On July 18, 1969, Sen. Ted Kennedy drove a car containing Mary Jo Kopechne off a bridge in Cape Cod. Sen. Kennedy extricated himself but waited many hours before reporting the collision to authorities. By the time rescuers reached the submerged car, Ms. Kopechne had died.
In another thread discussing “Chappaquiddick,” an upcoming dramatic film about the events (thread here: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=852561), two posters noted that John Farrar, the captain of Edgartown Fire Rescue who pulled Ms. Kopechne’s body from the submerged car, believed that she could have lived for hours in an air bubble trapped by the car. He believes that had authorities been notified of the collision sooner, Ms. Kopechne could have been rescued.
Mr. Farrar’s confidence that Ms. Kopechne lived for hours grows seems to grow inexplicably over time. Just six weeks after the accident, Mr. Farrar says that if authorities had been notified of the accident immediately, there was “a strong possibility that she would have been alive” when rescuers got to her because she could have survived in a pocket of air trapped by the car. His evidence is basically: (1) his belief that a large air bubble would have been trapped under the car, (2) his belief that the position of Ms. Kopechne’s body after her death indicated that she was trying to take advantage of a trapped air bubble, and (3) the people who lifted the car from the water by crane reported numerous air bubbles escaping from it (without saying where they came from or how large they were). He believes that the air bubbles were important even though his own dives indicated that there was no air in the passenger compartment of the car. (see news account from the other thread here: Prescott Evening Courier - Google News Archive Search).
Later, at an inquest which began in January of 1970, Mr. Farrar says even more confidently that Ms. Kopechne definitely lived for hours. He is quoted as testifying, “It looked as if she were holding herself up to get a last breath of air. It was a consciously assumed position. . . . She didn’t drown. She died of suffocation in her own air void. It took her at least three or four hours to die. I could have had her out of that car 25 minutes after I got the call. But he [Sen. Kennedy] didn’t call.” [emphasis added.] (see here: https://townhall.com/columnists/gayletrotter/2018/04/06/five-things-you-should-know-about-the-new-chappaquiddick-movie-n2468362).
I’m skeptical. Although he is an expert diver, I don’t think he is an expert in being able to distinguish between a person who intentionally inverted herself to exploit an air bubble from a person that was thrown around by the force of a car flipping over in a collision. I have little reason to believe that Mr. Farrar is an expert on where and for how long air bubbles form in submerged cars. I think he is greatly overestimating the build quality of 1960’s American cars if he is suggesting that the car would have preserved large air bubbles in the passenger compartment for hours. The autopsy concluded that she drowned rather than suffocated but there was no autopsy, which might have provided more convincing evidence.
Is there any other evidence that Ms. Kopechne lived long or that she could have?
There was a request to have her remains exhumed and autopsied, but that was based on some blood that was found on her sleeve. The family opposed it, and the request was denied.
AFAIK, apart from the testimony of the diver who recovered the body, there is no evidence whether or not there was an air pocket. So basically, apart from the only evidence, there is no evidence.
I should have written. “the medical examiner concluded that she drowned rather than suffocated but there was no autopsy, which might have provided more convincing evidence.”
The diver’s statement was that there was no air bubble when he was in the car. But he drew a picture of an air bubble later. The only air bubbles in the car were reported by the people who recovered it with a crane.
We know that it was possible to exit the car (i.e., the doors were openable, or there was some other way of getting from the inside to the outside), because Kennedy did it. Kopechne, however, was not able to exit the car. She might have gotten entangled in the seat belt, or been too panicked to be able to manipulate the belt or the car door, but it’s difficult to imagine her not resolving those issues for over an hour. Surely, the simplest assumption is that she went unconscious at the least very shortly after the accident?
I am not familiar with the body of water that the car went into. Was it unsafe to re-enter, or could Kennedy have reasonably gone back to check on her?
Kennedy claimed he tried opening the door and windows, but doesn’t remember how he got out of the car.
I thought John Farrar was both the captain of the Fire Rescue unit, and the diver who recovered the body.
