Death of a Child

I have wrestled with whether I should write this story, simply because I will pay an emotional price for doing so. I am no stranger to violent death and I tend to shy away from remembering most of them, simply because I know that the faces of the dead will haunt me for a while afterwards.

Writing this will do nothing good for my PSTD, but perhaps the telling of the story will help cleanse me of the pain of remembering. This particular event happened about a month before 105's shooting in March of 1982, and it was very cold and foggy in Farson and as I recall it happened about two o'clock in the morning. A truck driver who was hauling sacks of drilling mud on a five axle flat bed truck west bound on Highway 26, coming from Lander, Wyoming towards Farson, Wyoming missed seeing the red flashing lights warning that he was approaching a T-intersection with Highway 187. Other drivers who witnessed the tragedy stated later that the driver of the truck was so busy talking on his citizens band radio, that they were not able to warn him about the intersection coming up and so he he drove his heavily laden truck into the intersection at about 55 miles per hour, the speed limit in Wyoming at that time.

He realized that he was in trouble too late and unable to slow down quickly enough, tried to make the ninety degree left hand turn onto Highway 187 at twice the speed he should have been traveling, causing the truck to overturn. When I arrived at the scene of the wreck our faithful local emergency medical technicians were attending to the driver who received minor injuries, but sadly it was found that the driver had his two year old son with him in the truck and the little boy was killed when the truck overturned.

I witnessed the EMTs remove his little broken body from the wrecked vehicle while others kept the father away from his son as long as possible and then covered the body. When the driver realized that his little son had been killed, he reacted like any father would, screaming at the top of his lung, "What an I going to tell my wife?", and then collapsing. We bundled the man up to keep him warm, and I directed the EMT's to stay with him. Eventually an ambulance arrived to take the little boy to a mortuary in Rock Springs, and I decided that the best thing I could do would be to take the man the 47 miles to the hospital in Rock Springs to be checked out, rather than call another ambulance to come and pick him up.

The man moaned and cried the entire trip to town, and made the statement over and over to me that he was going to kill himself rather than tell his wife what had happened to their son. When we reached Rock Springs the man refused to go to the hospital to be checked out, and so I decided that the man was in need of constant supervison; fearing that he might take his own life in desperation over the death of his son. I made arrangements for a group of men from my church to stay with him throughout the night at a hotel room. I stayed with him while he broke the emotional, tragic news of the death of their son to the boys mother, and leaving him in the capable hands of good men who were willing to stay with him, I then left traveling the fifty mile back to my home in Farson.

I don't remember much of the details of what happened to this man after the wreck that killed his son, but the accident report reflected the reason the wreck happened was because the driver was traveling too fast to negotiate the ninety degree turn, causing the truck to overturn and the heavy momentum of the truck turning over on its side and colliding with the pavement crushing the small boys body.

In 1983 after I left the Wyoming Highway Patrol after the shooting of 105, I was at that time working as a Deputy for the La Paz County Sheriff's Office in Parker, Arizona. I was supoenaed to give my deposition in a civil case in which the driver of the truck who lost his little boy was suing the manufacturer of the truck he was driving claiming the truck was defective which was a direct cause of the accident. I testified against the truck driver and he lost the civil suit against the truck manufacturer.

How soon he forgot the truth of who truly caused the accident. As much as I sympathize with the loss of his son, I could not be party to a lie by which he hoped to benefit monetarily.