EP 28: Investigating the Scene of a Catastrophic Event

Welcome to the catastrophic comeback podcast with American Injury Lawyer Clark speaks, helping you find hope, purpose and joy after a catastrophic injury.

Hi, and welcome to another edition of catastrophic comeback today I'm very excited to have my guest, Jeff swagger on Jeff is a former law enforcement officer and is currently an investigator at Speex law firm. We're going to talk about investigations and in accidents and traffic accidents and in truck accidents and industrial accidents and that sort of thing. Jeff, thank you for being here. I'm happy to see you.

Thank Clark. I'm honored to be on your show today.

All right. Well, Jeff, let me first let's talk about in terms of investigations and all that. Can you tell me a little bit about your background and in that field in that area of professional work?

Sure. So I just retired from over 21 years old, the North Carolina State Highway Patrol officers master Trooper there and had a had a great career wasn't my first career choice. My first career choice was to be a firefighter. I was from the time I was five years of age, and blessed to be able to pursue that career and never let go of that dream. I was a firefighter for about seven years and then decided to take my second career choice and that was be a state trooper in North Carolina and went to patrol school graduated that and just had had a wonderful career.

Where did you Where did where did that career take place?

So my first duty station was in Statesville, North Carolina, Iredale County, and that was my initial duty station. I went through field training, there was a sign there for several years. And then I transferred over to the hickory area Catawba County, and I was stationed in Catawba, for the for the remainder of my career, and I had different roles as I progressed through those years.

So So did you did you investigate truck accidents and that sort of thing over what geographic area

I did so insightful, and also in Catawba. County. And then in the end, I was responsible for public information Media Relations for a 10 County area within our troop. And

you know, those 10 counties just covered most of the western part of the state,

it was kind of the foothills area of the state, from basically down just north of the Charlotte area to up into almost to the Virginia line. Wow.

So in terms of save, so you were involved in those investigations over the course of 21 years, I was involved in an accident, like, for example, for 21 years, that was something that you did on a relatively regular basis, it sounds like is to go, you come up on a scene, there's just been an accident. You know, you don't know how seriously people are hurt. But it's your job to get things under control. That what it was, what is your job at that at that at that stage?

So speaking from my perspective of a state trooper, and when a trooper arrives on scene, our first responsibility is the scene safe, you know that we need to close down the highway? Do we need to reroute traffic just to make the scene safe for ourselves for the victims of that crash? Also for the other first responders as well? So that's the first piece of it. You know, is there hazardous materials involved? What's What's the immediate danger to the responders and not have an ongoing situation? That's the first thing that we're thinking about and dealing with? And then the second is, are there any injured parties here? Who's injured? Is there have we identified all the injured folks in this crash? Is there anyone that we haven't seen or realized was injured yet? What medical attention do they need and and get them access to that provide medical attention ourselves and and also provide them access to further medical attention? Whether that's the local paramedics through the EMS system? Or do we need to call for a medical helicopter to come land at the scene to assist them?

So there's a lot going on when you're trying to assess an accident? Under those circumstances,

there is there's a, there's a it's a busy, it's a busy time. And so many times there'll be other first responders that have arrived on the scene before the law enforcement officer, the fire department or the rescue squad or paramedics. So we're interacting with them finding out exactly what the situation is that they know that we have so far. And once we've done those initial things, then we're then we switch to the investigative role. And one of the first things that I always look for was, Are there witnesses to the crash? Because the cars are going to remain there, and typically until we call a tow truck, some of the physical evidence is going to remain there for some amount of time. But witnesses they can Be gone very quickly, they think that the rescue squad is here, I did

my job. And I waited till the health people the safety people got here, I waited till the ambulance got here, the rescue squad or whatever. Now I'm gonna go on with my life and they might have a critical piece of evidence to figure out what happened. Is that right? Exactly.

So there's been many times where witnesses have been critical, just just establishing what happened. Just prior to that crash, what was going on with the vehicles? What did they see? What did they observe? So locating those witnesses was was critical to any investigation, because you're I mean, they do their, their good samaritan deed for the day, which is an event for them to experience as well. But then they think, Well, I'm gonna go on to work or school or store whatever they were involved in, and not realize what great information that they have that we could rely on as part of that initial investigation.

If they go is there any way to find them?

