Our reconstructions help us to see if our data coincides with what the EDR gives us.”Įssential gear for FLAIR teams also includes a portable drag sled. But we can’t always depend on them being completely accurate. “Depending on the brand, we can get a lot of information from the control modules, like speed or steering angles or whether the seat belts were buckled – some will even give you graphs. “If your airbag deploys, there’s an EDR that records the last five seconds of pre-crash data and locks it in,” says Bueno, who opens a case jammed with data-extraction cables from every major car manufacturer. But some of the most useful snapshots, such as the event data recorders stored in air bags, are already on file, waiting for the law to catch up. Inclement weather, mainly fog, can hamper the efficacy of the Total System, which accounts for the old-school standbys that accompany each investigation. That’s the distance it took for the body of a pedestrian to come tumbling out from beneath the car that struck him. One of Pascoe’s most memorable homicide scenes covered a 1.8-mile sprawl. No two accidents, of course, are identical. But if the car is overturned or strikes a pedestrian and the pedestrian hits the windshield and goes over the top of the roof, then we’re definitely going to need a total 3-D view of the car.” “If you mainly have just front- and rear-end damage, you may not need to get the whole picture. “It all depends on the complexity of the accident,” says Pascoe. The more photos taken and uploaded, the richer the texture of the three-dimensional reconstruction. Placed at a distance from each other, the robotically programmed Total Station requires a single operator to triangulate and map the scene. The two-piece setup involves a theodolite – an optical device that measures horizontal and vertical angles between designated points – and an electronic distance measuring instrument (EDMI). FLAIR teams use two versions, the TS12 and the slightly more advanced TS13, to record the details of the deceased’s final moments on Earth. And witnesses’ footage and imagery often provides multiple angles of any given accident. But the biggest addition to the FHP tool kit is a digital survey system called the Leica Total Station. But technology has changed the game.įor one thing, cellphones are so ubiquitous, they forced highway emergency call boxes into obsolescence nearly a decade ago. The teams still carry fluorescent orange paint, rolling tape measures, levels and cameras. The tools FLAIR applies to homicide scenes make what their fathers worked with look sluggardly. Like Bueno, Pascoe’s dad also served with the state patrol. Billy Pascoe.Ī 31-year FHP veteran, Pascoe directs Troop F’s FLAIR unit as a first-line supervisor. Bueno concedes that documenting details for forensic science is probably in his blood. Bad decisions and lethal collisions always obey the laws of physics and express themselves in geometry. “We stay in our lane here,” he says, which means collecting enough evidentiary points to let homicide-scene data speak for itself. Judges, juries, lawyers and survivors can tussle over motives, meaning and intention. For someone to leave a scene where someone is deceased – that’s unconscionable.”ĭon’t ask Bueno to interpret what the elevated number means. “That means more people were not being accountable for their actions. But there was an overall increase in hit-and-runs involving death.” SHFMV data indicates 2020’s tally of 261 hit-and-run deaths was actually 44 more than in 2019. “And we had a decrease in hit-and-runs last year, to about 91,000. “Usually, we’ll have over 100,000 hit-and-runs a year,” says Bueno. But fatalities actually rose last year, to 3,303, up from 3,192 in 2019. Predictably, the total number of overall crashes for the year dropped significantly as well, to 340,410. To no one’s surprise, the number of traffic injuries requiring hospitalization, averaging roughly 1,500 a month, plummeted below 1,000 in April before bouncing quickly back to the norm in May. And at those levels, wrecks annually kill roughly 3,000 drivers, passengers, motorcyclists, pedestrians and bicyclists.īut something disturbing cropped up in the stats in pandemic-rattled 2020 when, for several zombie-apocalypse weeks last April, lockdown orders swept all roadways clean of traffic. Between local police and sheriff’s offices, FHP shoulders roughly a third of the response load.Īll told, automobiles were involved in 403,626 collisions across the state in 2018, according to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. The roadways in the nation’s third most populous state are always busy and bloody. Bueno is the public affairs officer for FHP Troop F, headquartered in Bradenton, and charged with monitoring a 10-county district in Southwest Florida.
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