[
Cite](Chappaquiddick incident - Wikipedia). I don’t know if you mean that an “air void” is different from a bubble, or if the “ultimate air pocket” is what he meant.
Kennedy claimed to have tried to dive down and rescue her seven or eight times. He then went and got a couple of others, including the co-host of the party, and they both dived to rescue her, unsuccessfully.
Mr. Farrar did not say she was in a seatbelt when he found her and he described in interviews and at the inquest how her body was inverted relative to the car when it was discovered, suggesting that she not belted in. Let’s face it, there weren’t a lot of people who actually wore seatbelts in 1969. It would only have been remarkable if she had been wearing a seatbelt when she was found.
Yes, I think she likely lost consciousness during or right after the accident but that’s the heart of my question.
John Farrar was both the captain of the Edgartown Fire Rescue unit and the diver who recovered Kopechne’s body. Wikipedia doesn’t do a great job of detailing the inconsistency of his statements over time. Mr. Farrar didn’t start saying that Ms. Kopechne suffocated in the car until months after the accident. Testifying just six weeks after the accident, he said “I found when I inspected the car underwater that there was no air within the occupants’ section of the car. However, by the statement of John Ahlbum and Joe Cerpa when the car was first moved by cable or winch, numerous air bubbles escaped from the car while still underwater.” He also said things like there was “a strong possibility” she was alive for a while and that “a large amount of air would have initially been trapped” in the car. He doesn’t say where or for how long that air would have been trapped. St. Petersburg Times - Google News Archive Search
The statement he refers to from Ahblum and Cerpa doesn’t say how big those air bubbles were or where they came from. His own statement makes it clear that when he looked for an air bubble, there none to be found where Ms. Kopechne needed it.
So, when he looked at the car, he didn’t see any air bubbles. Later, he drew a picture of the car with a giant imaginary air bubble in it and said that Ms. Kopechne lived in it for hours. I don’t buy it.
Are there many reported cases of people being recovered alive from car completely submerged under the water for hours? Any?
It seems, from this article anyway, like there is a fairly small window of buoyancy while the car fills up, and a best chance to open the door at the point that the car is filled to about 2 inches from the roof of the cabin. Ted Kennedy got out so presumably it was not far from that when he did. Not a huge air bubble as an upper limit.
If a person was face into a trapped air bubble, say maybe 3 inches by a foot or so square, how long could they survive? CO2 build up would likely get you before lack of oxygen did. According to this site a human would need a pocket 10 cubic meters per day, so maybe 2.5 hours would require 1 cubic meter? Yeah, a meter by a meter by a meter big. Huge. A few inches by a couple of feet, even if it had existed, and even if she had somehow not been able to get out of the car but was able to get her face there, would simply not have lasted very long at all before the CO2 would have done its job, certainly not a two or three hours.
From what I recall, she had been doing a fair amount of drinking at that party. She was probably asleep or passed out when the accident happened, and was not able to awaken & respond in time.
As to the ‘air bubble’ idea, I don’t know of any car that is so airtight as to hold an air bubble for ‘several hours’. And that’s on current cars, much less those built 50 years ago. I’ve never heard of air staying in an underwater car for more than a few minutes, at best. So that seems unlikely. (And contrary to the Coroners Report, too.)
So much like the IMHO thread, people really, really are invested in the idea that Mary Jo Kopechne could not possibly have been saved. Quite likely true, but it’s also true that Teddy’s criminal failure to report the accident in a timely fashion reduced any chance she could have had to be rescued to zero.
The only emotional investment in the IMHO thread is in the idea that she *could *have been saved, even though that’s unknowable. The reasons for that investment are up to the reader.
Please don’t hijack my thread or wrongly guess my motives.
I’m not invested in Kennedy’s responsibility for the accident at all. I am invested in the idea that rescue workers pretend to be experts in areas where they have no expertise and that people give their opinions too much credit. I’ve heard this happen many times over the years but my most concerning example affects me personally. My sister was in a car accident many years ago. She slid sideways into a telephone pole, broke her pelvis, and got a concussion. This was a pre-airbag car and she wasn’t wearing a seat belt. The EMT who took her out of the car told her that she would have been killed if she had been wearing it because the telephone pole would have crushed her. This is preposterous. I saw the car after the accident and the door was bent but there was tons of space remaining for her to sit in the car. She was tiny. I’m guessing she broke her pelvis bouncing around the cabin of the car because she wasn’t belted in. The seatbelt would probably also have prevented the concussion.