Many times, they, they are not able to be located, they don't leave their name. Somebody doesn't get some information about them, what, then it's just difficult to locate them. But many times I've shown up to a crash scene, and the witness has literally written their name and phone number down on a napkin. And what how great that was for me to be able to contact them and, and later as they go on about their day to be able to reach out and say, Hey, what understand you with this crash? What did you see? What did you hear? And that's been very helpful. So

then it becomes a matter of how thorough how diligent how, how motivated that your investigator is in terms of being able to locate those witnesses and, and track them down and, and get the evidence that's so critical in those cases? Oh, exactly. I

tempted to reach every witness that any any witness that was on the scene or maybe left some information that I could contact them later, because even though as an investigator, I have a good idea of what happened in the crash. And you know, I can look at the cars and look at the physical evidence and, and make that determination. But there just may always be that extra piece of information that that just could be very helpful in what what is the totality of the circumstances. So

let me ask you that. So I understand how important the witnesses are, that makes a lot of sense. I understand how important that evidence is. But when you walk up on a scene, or historically when you were in that job, and I guess even now when you walk up, if you were to walk up on a scene, you when you see it, you can you can kind of tell what happened or are not too much. What What's your perspective,

there is based on training and experience, there is a there's usually a quick synopsis that we start building in our minds as investigators like what what kind of happened here, I could, you know, if I get to give an example, a rear end collision, you know, someone stopped or slowed down and someone else Hit, hit that car in the in the rear end. And so that's a rear end collisions, unfortunately, a relatively common collision. But we just can never take just that little piece of information is for granted. Because there may be other things going on What if it was a what if it was a road rage incident, and the person in front of me slammed on the brakes, and calls that collision that that normally would not have occurred. So there's, there's just those pieces that you kind of form an opinion of what's going on. But you always have to be open to other possibilities. And extent until you've explored all those options, it's best not to just come to a firm conclusion yet. Well,

when you're so some things I imagined can probably complicate your investigation, your work, one of the things that I'm thinking is visibility is at night is a daytime traffic, whether those kinds of things are how much do those play a role in your investigation and and getting a good clear understanding of what happened? It's

always something that we that we noted on our reports and in our field notes about how, you know, what were the conditions at the time, was it raining was it was it drizzling rain, how much? How much was it pouring down rain? Had it been raining for several days had water ponding on the highway. So there's a lot of things that we just just made notes of that if we ever have to refer back to that if we can build into that case. Also,

I also wonder if if, if whether like if somebody calls me about so if I talk to somebody about a serious accident and since collision one of the things that runs through my mind is weather because my experience is that witnesses sometimes don't stick around as long if it's pouring down rain A tire tracks can be, can be washed away, if it's more, you know, tire impressions can be washed away if it's pouring down rain. Another example might be when, if people if someone moves their vehicles because, you know, from where they were originally, out of the out of the way, because of, you know, heavy traffic from a game, a concert and event, or just a normal flow of traffic, it's not eight or five o'clock in the afternoon. So what kinds of things are those things that you've run into as challenges and what have you done to overcome them,

we encourage folks to, I have encouraged them in the past to, you know, just snap pictures, if they if they're, if they are able to, and it's safe to do so first of all, their safety is number one. But if they're able to snap a picture of where their cars were in the highway, any of those picture of their car picture of the other vehicle involved. And then from that, we can start getting a snapshot of what happened right after that crash. And it's, that's very helpful for us as investigators to be able to see that, because many times you're right, people will move their vehicles. You know, North Carolina and other states do have laws that if no one's injured, you need to move your vehicle out of the highway to to reduce the chance of a secondary collision. So you know, we're bound by law to do that. But if it's safe to do so, hey, right, before we move those cars, snap a picture where they're sitting in the highway, what does it look like? And gives us a better viewpoint of what that looked like before the vehicles were moved to the shoulder of the highway or into a parking lot.

So from your perspective, the priorities would be safety's first, right? You got to make sure that we have whoever is around is as safe as they can be. Under the circumstances, we've called for whatever medical attention, medical treatment that we need, you know, you've checked on yourself and other paths, passengers and other people to see if they're okay. Or at least if they're not currently getting worse. And you've done what you could to protect human life. I guess the next priority past that would be preservation of evidence, including photographs, witness statements, that sort of thing. Is that fair? It is

it is, we're starting to look at once we've made sure the same was safe. And then we're looking for witnesses. And then now we're now we're on to the evidence piece of evidence on the roadway. tire impressions, as you mentioned earlier, many, many folks will refer to those as skid marks on the highway. And in law enforcement and law, we return refer to those as tire impressions on the highway or off the highway, through the grass, through a rock area where they're whatever that may look like. So that type of evidence because that that evidence is going to go away, after sometimes short amount of time or depending on the type of evidence it's going, it's going to be fading. And then so we're looking for that. And then now we've got the physical evidence that that we have the vehicles and that that's going to remain the same for for quite some time. So we've got that that's the next priority after that is looking at the vehicles. So

you mentioned some of the different types of evidence. One of the things that flows from that investigation is a collision report. And you've prepared collision reports

