This story was originally written for my restricted Facebook blog.  But why not share it with the rest of the world?  Its all about peace and love right?  Well, before you answer that, read on.

Dispatch was talking to a woman who had crawled to a nearby house after a car wreck. The house was abandoned and she had broken in to call 911.  She was claiming that someone else had died in the wreck. She was unfamiliar with the area, and could not give her specific location. It was 2am and we did not have a very good description of the accident scene, so it took forever to find the place. The fire department first found the vehicle which was at the bottom of a ditch beside the road near the entrance to a large piece of fenced property with several buildings. We were told that the patient who called was most likely at the residence which was about 200 yards up a private drive on the property.

I finally got on scene and the first thing I wanted to do was check the other occupant of the truck.  A fireman in the ditch told me that the other occupant had injuries incompatible, so I drove up onto the property looking for the girl.

It took forever. We drove to one building. No answer. Then another. Still no answer. Then another. Dispatch told us that she was starting to get weird and might be ready to pass out so we started playing the ‘whoop the siren game’ so she could tell dispatch if we were getting closer or farther away. Finally we found a little house all the way on the back half of the property, and we heard screaming inside. When we opened the door a dog came running at us and I was afraid I was going to have to do something horrible to it, but he ran up and licked us

The place was filthy. It looked like no one had been home in days. The floor was littered with piles of dog feces, and the smell of urine was overpowering. We got to the kitchen and found a girl in her mid 20’s with a death grip on the phone, slipping around in her own blood on the floor. Something chunky covered her head, plastering her hair to her face, but there was no real injury to her head. She said that the blood probably came from her husband. Her right wrist was deformed and obviously snapped in half. Her right thigh had a large puncture wound with avulsed skin. Fatty tissue and muscle was clearly visible. What follows is a synopsis of the story she gave:

She said that she was at a party with her husband, and that they were arguing. They both separated at the party and had a few drinks and talked to friends. Later when it was time to go home, the couple got into their Ford pickup with her husband as the driver. She said that it was not long after her husband began to drive that it was apparent that he was too drunk to pull it off. She confronted him about this and it was on. He refused to pull over and in fact started to drive faster, approaching speeds of 80 mph. The argument got worse and she yelled that he was going to kill them both. She claims that it was at that point that he looked over to her and said, “Fuck you, I will kill us both.” He then purposefully drove the car off the road and that was the cause of the accident.

Neither of them were wearing a seatbelt, and the truck rolled several times before coming to a rest at the bottom of the ditch. She was pinned by some twisted metal in the truck and her husband was unconscious and laying on top of her. She was able to push her unconscious husband out of the way, but had difficulty freeing her leg from the vehicle, which she said was the cause of her leg injury. After crawling through the window, she could see a light off in the distance and decided to try and reach it to call 911. So with her snapped wrist and her wounded leg, she started crawling towards the light. By her account it took a couple of hours. She couldn’t walk. She had to cross a couple of sections of barb wire fence. It was pretty cold and she had to give up and rest a couple of times.

She says that the first house she came to was locked up tight. She cried and screamed on the porch for awhile, but no one came. So she started crawling towards the next light off in the distance. When she got to this one, it was locked too. But she was able to break the window with a rock and use the phone in the kitchen. This is how we found her. The crew and myself were about to place the patient on a backboard when a state trooper came strolling in. He was a big corn-fed lookin’ fella, short on IQ. He had a certain kind of swagger that some of those state troopers have, with his chest sticking out like a rooster. He found the patient as we did, covered in blood and screaming with an obviously broken wrist and the large puncture wound in her thigh. He asked, “Are you going to transport her?” I thought about saying, “No Corn-Fed, I’m going to leave her here,” but I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The patient was hysterical and we were having a hard time trying to get her to be still so that we could bandage her wounds and get her onto a backboard. Corn-Fed started to question her about the accident, and at one point suggested that she may have been the driver of the vehicle instead of her husband. This made her go ape, and she began to lift her head up from the board just as we had placed a cervical collar on her and started to tape her head down. The trooper pressed this line of questioning and repeatedly tried to get her to admit that she was the driver of the vehicle. She became even more hysterical and difficult to control. We managed to get her calm enough to stabilize her head to the board and we carried her out of the house with the trooper in tow continuing his accusations.

