I heard sirens in the distance, then closer, then WHUMP!
There’s a white car sideways in the road, and two cop cars with sirens blazing!
I’ve looked out a few times but am hesitant to go out there with a camera or anything…
Now there are a dozen cop cars and an ambulance…
I can’t see much right now because of some bushes we have on the corner.
Holy shit stretcher coming out of the ambulance!..
Ack. And I’ve gotten chills from merely having apparatus pass by, towards a destination way down the street.
Turn on a local 24 hour news source, but put it on quietly. My sympathies, I also get chills when an ambulance goes by, our street is one they often take to get to their destination.
So what is it, do you think? The abrupt end of a chase, as evidenced by the “WHUMP” being the impact of the pursued vehicle?
They took somebody away on the stretcher with a huge foam neckbrace. I hope they’re ok…
Ok, the ambulance left and I saw a flatbed truck approaching so I scrambled to get fresh batteries into my camera… got out there and there were still at least eight cop cars. This is a busiesh two lane road, but there are no shoulders, so all the cop cars are lined up like this in the close lane to my front porch: / / / / ~ \ \ \ \
Mind you I’ve been drinking tonight and it’s 3:30 am here so I’m not really in the mood for raport with Joe Law Enforcement. (hide the bong!)
I see the sideways car, very slightly smashed into the tree on my corner. I chicken out, figuring there’s not much to photograph anyhow, retreat to my porch, when I see two other people from down the road practically running toward the scene. I go back, to see what the police reaction to their presence will be. I thought they were right up there at the scene, gawking, so I figured I’d go in a for a gawk of my own, when right behind me another cop says rather loudly in an almost artificially deep voice, “Probably better if you didn’t.”
He was talking to the other two people, from within his cop car (how many times can I say that? it’s starting to sound funny).
Assuming he meant walking down there, I just asked him if everybody was all right, he said, “Yeah, we just use the neckbrace just in case, to be safe”, and I came back in the house. For perspective, his car was parked 20 feet from my side door, and the accident was maybe another 30 feet away.
Now the towtruck is gone but there are still 4 copcars outside with their lights flashing. Big shit for such a small town.
I imagine tomorrow I’ll take a pic of the tree and post it here…
shiver If that isn’t omnious.
Definitely. Whether they knew they were actively fleeing or not, I don’t know.
I imagining an extremely drunk driver, mowing down mailboxes left and right, gets the cops called on him, who speed to catch up to him as he crashes out on my tree.
And ftr it is MY tree now, I just bought this house on Sunday. 
Still, from the position of the car, I think he was probably only doing 25 of so and hit a glancing blow, or something.
I did tell the cop that it sounded like a high speed chase but he just kinda smirk/winked or something.
If you think that’s ominous, have you seen Walking Tall? I mean the Original '70s movie?
Consider that his words are more accurately represented as, “Prolly bettah iffin you dint”.
Truthfully though, for a small town in a small county of a small state, our police are remarkably professional and liberal.
Yeah, I had the misfortune to walk right by an accident a few years ago, in which an elderly mentally ill man walked in front of a semi that was going over the speed limit. This happened right in front of the community college, which is on a particularily long block. I walked right by a policeman directing traffic, and he didn’t detour me. (I thought a water main had burst, there was water flowing down the gutter, and there had been some problems with the water mains just prior to this. There were what appeared to be large city repair type trucks stopped in the middle of the street as well.) The corpse was under the trailer, uncovered, with frozen blood seeped into the road. It was definitely blood, it was sort of reddish in color, and the puddle was roughly circular and spread out away from the gutter. Part of the puddle was in direct sunlight, but the pavement was cold enough to freeze non-moving liquid on it. I averted my eyes as I got closer, I didn’t really see the gore, but the blood was stark enough I could see it from a ways back.