1000s. So so,

you know, one of the things that comes to my mind is I've seen so many collision reports. I've never prepared one, but I've seen them prepared by people that do the work that you do. And I've seen so many of them, usually I can tell I can look at a collision report within I don't know, 1015 seconds and tell, okay, does this case have value? Is there it can we can I recover a monetary settlement for the person who's come to see me about a case. And the reason is because of I've looked at so many of them over so long, that I can see things in them quickly that the numbers make sense, versus a person who might get an one record two wrecks in their lifetime. They can't see those same things I imagined. You can see lots of things from those same I mean, from those same reports. You mean Can you can you look at a report and just see things that you think that normal people probably who haven't done that for a living for so long can say can't see.

I'm confident that I can just like you, you've looked at, you know, multiple, you know, hundreds and hundreds and 1000s of reports to make that determination. And there is a lot of information in that report that To that the layperson just would not understand it doesn't jump out at you doesn't jump out it, doesn't it, there's a lot of coding involved, because of the way the reporting system is.

So, and they don't even give you the code when they give you the report. Is that right? Exactly.

So it's just, it's just numbers. There's driver information. There's some vehicle information, some infant insurance information. There'll be a diagram in North Carolina, you know, there's a diagram on the back of that report of the officers, you know, diagram of that crash. But that's all very, that's just the cursory information. And then outside of that, there's just a lot of coding. And that's that built in the report. There's some really good information in that coding, that that just needs to be deciphered and look through and that's, that's what, you know, a lot of light people would need help in that aspect. To be able to understand what did what did the officer actually say, what was his opinion of what occurred in this crash, and it goes beyond just having the name of the other driver.

Thank you for joining us, and we'll see you next time.

Welcome to the catastrophic comeback podcast with American Injury Lawyer Clark speaks, helping you find hope, purpose and joy after a catastrophic injury.

Hi, and welcome to another edition of catastrophic comeback today I'm very excited to have my guest, Jeff swagger on Jeff is a former law enforcement officer and is currently an investigator at Speex law firm. We're going to talk about investigations and in accidents and traffic accidents and in truck accidents and industrial accidents and that sort of thing. Jeff, thank you for being here. I'm happy to see you.

Thank Clark. I'm honored to be on your show today.

All right. Well, Jeff, let me first let's talk about in terms of investigations and all that. Can you tell me a little bit about your background and in that field in that area of professional work?

Sure. So I just retired from over 21 years old, the North Carolina State Highway Patrol officers master Trooper there and had a had a great career wasn't my first career choice. My first career choice was to be a firefighter. I was from the time I was five years of age, and blessed to be able to pursue that career and never let go of that dream. I was a firefighter for about seven years and then decided to take my second career choice and that was be a state trooper in North Carolina and went to patrol school graduated that and just had had a wonderful career.

Where did you Where did where did that career take place?

So my first duty station was in Statesville, North Carolina, Iredale County, and that was my initial duty station. I went through field training, there was a sign there for several years. And then I transferred over to the hickory area Catawba County, and I was stationed in Catawba, for the for the remainder of my career, and I had different roles as I progressed through those years.

So So did you did you investigate truck accidents and that sort of thing over what geographic area

I did so insightful, and also in Catawba. County. And then in the end, I was responsible for public information Media Relations for a 10 County area within our troop. And

you know, those 10 counties just covered most of the western part of the state,

it was kind of the foothills area of the state, from basically down just north of the Charlotte area to up into almost to the Virginia line. Wow.

So in terms of save, so you were involved in those investigations over the course of 21 years, I was involved in an accident, like, for example, for 21 years, that was something that you did on a relatively regular basis, it sounds like is to go, you come up on a scene, there's just been an accident. You know, you don't know how seriously people are hurt. But it's your job to get things under control. That what it was, what is your job at that at that at that stage?

