrected number in the final report is one.

The cost, incidentally, was just under four hundred thousand dollars for the six units, which was most of our replacement budget for that fiscal year. That number went to the county and the county went to the newspaper and the newspaper wrote about the man who cost taxpayers four hundred thousand dollars.

The correction ran eleven weeks later in a much smaller font.

Here is what I have taken from twenty one years of receiving other people's worst nights on a tow hook.

The evidence in almost every one of these situations already exists somewhere. It is very rarely hidden. It is in the wrong department, in a system designed for a different purpose, being read by somebody who is not looking for it, and that is functionally the same as being hidden.

And the story that gets told first is almost never revisited. Six patrol cars wrecked by a fleeing driver is a clean sentence. One patrol car damaged by a fleeing driver and five damaged by the response to him is a complicated sentence, and complicated sentences do not travel.

I am not the hero of this. I nearly did not say anything. I had already filed my report three years earlier and been ignored, and there is a very comfortable place a person can settle into where they have technically done their part. What got me out of that chair was a twenty four year old who assumed that if they said he lost control, he probably lost control.

Do not assume that. Not about yourself, and not about the story you are being handed.

The footage of that pursuit is below. Watch it if you want to. Just know that the video shows you six cars in a line, and it does not show you which one of them touched him, and for eleven weeks nobody thought to ask.