By the time I realized what had happened, it was too late for me to turn back and go another way. (I couldn’t see very far, my glasses kept fogging, and I had a scarf and hood on.) I was in a sort of shock, and the place I needed to get to was two blocks away. I over halfway through a double or triple length block, and I’d have to walk back by the busy intersection with detouring traffic all gawking at the accident and not watching what was in the intersection, and go around the college to get where I needed to go. (The drivers in this town are non too safe at the best of times.) It was cold, and taking a detour at that point was very impractical to my mind at that point, all I wanted to do was get away, and not linger in the area. It was a shorter distance, and therefore less time, to hurry past with my chin tucked into my coat, and hood pulled forward.
I found out later that the driver of the semi was very new to the profession, I think that may have been his first. A young man who saw the accident occur apparently had to be treated for a nervous breakdown according to a friend of ours who knows him. This is somewhat verified by my memory of seeing a young man babbling inconsably, shivering uncontrollably, and overall seeming out of it in a parking lot adjacent to my destination, which was in clear veiw of the accident.
Anyway, maybe you should be glad that this cop was thinking of your emotional health, instead of the dimwitted policeman who saw me approaching and said nothing to me. (Maybe he isn’t dimwitted, but afterwards, looking back, it surely seemed so.) It would have been easy for me to detour around the back of the college to miss seeing the grisly scene as I crossed the street where he was stationed. I’d have preferred to walk that extra distance, had I been given the choice. I’d have been more than willing to take the option of the detour, walking on the snowy college lawn, rather than the shoveled sidewalk going by that poor soul.
Adding, I borrowed the pharmacy’s phone, and called a friend to get a ride home. They were willing to let me use the phone after I explained that I had walked there, and they realized the direction I’d come from.
It’s a horrible feeling, isn’t it?
About ten years ago I was standing on my balcony on a hot summer’s night, looking down on our quiet road just before going to bed. A car went by slowly, not in any rush, then there was this tiny “fddd” noise along with a bit of scraping. Then silence for a few minutes when I thought I’d go in. And then this dreadful laughing and keening started.
My husband came out onto the balcony with me but our view was blocked by a tree. The keening went on for some minutes until I said I’d go out and see what it was.
Got out there to see a car stopped in the road, with its lights on, engine running and the driver’s door open. A body on the road in front of the car, and the woman driver kneeling in the road. She was the one who was keening.
There were a few bystanders by this point - maybe 15 minutes had elapsed. No-one had moved into the scene to see if the pedestrian was dead (I think he was) or to help the woman.
The police came just as I arrived and took charge, but I did lead the woman over to the parking lot of a convenience store and help her to sit down on the kerb. That seemed to break the frozen bystanders, and the convenience store clerk gave the woman a jacket to put over her shoulders as she was shivering so hard she couldn’t sit straight.
Me being a foreigner didn’t help matters - I was upsetting her more, so I just left after that.
We scoured the local papers for any news of what had happened and if the man hit had died, but never heard a thing…
What is “keening”?
A high pitched wailing cry - not very loud, but almost constant, like a kind of “Eeeeeeeee, Eeeeeeeeee, Eeeeeeeee” Very eerie and sad.
Keening is often an involuntary wail after a shock, like witnessing a death. I guess it’s a kind of hysteria or something similar. Some people babble, some people walk around in a daze, and others just cry out in long wails.
I’ll assume that the fire department responded to extinguish the blazing sirens? 
Well they did a number on my tree… I hope it survives. Took out the road sign too.
http://adulthumor.com/SDMB/AGF00002-01.jpg
http://adulthumor.com/SDMB/AGF00003-01.jpg
The tree should survive, but it look like a different story for the roadsign!
Somehing similar to this happened a few years ago on New Years Eve. Three police cars drove into my next door nieghbor’s yard at about 10:30 PM. The only difference was we never figured out why. We still have the same nieghbor (who was a fine law abiding citizen). To this day, niether my family, nor our guests know why it happened.
[Garp] Honey! This house has been predisastered! The odds of anything like this ever happening again are astronomical![/Garp]
Any idea why the laughter? Was it the woman? Maybe a nervous response?
You know, I read this thread last night, and I’m kicking myself that I didn’t suggest this earlier:
That might have been a great time to grab a sidearm, run outside to the police, and yell, “Don’t worry! I’m here to help!!”
Tripler
Well, it sounded funny five minutes ago. 