So speaking from my perspective of a state trooper, and when a trooper arrives on scene, our first responsibility is the scene safe, you know that we need to close down the highway? Do we need to reroute traffic just to make the scene safe for ourselves for the victims of that crash? Also for the other first responders as well? So that's the first piece of it. You know, is there hazardous materials involved? What's What's the immediate danger to the responders and not have an ongoing situation? That's the first thing that we're thinking about and dealing with? And then the second is, are there any injured parties here? Who's injured? Is there have we identified all the injured folks in this crash? Is there anyone that we haven't seen or realized was injured yet? What medical attention do they need and and get them access to that provide medical attention ourselves and and also provide them access to further medical attention? Whether that's the local paramedics through the EMS system? Or do we need to call for a medical helicopter to come land at the scene to assist them?

So there's a lot going on when you're trying to assess an accident? Under those circumstances,

there is there's a, there's a it's a busy, it's a busy time. And so many times there'll be other first responders that have arrived on the scene before the law enforcement officer, the fire department or the rescue squad or paramedics. So we're interacting with them finding out exactly what the situation is that they know that we have so far. And once we've done those initial things, then we're then we switch to the investigative role. And one of the first things that I always look for was, Are there witnesses to the crash? Because the cars are going to remain there, and typically until we call a tow truck, some of the physical evidence is going to remain there for some amount of time. But witnesses they can Be gone very quickly, they think that the rescue squad is here, I did

my job. And I waited till the health people the safety people got here, I waited till the ambulance got here, the rescue squad or whatever. Now I'm gonna go on with my life and they might have a critical piece of evidence to figure out what happened. Is that right? Exactly.

So there's been many times where witnesses have been critical, just just establishing what happened. Just prior to that crash, what was going on with the vehicles? What did they see? What did they observe? So locating those witnesses was was critical to any investigation, because you're I mean, they do their, their good samaritan deed for the day, which is an event for them to experience as well. But then they think, Well, I'm gonna go on to work or school or store whatever they were involved in, and not realize what great information that they have that we could rely on as part of that initial investigation.

If they go is there any way to find them?

Many times, they, they are not able to be located, they don't leave their name. Somebody doesn't get some information about them, what, then it's just difficult to locate them. But many times I've shown up to a crash scene, and the witness has literally written their name and phone number down on a napkin. And what how great that was for me to be able to contact them and, and later as they go on about their day to be able to reach out and say, Hey, what understand you with this crash? What did you see? What did you hear? And that's been very helpful. So

then it becomes a matter of how thorough how diligent how, how motivated that your investigator is in terms of being able to locate those witnesses and, and track them down and, and get the evidence that's so critical in those cases? Oh, exactly. I

tempted to reach every witness that any any witness that was on the scene or maybe left some information that I could contact them later, because even though as an investigator, I have a good idea of what happened in the crash. And you know, I can look at the cars and look at the physical evidence and, and make that determination. But there just may always be that extra piece of information that that just could be very helpful in what what is the totality of the circumstances. So

let me ask you that. So I understand how important the witnesses are, that makes a lot of sense. I understand how important that evidence is. But when you walk up on a scene, or historically when you were in that job, and I guess even now when you walk up, if you were to walk up on a scene, you when you see it, you can you can kind of tell what happened or are not too much. What What's your perspective,

there is based on training and experience, there is a there's usually a quick synopsis that we start building in our minds as investigators like what what kind of happened here, I could, you know, if I get to give an example, a rear end collision, you know, someone stopped or slowed down and someone else Hit, hit that car in the in the rear end. And so that's a rear end collisions, unfortunately, a relatively common collision. But we just can never take just that little piece of information is for granted. Because there may be other things going on What if it was a what if it was a road rage incident, and the person in front of me slammed on the brakes, and calls that collision that that normally would not have occurred. So there's, there's just those pieces that you kind of form an opinion of what's going on. But you always have to be open to other possibilities. And extent until you've explored all those options, it's best not to just come to a firm conclusion yet. Well,

when you're so some things I imagined can probably complicate your investigation, your work, one of the things that I'm thinking is visibility is at night is a daytime traffic, whether those kinds of things are how much do those play a role in your investigation and and getting a good clear understanding of what happened? It's

always something that we that we noted on our reports and in our field notes about how, you know, what were the conditions at the time, was it raining was it was it drizzling rain, how much? How much was it pouring down rain? Had it been raining for several days had water ponding on the highway. So there's a lot of things that we just just made notes of that if we ever have to refer back to that if we can build into that case. Also,

