The carnage that haunts them: On the road with the NSW Police crash investigation unit
From the horror of the Hunter Valley bush crash, to the tragedy in Buxton, to the Prospect collision this week that killed a high-ranking Bandido member, the Crash Investigation Unit officers have seen every road horror imaginable.
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For the team of police officers who attend every major crash site in NSW, the lifeless bodies in the carnage is not what keeps them awake at night.
It’s the living relatives about to take a journey through grief that will likely never come to a standstill.
From the horror of the Hunter Valley bush crash, to the tragedy in Buxton where five teenagers lost their life when the driver crashed into a tree, to the Prospect collision this week that killed a high-ranking Bandido member, the Crash Investigation Unit officers have seen every road horror imaginable.
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And with 236 people dying on the state’s roads so far this year, and thousands more seriously injured, the officers of the Crash Investigation Unit have every reason to believe they will be faced with hundreds more families grieving lost loved ones — unless driver behaviour changes. And fast.
“We say to the guys here, in some ways you’ve got to divorce yourself from it because you don’t want to go down your own spiral. You have to do your best to keep yourself in check while still being there for the families,” Sergeant Brett Hobbins said during a Sunday Telegraph exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the metro unit based in Huntingwood this week.
“We try not to expose when we don’t have to. You are too busy at a scene worrying about your work, collecting all the evidence, establishing what’s happened rather than the horrific side of it.
“But yeah. it’s definitely the human element that can cause a spiral.”
The mental health of his staff at metro and regional units across the state is always on the mind of Crash Investigation Unit Manager Inspector Jason Hogan.
With his teams attending 204 serious road crashes so far this year, he said the mental health of his staff was “extremely important and they undergo regular well checks with a police psychologist”.
Some of the jobs that hit hardest are when people “don’t have the humanity to stop and see if the other people are okay”.
“Fail-to-stop crashes have a huge impact on our staff due to the protracted nature of those investigations,” he said.
“I have heard drivers say they panicked after the crash and that they didn’t know what to do. That response more often than not turns into self-preservation and not owning their poor driving behaviour that caused the crash.
“It’s such a disregard for human life and drives investigators to charge all people who without reasonable excuse withhold information that could lead to the apprehension of the person responsible.”
Sgt Hobbins says “certain crash scenes” stay with him.
“There was a crash in 2014 at Terry Hills where a girl and guy were in the car it rolled, she got thrown out the passenger side window and died,” he recalled.
“The family just hung on for years and years and years. They wanted to see the photos. I was thinking to myself ‘I know what it looks like and you don’t want to see your loved one like that’.”
In some cases, he’s seen people find closure from viewing the unfathomable.
“In some cases it helps, but in others, I have had a couple where it has put them into a spiral,” he said.
Buxton is another raw example.
“Some of the family members went back and saw their loved one and they just said to me ‘we don’t know how we get up every day’. That’s tough.”
Then there was the ute out in the country where the property owner had a “home-fashioned slasher” on the back and was “going around the paddock mowing away and the kids jumping around in the back”.
“The two-year-old falls out and he runs over her. They wanted to see the child. Now you can only imagine what that was like.”
“I don’t know what I would do in that situation, would I want to see them? Would I not? With the background I’ve got, I don’t know. There is no right or wrong.”
Sgt Hobbs described the job of the metro team like a “job lotto”.
They can be called to a crash scene at any time day or night, and also support the other Unit’s in Ballina, Kempsey, Dubbo. Tamworth, Newcastle and Wagga.
They can drive to a scene in a minute’s notice or be flown in by chopper or fixed wing aircraft.
“We are responsible for scene interpretation, recording all evidence, and photographing the crime scene. We are one of the few teams that are a one-stop shop,” he said.
The team then follow a serious crash right through the court process, often being called to give evidence in coronial inquests, criminal courts and are interviewed by insurance companies.
While the reckless actions of P-platers will always hit a nerve, it’s the blatant, dangerous behaviours of motorists who should know better that rile these cops who almost daily see the horrific results of bad driver behaviour.
“One time a truck went up the back of a parked truck. We extracted the data out of the vehicle and he was watching Big Bang Theory episode 6 Season Four at the time of the crash,” Sgt Hobbins said.
