Trooper Ben and the Nail Driver

"We Get Mail"

Over the past week we have received numerous complaints about a ticket, based on a report in the news, written by one of our Troopers. The news report went like this:

"Trooper stopped a speeder who told Trooper he had shot himself in the leg with a nailgun and was on his way to the hospital. Trooper then followed the speeder to the hospital where trooper gave the victim a ticket for speed.".

That's the simple version, as related in the news, and apparently relied on by the complainers who wrote us.

The complaints received about this news report ran the gaumet from reasonable enquiry of the facts, to wild-eyed demands for firing the Trooper, or assigning him to some menial task in some remote basement office where he would never again have official contact with the public. Others called for some kind of lawsuit against the State of Utah in general and the UHP in particular. One complainant, insinuating between the lines of his uninformed rant that he also wore some kind of a badge, claimed the Trooper was an insult to all police officers. If indeed that particular complainant was a genuine, uniformed police officer working a field assignment, his complaint statements made it obvious he has never done anything noteworthy enough to get into the news and be twisted beyond recognition. The fact is, any actual field officer knows personally how incomplete or inaccurate "the news" usually is. Unfortunately most civilians do not have occasion to experience that fact.

So What Was The "Rest Of The Story"?

Trooper is on patrol when he observes a vehicle traveling at speeds over eighty miles per hour. the road conditions are not optimum, and the vehicle is weaving in and out of traffic which creates even more concern about the unsafe speed and extreme danger to other families on the roadway.

Trooper turns on his lights and siren in the prescribed attempt to stop the speeding vehicle. The driver obviously sees the Trooper but refuses to stop or even slow down. This chase continues until the vehicle stops at the hospital several miles later. This dangerous road race had run through traffic from Hurricane St. George. The driver of the speeding vehicle is not the "nailgun victim". The passenger in the vehicle is the one who stabbed the nail into his own leg. The wound is relatively minor and certainly not life or health threatening in any way, shape or form. The patient is treated and released.

Trooper had a long talk with the violator, explaining that in a true emergency all he had to do was ask for help in the first place. In the second place, never continue an eighty-plus mph chase through county and town when an officer is trying to stop you.

Finally, in defense of the offending driver's basic good nature, he apologized to the trooper, realized his poor judgement in the situation, the danger he had put everyone on the road in, and promised to do better in the future.

Our Trooper cited the driver for speeding. "Why", you ask? Because of the high speed, erratic, cutting in and out of traffic, way he was endangering all other drivers on the roadway. Because the workers' injury was relatively minor and did not in any stretch of the imagination require a wild ride for miles through traffic. Because if the naildriving worker needed medical attention a simple phone call would have summoned EMT's for emergency assistance quicker and more effectively than the wild race through traffic the driver decided to engage in.

Yes, that driver got a speeding ticket. And if you don't think he deserved it then you were not one of the families minding their own business when that driver took their safety as a grain of salt to satisfy his own temporary lack of judgement by driving recklessly on the wild side of our public highways.

And, by the way, Ben, you could work for me anytime. You wrote the driver for just his speed when you could have easily written it as 41-6-45, a class-B misdemeanor, because of the continuing series of various violations. In addition to 41-6-45 you could have arrested him under section 41-6-13.5, a felony-3^rd. And was this by any chance an industrial accident? Well, that's a question for other people who are not as busy as you are, Ben.

Ben, as I see it, you gave that driver the genuine big time break of the year 2005 and still managed to get the safety message across to him.

So if all you people depending on an incomplete news article who wanted Ben's head on a platter still think he abused the reckless driver, you should really be able to get all fired up about this next one!

"Trooper arrests husband for speeding pregnant wife to emergency hospital"

That was the news headline. But just like Ben's case, there is "the rest of the story":

Trooper was on night shift in Morgan County when he tagged a westbound car doing over ninety-two miles per hour through the Mountain Green area. If you've driven that road you already know the speeder was headed into several extremely righteous curves as well as one dangerous, narrow, icy bridge the span of which is also on a curve.

Trooper turned on the lights and the speeding driver eventually slowed down and pulled over, west of the Mountain Green rest area. When trooper got to the driver's window, the driver frantically cried that his wife was in labor and they were headed to the Ogden hospital. Trooper shined the light over to the passenger, and sure enough there was wife holding her belly and moaning something terrible. Something didn't look quite right to the trooper, but just then was not the time to pursue what it might be.

Trooper asked driver if wife's water had broken, he replied no. Trooper asked driver if he wanted to have trooper drive them both to the hospital in the patrol car so he could attend to his wife, or should trooper lead them through traffic to the hospital, or should trooper call an ambulance. Driver replied he would follow trooper to the hospital. Trooper told driver to follow at a decent distance but also make sure he didn't try to get "lost" on the way. Trooper escorted the driver and radioed to dispatch to have the hospital staff meet convoy at the ER door.

Trooper and driver arrived at the emergency entrance to find doctors and nurses dutifully waiting to take wife into the emergency room. Husband and trooper waited at the desk while husband started looking blankly at the paper work on a clipboard the receptionist handed him.

In a few minutes the doctor came back out with his OpRm Mask hanging down around his neck. Trooper asked doctor how the lady was doing, and doctor replied that she had just delivered a 1-lb 8-oz cushion, plaid in color, tassles around the edges, and it was doing just fine. The proud father of this plaid, fringed pillow slowly laid down the pen and clipboard he was holding, and began to studiously concentrate on the pattern of the tile floor. In fact, he never said a word at all as trooper wrote him up for the whole ninety-two miles per hour.

And for all you who wanted Ben's head on a platter, don't you believe this second heartless trooper should have at least given the husband some kind of a break, maybe for his wife's semi-convincing "in-labor" performance?

Troopers who are not always overcome to tears with the sad stories related by violators are usually the ones who have pulled countless broken bodies of little children, babies, the young and the old, suffering, bleeding and dying from senseless, bloody, deadly crashes caused by speeding violators.

But relating those heart breaking crashes caused by speeding drivers is reserved for another time and place, and they probably really don't matter to you who wanted Ben fired. Until perhaps someday a reckless speeding driver puts you or a member of your family in the grave. Then you'll want to know why the hell one of us could not have stopped the violator before (s)he shattered your world.

And that, dear friend, is just part of the story you will never find in the "news" about "Ben and the Nail Driver", or "Trooper arrests expectant father". But never fear, there will always be more half-baked news reports you can believe in and get yourself all heated up about. And if one of those don't come along fast enough, maybe you could pick up a copy of some news rag at the checkout counter; you might find out where Elvis is being held prisoner, or discover where the last alien spaceship picked up some poor soul for unspeakable experiments on another planet and then dropped the victim off in some local swamp.

Hey, don't laugh; they are about as reliable as many of the police reports you will find in the news. :-)

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