It’s November. I’m working the afternoon shift on the Santa Fe Springs’ Interstate 605 beat. It is dark by five o’clock. I’ve had a very busy day with crashes, and I am behind in completing my reports.
To catch up, I back into the corner of a closed gas station by the exit/entrance to the freeway. This allows me to respond quickly if something else goes down, which I am hoping upon hope it won’t.
I flip on the dashboard gooseneck light and commence writing. I want to get as much done as I can, because I’m still hoping to get off work by the end of the shift at 10:15 PM.
At 9:00 PM, I look at my watch. It’s coffee time. I decide to skip coffee—What? A highway patrolman skipping coffee? Yes, it does happen—in the interest of getting the paperwork done so I can get off on time. I resume writing.
At 9:20 PM, a car exits the freeway at the ramp. I happen to be looking up at the time, pondering a thought to write. The car stops for the green light, and still on the green starts up and drives straight across the intersection at a diagonal into the gas station. It stops opposite my side of the unit about twenty feet away, driver’s door to driver’s door.
The driver leans into his open window and says, “Eshscuse me, offishshir. Caann you tell me howww to get to the Shandago Freeewayy?”
So much for report catch-up and getting off on time.
Judging from the evidence, because there is no complete witness, an elderly man, alone in his vehicle, is driving a minibus uphill on a narrow, steepish, two-lane mountain road when the vehicle stops running for reasons unknown. Again, judging from the evidence, the minibus stops in the single lane and the driver puts the parking brake on. He then gets out, releases the parking brake, and runs back to the rear of his vehicle to push it uphill a short distance into a dirt turn-out area. At that moment, a witness to the last event rounds the corner in his car some distance downhill from the minibus’s location. The witness sees the minibus roll backwards, knocking down its former driver and running over him, and continuing to roll backward into a small ditch and cut bank on the left edge of the roadway.
The man is dead when the witness reaches the scene.
The ironic thing to note, and it is patently obvious at the scene, is all the driver had to do is sit in the driver’s seat, and using the regular hydraulic unpowered foot brake, slowly roll backwards to a very adequate stopping place downhill and behind him on the dirt shoulder.
Why then did the man attempt to push it uphill to get it off the roadway?
I leave the office following afternoon shift briefing on this nice spring day, and head out for my beat, the state highway that connects the valley to the Pacific coastline. To get to my beat, I take the 99 Freeway.
And that’s where I am when I drive by a picnic.
In the grassy center median.
With a family of four.
All are seated on folding chairs at a card table, complete with a white table cloth.
Besides craning my neck almost to the breaking point looking back over my left shoulder when I drive by the picnickers, not believing what I am seeing, I whip my head and neck back the other way looking for a camera truck. Especially, one that is hiding a TV network’s secret camera. Surely, this is a trick someone is playing on the beat highway patrolman. Surely.
Nope. Surely, not.
Overshooting the picnickers, I go to the next ramp lickety-split, exit, and then zip back on the northbound side to the meals-near-wheels crew.
I stop in the center median on the other side of the oleanders from the group.
I see a father and mother of forty or so, and a son and daughter of the fifteen-sixteen age group. All are eating lunch as a nice, cozy family group.
Their van is parked in the median with them. Actually, they are somewhat adjacent to the van, trying to get shade from the western sun.
“Hi there,” I say, and no more, leaving the talking to the family’s leader.
“Hi, officer,” the father says, and no more, parrying my opening move.
“Will you folks be much longer? You’re not suppose to stop in the median, or on the freeway, unless it’s an emergency.” I fill in, “This is a very dangerous place for you to have lunch. You are between the two fastest lanes of traffic on the freeway with no safe place to seek refuge if you have to flee because of an out of control vehicle.”
“Well, we needed to eat lunch,” the father says, “but there is no shoulder. There is only an embankment. This is the only place we found that is almost level where we could set up the table and chairs. And over here, we’re away from the trucks.”
Hard to argue with the logic.
I ask them if they can close up right then, and move off the freeway to finish lunch in a parking lot, or the like. The father says they are done. In short order, Mom clears the table items into a cardboard box, Dad folds up the table and chairs and puts them in the van, and the whole group embarks into the van to motor on down the southbound freeway to I don’t know where.
I guess when you’re hungry, you’re hungry, and like me, any port in a storm.
