Over the weekend I was a passenger in a 3-car chain collision on I-90. The state trooper showed up and asked a group of 4 of us what happened. Two didn’t even open their mouths, but my sister (the driver and owner of the car I was in) launched into this description of traffic conditions that I knew (and the cop somehow sensed) would take 10 minutes to get to the point.
So the cop cut her off. “Just the short version, please. What happened? Shooting?”
We all chuckled a bit and I piped up with, “Crash!”
He smiled and pointed at me and said, “Great, that’s what I needed. Now, a few details, please.”
My sister again launched into a story that seemingly began with the invention of the automobile. This time I cut her off with, “Red car rear ended silver car. Silver car rear ended us. We didn’t hit anybody.” The cop was VERY happy with this answer too.
Then he asked if anyone was hurt, and I piped up, “The woman in the red car has a wrist that looks swollen.” So he said he would go check on her and that we should all follow him in our cars.
The woman in red who caused the whole thing wasn’t with us because she had tried to split. But her radiator was smashed and she only got a few hundred yards before her car died. The cop arrested her later because she was driving on a license that had already been suspended for something else. She got all the tickets. We made sure to add later that the silver car in the middle was pushed into us by the red car. We heard that crash a second or two before we felt the impact on our own car.
The red car driver had three kids in her car, and it’s just as well they arrested her. Before she decided to split, while we were all stopped in the left lane of I90, she let her kids out to the car to … play? wander? take a leak? Dunno, but the rest of us started screaming to get the kids back in the car. She gave us a look like we were a bunch of crazies, but did in fact get her kids out of traffic.
One thing I learned – it takes like 20 times as long to process a traffic stop in Illinois if you’re from some other state. We were heading back home to Wisconsin. The silver car was from Indiana. Only the woman who caused it all was from Illinois. The trooper told us that he could just swipe her licence and get all her data, and transfer it to the tickets he was writing. For the others he had to type it all in manually. It was a full hour and a half from the time the cop arrived until we were on the road again – he must have been the slowest typing trooper in Illinois.