1996. A man lost his 21 year old daughter, (I don’t wish to say who the man was but he was a person, someone alive and loving, someone who cared and loved, cried, tried and would have died for his daughter, the girl in this story. A fellow policeman). The girl had been run over at a intersection, at a shopping centre, hit by a car and thrown to the road. It wasn’t the drivers fault but that fact didn’t really help anyone. It was just after lunchtime , the sky had been lightly overcast and it was cool with a bit of a breeze from the south. A mild winter weekend.
She had been with her best friend at the bridal boutique, having the final fitting of her bridesmaid gown and her friend’s bridal gown. They came out of the shops, all giggles and smiles, enjoying themselves, talking twenty to the dozen. Holding each other in delight they ran across the lights without looking at anything other them themselves without a care in the whole world. What could go wrong? One was hit, the other wasn’t.
The girl was carried 20 or 30 metres up the road. She never knew what had hit her.
The bride ran over to her friend but there was nothing to be done, an impact over 40 kilometres an hour is marginally survivable and this was a 60 zone.
I arrived a shortly after the first police. The intersection was closed down. A damaged car was stopped just past the intersection and a covered body behind it. A crowd had gathered and was milling about doing what crowds always do, leering, being titillated and shocked at the same time. It was someone else’s misfortune not theirs.
I was told by the local police that the ambulance refused to transport the girl’s body because ‘we don’t transport dead people’ and the government contractors (the body snatchers) were out of the area but wouldn’t be long. It was a state of affairs I had never come across before. I told the senior local officer to fix it.
I’d been working for a half hour or so at the scene when a gentleman emerged from the crowd of on lookers. I recognized from my days in the drug squad. I have a good memory for faces but this guy had Jerusalem tattooed across his forehead, so he was pretty recognisable. He was somewhat agitated but spoke coherently and had a good point. He wanted to know why the poor girl was still lying on the road. Good God I thought, I turned and cringed, she was still there, covered sure enough but still there. Why did it take a certified lunatic to point out what obviously should have been done sooner. The local wallies hadn’t given a fuck, they’d washed their hands of it, the Crash Unit here, they can take care of it. Later, I even had to notify the girls parents.
I’d asked the locals to arrange a very limited number of things, one of which was to have the girl moved and they didn’t bother and I got too busy and failed to check. So I apologized to Mr Jerusalem and called the rescue squad and had them do the right thing and move the poor girl off the road. After a while the body snatchers turned up and took her to hospital.
I met mum and dad and the rest of the family at the hospital and broke the bad news, whoever rang them originally had just said to go to the hospital as she’d been in a car accident. It came with a sicken sense of loss when they saw me. The dad was a cop and as soon as he saw me he imagined the worst and it came true. My unit had garnered the nickname ‘the death police’.
It could be a loathsome job.