“In another crash at a notorious intersection at Wetherill Park, where they have prangs all the time, a driver went through a red light and hit a bus and he was watching the cricket.”
Then there was a bus driver, who didn’t cause an crash but was hit by a driver running through a red light. The bus driver was watching a movie on the phone at the time.”
For Inspector Hogan, he has immense pride in his teams’ dogged determination to see an investigations through.
“There are numerous highlights however recent standouts are the reinvestigation of the 2004 Hume Highway Sutton Forest crash where a seven year old boy was killed and his parents and brother were seriously injured when hit from behind by a truck driver who failed to stop.
“The driver being recently found guilty of this act, brought some closure to their loss and removed any doubt that it was the truck driver that caused the crash and left the scene without giving those in the car a second thought,” he said.
“The Greta Bus crash and the Buxton deaths of five young kids that saw the devastating wide reaching effect on countless families and communities, cannot be allowed to be repeated.”
“These crashes affect all first responders that attend these scenes,” Inspector Hogan said.
“There are so many jobs that don’t hit the media but involve the tragic loss of life or involve serious injury to drivers and passengers that the crash investigation unit roll out to daily. “They carry out a very difficult job around the clock at scenes and circumstances that are extremely challenging even for our longer serving members. They deal with grieving family and friends while meeting the challenging time restraints to have the matters ready for Court.
“They do these investigations to find the drivers at fault and see them put before the Court, but more importantly they give a voice representing those who have found themselves doing a daily activity, simply driving, that has gone so horribly wrong for them and has changed their life forever.”
They call it the “job lotto”, never sure of what a shift in the 24-hour Crash Investigation Unit will look like.
The constants are a team to be stationed in the Sydney CBD each peak hour, ready to respond to major crashes that have the potential to bring Sydney’s traffic to a standstill.
Back in Huntington there are high-speed cars and motorbikes lying idle in the “barn” but ready for the first phone call to a serious crash.
Not many days go by that such an SOS doesn’t come in.
Tuesday was a quiet morning, giving Sergeant Sergeant Brett Hobbins time to go through the array of tools the investigators have up their sleeve to piece together what caused a crash.
There’s what the driver tells them, to witness accounts, to state of the art technology that they prefer to keep close to their chest.
One little known gem in the arsenal is the little black box that controls the airbags fitted to most modern cars.
“We can actually tap in and gain data from these vehicles’ brakes, all that sort of stuff,” Sgt Hobbins explained.
“It’s a good guide as to what happened during a crash sequence and we can use that in court now.
“The device sits under the console or instrumental panel in the front of the car. It is used to activate seatbelts and airbag modules … it will wake up an airbag to deploy at any time and start recording data from set periods of time normally from about five seconds out from the time the airbag deploys itself and then writes the data for us to download later on.”
As investigators head out to a wreckage yard at Revesby to further examine a car that’s been involved in a crash a few days earlier, that call comes in.
There’s been a major crash in Prospect.
Two motorbikes and a car have crashed on the busy Great Western Highway.
The investigators are on the spot in no time, assess the scene and do what needs to be done for the survivors.
One motorbike rider they can’t help. He is respectively covered with cloth and a tent placed over his body until he can be removed from the scene.
Then their work kicks in.
Sergeant Brady Fisher marked the road with spray paint.
“The entire collision scene can have evidence on the road that may be relevant, some pre and some post-collision,” Sgt Fisher explains.
“Pre-collision evidence is especially useful in interpreting the collision sequence, looking for much more than just tyre marks.
“Usually there is road surface damage, scratches that can determine vehicle movement, area of impact and can even get as detailed as clothing and skin particles depending on what type of collision we are investigating.
“In the event we don’t have CCTV or dash-camera evidence, capturing this road evidence is vital to that interpretation. We can perform mathematical equations to work out speed travelled if sufficient evidence exists solely based on road evidence.
“Usually there is someone allocated to photographing the vehicles and the scene evidence.”
The investigators get the best picture of what went on that the evidence and witnesses can shape, before the journey for yet another family through grief begins.
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Originally published as The carnage that haunts them: On the road with the NSW Police crash investigation unit
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