You’re quite welcome. I, too, wish for a thorough investigation, ideally handled independently of the state police to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, and swift justice meted out to any deserving of same.
Like it or not, at least here CHP will pretty regularly do bursts of 90+ mph when freeway traffic is light looking to catch up to possible speeders ahead of them. Mind you, they are not pursuing a given car, just hunting and trying to bring speeders into range of their doppler radar units. If doppler say the car ahead is going 80mph, now they switch to pursuing/pulling over that car. They don’t do this in the fog or during heavy traffic that I have seen but it is a typical practice per a friend in the biz.
Ya know, If I’m ever framed for a crime I didn’t commit, I could only pray to get Bricker on my jury.
That said, it’s hard to stay objective. If nothing else, the Chief has a duty to keep his force respected and trusted, and seems to be missing the mark right now.
Former defense attorney. Hard habit to break. 
“Dayum!” said the slack jawed yokel…I didn’t really stand any of a chance against them credentials… :smack:
I kid** Bricker **…I kid.
tsfr
Have you ever been on the receiving end of information from a 911 call? The information varies wildly in its accuracy. This is especially true of public events like car crashes. More often than not, the crash is getting called in by someone else driving by at highway speeds who’s not entirely sure where they are, let alone where the crash actually is. I’ve been dispatched on rollovers with entrapped patients that turn out to be stalled vehicles on the side of the road. It’s not fair to say “dispath gets everything they need from the caller.”
In addition, there’s not a lot of communication between dispatch centers. Most of the time when I respond on a crash, I have to talk to three different dispatch centers- ambulance, police, and fire. Sometimes there’s even more involved! In this case, it’s entirely possible that the Sheriff’s deputies knew the crash was minor, but the information never made it to the State dispatch center and the trooper responding.
St. Urho
Paramedic
Around these parts, the right shoulder is almost always nearly as wide as a travel lane (though it can and does narrow in underpasses and overpasses). PennDOT standard for the right-hand shoulder on a limited-access highway is 10 feet.
The left shoulder on the same limited-access highway is narrower than a standard travel lane, having a standard width of (IIRC) 6 feet.
Many of these shoulders contain a series of grooves perpendicular to the white (or yellow) line - a rumble strip to alert drivers that they are off the road - which we used to either straddle or ride outside of when we were in construction vehicles. Both shoulders are commonly littered with debris, from blown out tires to road-killed deer or broken-down vehicles.
I worked for the Pennsylvania Dept. of Transportation for 3 years, including time as a highway inspector where it was my job to measure the actual width of said roads, travel lanes and shoulders both and evaluate the condition of the travel lanes, shoulder, guide rails and/or barriers, and drainage condition.
I would not expect that it would be guaranteed safe for an emergency vehicle to travel at 85+ mph on either shoulder and assume that there would be nothing to obstruct the forward progress of the vehicle.
Maybe your roads in Ohio are more perfect, but I for one would not assume that any multi-lane limited-access highway would have a shoulder on both sides suitable for travel at speeds in excess of 80 mph.
I suppose that’s possible, although I’ve given out information at least four times, and never had a problem with accuracy. But nothing I would have said would have sparked a rushing police officer. Maybe I’m just sane and attentive, but I always pull over. I avoid talking on the phone while driving, and I can’t help dispatch if I can’t see anything.
This strikes me as a pretty reasonable observation.
Driving 85 mph or faster on the shoulder in traffic and road construction strikes me as pretty inherently risky behavior. I wonder what kind of information he might have been given to suggest such haste was required.
Any rough estimate how far the accident was from where he was when he received the call? Are we talking 5, 10, 20, or more miles? How much time would he have saved going 85 on the shoulder as opposed to, say, going 75 in the left lane with lights and siren blaring, signalling traffic to pull over? Seems to me that it would have to be a pretty severe accident and/or a pretty significant distance to travel for that amount of haste to have made all that much of a difference.
tsfr
126 miles an hour?!? On the shoulder?? Holy shit. :eek: 
How sad for those two girls’ families.
Got no dog in this fight, but it’s caught my attention. It’s a sad thing about those girls and my heart goes out to their families. What bothered me enough to make a post out of it, though is not that there was a tragic accident that killed someone…that happens every day. What bugged me is that in one of the first articles cited, there was a lengthy quote from some “witness” who I’d like to think of as “cockhead” who’s first thought upon encountering a fatal accident on the road moments after it happened was how it might inconvenience him to have to hang around to give a statement instead of, oh, I don’t know…fucking seeing if he could help somehow? What kind of a narcissistic prick has that as his first thought?
I’m certain that I must be making broad assumptions about his ability (or lack thereof) to intervene in some way, but those words strike me as dickish in the extreme.
OK, now I think I understand how it happens, I see how this game is played.
First, someone posts an outraged account of the latest police malfeasance. Then Bricker or someone jumps up and says “Don’t get outraged yet, we don’t know all the facts”. Next, someone abuses Bricker, or whoever the voice of reason is today.
Then all the facts come in, and they show that the OP actually underestimated how bad the police actions were.
It’s like some kind of morality play, with all of the parts choreographed. So far, I haven’t seen one of these threads go down with a foot out of place.
Did I miss any of the steps in the dance?
w.
Yeah. The part where somebody comes in and disregards the original outrage with a brand new one that will either make the thread take a wrong turn at Albuquerque or be roundly ignored.
I’ve ridden in several cop cars going full speed (long story…) I don’t know what kind of car this cat was using, but if it was like the Crown Victorias I used to ride in, he really had to work it to get it up to 126mph. Once it gets past about 115, the acceleration dramatically falls off. By 120 mph, the car increases about 1 mph every 3 or 4 seconds. Assuming this car was similar, it probably took him a full minute all out to go from 115 to 126. You have to have a straight road to do that, too - even a mild curve slows you down.
I once rode with a cop who was barrelling down the shoulder at about 60mph when he hit a peice of debris that smashed his transmission and ruined the car. If he’d been going 126mph, I’d be a ghost right now. There is simply no justification for going that speed on the shoulder under any circumstances.
That’s rather unfair given that the update was only posted a short while ago. Give Bricker a PM about the thread and a few hours to respond if it’s so important to you that he make a reappearance.
Anyway, I didn’t post the the thread originally, but I recall it and I generally felt that people were rushing too swiftly to judgement.
Given the facts that are now available, I would not be averse to this trooper spending a few years in prison for his horrific wrecklessness.
Actually, if he had been wreckless, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. 
ETA: d&r
You’d think he would have known better than to swerve into two pretty white girls.
If a police officer drives with flashing lights, he should expect that some vehicles, upon seeing such lights, would pull to the side of the road. Thus the officer should take care that if he intends to pull out and pass on the shoulder, his speed should not be so high relative to the traffic in the driving lanes that he can not control his car when cut off.