Fatal Crash
Las Vegas Metro officer James Manor plowed into a pickup attempting a left turn, he was driving his patrol car 109 mph without flashing lights or siren, Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie said. [Las Vegas Review-Journal]
Manor had little time to avoid hitting Calvin Darling’s truck May 7. The prima facie speed limit in the zone was 45 mph. Manor was killed. He was not wearing his seat belt. He was not ejected from his police car.
Manor was eastbound on Flamingo Road enroute to a domestic call. It was 12:48 a.m.
Darling, 45, was arrested for driving under the influence and failing to yield to an emergency vehicle. Gillespie said he couldn’t see Darling facing the latter charge because Manor’s lights and siren were off.
The sheriff initially was adamant that Manor and an officer in a second patrol car were on their way to a call with lights and sirens on.
Turns out the second officer also was not running lights or a siren.
Also, a little over an hour after the accident, a blood test showed Darling had a blood-alcohol level of 0.035, well below the legal limit of 0.08. Darling said he saw the police cars but thought he had enough time to make the left turn in front of them.
The domestic call was from a 14-year old girl who said her father had struck her. Part of what she said in the call was fabrication, according to the mother of the girl.
A really sad and tragic occurrence. A police officer loses his life. It could, of course, been worse. Darling could have been killed as well. The sheriff is conceding that Darling is not guilty of failing to yield to an emergency vehicle. From the blood alcohol results Darling won’t be convicted of DUI either.
Driving over 100 mph on any Las Vegas street is reckless driving, I don’t care if Manor was in a police car or not. That is too fast even if he’d had his red lights flashing and siren going. Darling, too, misjudged his supposition he could make the left turn in front of the police vehicle. Whether the influence of the alcohol in his system contributed to his misjudgment or not–we’ll probably never know.
I have prosecuted a few hundred drunk driving cases, including those which involved death to people. Accident reconstruction is basically a science, but there is almost always elements of non-science as well. Conclusions are drawn based upon a myriad of minute physical facts, the laws of physics, and opinions of who did what and when. It is not easy to try to accurately reconstruct with absolute precision what happens in any crash.
The Sheriff indicates he is troubled about the accident. And he should be. It isn’t easy to manage a department as large as Metro. No sheriff can insure that training of his police officers will always insure avoidance of such events as has happened in this instance. But it is evident he must tighten up his training in his best effort to prevent this type of tragedy again.
Police officers are a necessary and valuable resource for public safety. They do, however, need to understand their function of serving and protecting, means using some common sense in the course of doing so.
It was such a needless and sad tragedy.
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