I also wonder if if, if whether like if somebody calls me about so if I talk to somebody about a serious accident and since collision one of the things that runs through my mind is weather because my experience is that witnesses sometimes don't stick around as long if it's pouring down rain A tire tracks can be, can be washed away, if it's more, you know, tire impressions can be washed away if it's pouring down rain. Another example might be when, if people if someone moves their vehicles because, you know, from where they were originally, out of the out of the way, because of, you know, heavy traffic from a game, a concert and event, or just a normal flow of traffic, it's not eight or five o'clock in the afternoon. So what kinds of things are those things that you've run into as challenges and what have you done to overcome them,

we encourage folks to, I have encouraged them in the past to, you know, just snap pictures, if they if they're, if they are able to, and it's safe to do so first of all, their safety is number one. But if they're able to snap a picture of where their cars were in the highway, any of those picture of their car picture of the other vehicle involved. And then from that, we can start getting a snapshot of what happened right after that crash. And it's, that's very helpful for us as investigators to be able to see that, because many times you're right, people will move their vehicles. You know, North Carolina and other states do have laws that if no one's injured, you need to move your vehicle out of the highway to to reduce the chance of a secondary collision. So you know, we're bound by law to do that. But if it's safe to do so, hey, right, before we move those cars, snap a picture where they're sitting in the highway, what does it look like? And gives us a better viewpoint of what that looked like before the vehicles were moved to the shoulder of the highway or into a parking lot.

So from your perspective, the priorities would be safety's first, right? You got to make sure that we have whoever is around is as safe as they can be. Under the circumstances, we've called for whatever medical attention, medical treatment that we need, you know, you've checked on yourself and other paths, passengers and other people to see if they're okay. Or at least if they're not currently getting worse. And you've done what you could to protect human life. I guess the next priority past that would be preservation of evidence, including photographs, witness statements, that sort of thing. Is that fair? It is

it is, we're starting to look at once we've made sure the same was safe. And then we're looking for witnesses. And then now we're now we're on to the evidence piece of evidence on the roadway. tire impressions, as you mentioned earlier, many, many folks will refer to those as skid marks on the highway. And in law enforcement and law, we return refer to those as tire impressions on the highway or off the highway, through the grass, through a rock area where they're whatever that may look like. So that type of evidence because that that evidence is going to go away, after sometimes short amount of time or depending on the type of evidence it's going, it's going to be fading. And then so we're looking for that. And then now we've got the physical evidence that that we have the vehicles and that that's going to remain the same for for quite some time. So we've got that that's the next priority after that is looking at the vehicles. So

you mentioned some of the different types of evidence. One of the things that flows from that investigation is a collision report. And you've prepared collision reports

1000s. So so,

you know, one of the things that comes to my mind is I've seen so many collision reports. I've never prepared one, but I've seen them prepared by people that do the work that you do. And I've seen so many of them, usually I can tell I can look at a collision report within I don't know, 1015 seconds and tell, okay, does this case have value? Is there it can we can I recover a monetary settlement for the person who's come to see me about a case. And the reason is because of I've looked at so many of them over so long, that I can see things in them quickly that the numbers make sense, versus a person who might get an one record two wrecks in their lifetime. They can't see those same things I imagined. You can see lots of things from those same I mean, from those same reports. You mean Can you can you look at a report and just see things that you think that normal people probably who haven't done that for a living for so long can say can't see.

I'm confident that I can just like you, you've looked at, you know, multiple, you know, hundreds and hundreds and 1000s of reports to make that determination. And there is a lot of information in that report that To that the layperson just would not understand it doesn't jump out at you doesn't jump out it, doesn't it, there's a lot of coding involved, because of the way the reporting system is.

So, and they don't even give you the code when they give you the report. Is that right? Exactly.

So it's just, it's just numbers. There's driver information. There's some vehicle information, some infant insurance information. There'll be a diagram in North Carolina, you know, there's a diagram on the back of that report of the officers, you know, diagram of that crash. But that's all very, that's just the cursory information. And then outside of that, there's just a lot of coding. And that's that built in the report. There's some really good information in that coding, that that just needs to be deciphered and look through and that's, that's what, you know, a lot of light people would need help in that aspect. To be able to understand what did what did the officer actually say, what was his opinion of what occurred in this crash, and it goes beyond just having the name of the other driver.

Thank you for joining us, and we'll see you next time.