Had the EMT just shut the fuck up about his idiotic opinion, it probably would have been easier to convince her that wearing the seat belt would have helped her. Instead, she won’t listen to reason. Although she drives over 25,000 miles per year, she has never chosen to wear a seat belt since, putting her at much greater risk over the years. If she is killed or badly injured in a car accident again, part of the fault can be traced back to one stupid EMT. I’m sure that he doesn’t remember making that statement but she remembers it very clearly.
I am also invested in the idea that courts recognize a lot of junk science that they should not allow. I don’t know whether the Mr. Fararr testified at a grand jury but I’m betting that if he did, his seemingly unsupportable opinion would have been accepted into evidence. Accepting junk science into evidence is an ongoing criminal justice problem although it has gotten much better since 1969.
Thanks for your response. I appreciate learning that it was unlikely the air pocket could have been nearly big enough to sustain her for that long.
Kennedy went out his open window. It’s unknowable why Ms. Kopechne didn’t but it suggests that she may not even have been conscious when the car submerged.
We’re probably going to get modded soon for a hijack, but in the IMHO thread BobLibDem states:
My apologies then, and I’m sorry about your sister. But we have no idea why Fararr testified as he did. Maybe he honestly believed Kopechne survived for a time in the car, breathing in an air pocket. Maybe he honestly believed that had Kennedy called the police ASAP she could have been saved. Maybe he was just really pissed that a powerful politician was going to get away with leaving the scene of a fatal accident with essentially no legal repercussions, and testified in such a way to keep doubt open.
But I’m really uncomfortable with immediately discounting the testimony of the person who actually recovered her body because “she was probably asleep”, and “it didn’t matter, she couldn’t have been saved anyway.”
If the water was cold enough (I don’t know if it was or not), it’s possible even without an air bubble. If we’re talking hours, then there’s going to be brain damage, but the person’s life might still be saved.
I just don’t think it’s likely that she survived by virtue of any action on her own part, like seeking out an air bubble. If she could do that, why didn’t she leave the car when Kennedy did?
I wasn’t there, but, I have been on Martha’s Vineyard and it’s a slow place so I’d be surprised if anyone wore seatbelts at all. Looking as to how that car rolled over (roll beginning on passenger side and ending on top of the car) she was probably knocked out if she was awake. Even at 25 MPH an accident happens a lot faster than one would think. Also, it appears the windows were open so the car would have sunk relatively quickly. Taking into account the deformation of the body after the accident and how cars are not air-tight, it probably would have submerged quickly. Possibly an air pocket in the trunk or footwell area of the rear passenger section. But, to be sure, we’d have to test the same model car. Again, it’ll be different than the movies as they’ll use the car floating as a plot device.
We also have to take into account high-tide versus low tide, and any maximums that may have been. Looking online, calculating tides is somewhat complex, and I can’t readily find a chart for July 1969.
If it was high tide, that could explain the difficulty in extraction at first.
Much of it boils down to “maybe”. I prefer to look at the one important thing that is not a “maybe”, and that is the fact that Ted Kennedy should have immediately called emergency services as soon as he had access to a phone but chose instead not to do so.
I can forgive him for not trying to rescue her before saving himself because his overriding instinct for survival said, “Get out of this sinking car and get to the surface!” Because he was an excellent swimmer, I’m less forgiving over the fact that, upon reaching safety and getting past the panic stage, he did not try to go down and extricate her. What I find unconscionable and inexcusable is the fact that he left her there for hours before making the call. That indicates to me that the only reason he made the call at all was because he decided there was no way it wouldn’t be traced back to him.
He said he did try to dive down and find her, and that when he returned to the party he gathered up 2 other people to dive down and try to find her. They were all unsuccessful, at which point he went back to his hotel and went to bed.