Alta. Mounties speak of confusion among police at fatal bus-truck crash
Dean Bennett, THE CANADIAN PRESS
EDMONTON - An Alberta Mountie painted a picture Tuesday of police confusion and miscommunication at a traffic control scene just minutes before a semi-tractor trailer plowed into a stranded passenger bus, killing six people.
Const. Richard Dozois testified that he didn't know why then-rookie Const. Daniel Kehler drove away and left his post just moments before Inderjit Singh Virk barrelled past and broadsided the loaded passenger bus that had become stuck across the highway.
"I'm not sure what he (Kehler) was doing," Dozois said at the second day of Virk's judge-alone trial in Court of Queen's Bench.
Virk, 35, is charged with six counts of dangerous driving causing death and 21 counts of dangerous driving causing bodily harm in the crash that occurred just after midnight on May 20, 2005, on Highway 28, north of Edmonton.
He was hauling peat moss on a rain slicked road busy with buses and cars bringing workers home from the oilsands operations in Fort McMurray.
Events began just before midnight when Dozois - then a veteran of five years with the RCMP - and Kehler were called out to handle a car accident on the highway. A man had fallen asleep, driven off the road and rolled on his roof.
Firefighters and paramedics were on scene when they arrived. An air ambulance helicopter was en route and traffic was quickly getting backed up and snarled in both directions.
Dozois told Justice Laurie Smith that he blocked traffic at one end, told the drivers at the front of the line to not move, and told Kehler to go up the road and block traffic from the other side.
Kehler has testified that he drove a kilometre up the road and blocked both lanes of the highway with his cruiser and left his lights flashing to signal to drivers to stop, but didn't stay to make sure traffic was halted.
Instead, he hitched a ride back to the rollover scene to help out with bystanders and clear a path for the helicopter.
"For some reason he had come back to the collision scene?" defence lawyer Alex Pringle said to Dozois.
"Yes, sir."
"You didn't feel you needed him there?"
"No sir."
Kehler has said that after returning to the rollover scene, he decided that he needed his cruiser after all and hitchhiked a ride back to get it. This time, however, he said he came across a passenger bus that was stuck across the road, blocking both lanes, its rear double axles churning and spitting up the mud on the shoulder.
The bus, carrying 42 workers from the Syncrude plant in Fort McMurray, had tried - and failed - to turn around on the narrow highway to find another route around the accident.
The bus had put its interior lights on and some passengers were standing on the side of the road to smoke. Other drivers, meanwhile, were not stopped by Kehler's cruiser but were instead driving around it and inching around the bus.
Kehler retrieved his cruiser and drove back to the rollover scene for a second time, this time to get a tow truck to get the bus unstuck. He tried to radio for a tow truck but couldn't get through. He said the bus was well illuminated, so he didn't put out warning flares or safety cones.
Minutes after he left, Virk's truck violently T-boned the bus, said crash witness Martin Sinneabe.
"I can still see that semi bounce," Sinneabe testified. "The front of the bus swung around like the hand of God.
"I remember seeing bodies flying through the air.
"There were a lot of people in the ditch."
Witness Dave Driscoll was standing on the road smoking a cigarette when he heard the roar of the truck gearing down before impact.
"The screeching sound of the brake, I didn't hear that," said Driscoll. "I just heard the gearing down.
"After that, bang! He hit the bus."
Back at the rollover scene Kehler, before hearing about the crash, asked the ranking Mountie who had since arrived on scene - Cpl. Riel Menard - for the OK to hire the tow truck to pull out the bus.
"You didn't know the bus was a hazard?" Pringle asked Menard Tuesday.
"Not really. He (Kehler) just said he had to move a bus that was stuck on the highway."
But Menard later admitted Kehler made it clear that getting the bus removed "was an urgent thing."
However, he said he didn't press Kehler on it: "I assumed it would be an obstruction, a hazard. I couldn't say what the details were."
Just as the tow truck drove toward the bus, the report of the crash came in.
Menard said he raced up the road to a scene of carnage and chaos lit only by the yellow cones of headlights - bodies in the ditch, bodies on the road, luggage and clothing strewn about, the truck and bus hissing and leaking fluid.
Menard said he had to park far away: "I didn't want to run over anybody."
Driscoll began helping with first aid and remembered turning his head at one point when he heard a paramedic shouting at the officers as she tended the injured.
"Jesus!" he recalled her saying. "Somebody close that road!"
[ 2008-09-23 ]
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