After loading the patient into the ambulance I was going to go back to the scene of the MVA to make absolutely sure there were no signs of life in her husband before I left scene to transport downtown. While I was getting back into the chase car I crossed paths with the state trooper and took the opportunity to tell him, “Look, I know you were just trying to do your job, but we are trying to do ours, and in the future could you not antagonize patients like that.” At that point he became openly rude to me, stood up as straight as he could, stuck out his chest, and mockingly yelled, “Oh yes sir! Whatever you say, sir!”

“Alright, you ignorant redneck. Go off and play cop with your little plastic badge if you want to.  Just try to unfuck yourself before you decided to protect and serve one of my patient’s again.  Pick your knuckles up off the ground and fuck off, okay?”

It was obvious that Corn-Fed was not wanting to have any sort of constructive conversation about this subject, so I took the opportunity to berate him a little. This took him back and he wasn’t really sure what to do, so I just walked around him and got in my chase car.

I drove back up to the scene of the accident, but upon reaching the gate, I found another state trooper vehicle blocking our exit from the property. Now there was plenty of room to park on either side of this gate, but this other genius decided to park on a cattle guard directly between the posts of the gate leading onto the property. Because of this I was unable to access the accident scene. I asked dispatch on the radio to inform the trooper to move the vehicle.  The trooper actually got on the radio and said that the keys were in it and that I could move it myself.

So I got into his car and took the opportunity to back it into the biggest pothole I could find.  On my way out I thought about chucking his keys in the woods, but I decided to take the high road and simply lose them in the floor board.

I finally got to the wreck and crawled down in the ditch to see if there was any hope for the woman’s husband, but his head was split open and halfway torn off his neck. One of the firemen was exchanging wise cracks with me while we made our way back up the slope. That’s when he told me that I had apparently angered the officers on scene and they were all already talking about how I had complained about ‘antagonizing’ the patient. This was only minutes later so the trooper must have made it a priority to complain about this to other officers. He also must have done it on the radio since he was still up by the house.

Well, you know me. I didn’t let it go. I wrote an epic three page memo and turned it into the Colonel that commands that state trooper post.  Here is anexcerpt from my formal complaint:

“When I transported the patient to ________ she repeatedly expressed shock and dismay at how an officer could treat her in such a way after such a horrible experience. She broke into tears several times about this and asked, “Aren’t they supposed to help people?”

I have the same question, and the purpose of this memo is to lodge a formal complaint about the attitudes and behaviors of the troopers on scene that night. I realize that troopers are trained to gain information when the opportunity presents itself. However, it is my hope that this training also tells them not to interfere with patient care being performed on someone who has serious wounds. It is also my hope that such training would not supersede basic common sense. I have no detective training whatsoever. However, all of my patient’s wounds were on the right side suggesting that she was in the passenger seat. A responder at the scene of the accident also told me that the occupant of the car was sitting in the driver’s seat, but was slumped far over onto the passenger seat. Both of these facts would suggest that her story was true. Even if her story was not believable, an officer should not interfere with patient care to the point where injuries could be worsened, no matter what suspicions exist. I also do not appreciate the rude and mocking behavior displayed when I politely tried to discuss this with the trooper.

It is my understanding that it is the duty of state troopers to protect and serve the public. I would imagine that they are also there to detect crime. However, it is my understanding public service is a priority. This state trooper encountered someone who had been in a terrible crash, removed her dead husband from on top of her, seriously injured herself exiting the vehicle, and spent hours crawling towards help while going into shock. This state trooper encountered this individual covered in blood, and seriously injured. Was his first instinct to protect and to serve? No. It was to aggravate the situation, accuse the patient of a crime, and mock and treat other responders rudely. Another trooper decided to park in such a way as to block other resources from accessing the scene and taking patients to the hospital.

The purpose of this memo is to report these events and ask for some investigation into the behavior of the officers on scene. I have been a paramedic since 1996, and have never encountered such rude or intimidating behavior towards myself or even a patient who was obviously guilty of a crime, much less someone like our patient who was obviously a victim. If I continue to work in this area, I would like some assurance that working with the state troopers will be an asset rather than something to be avoided whenever possible. After my experience the other night, I will think long and hard about whether to call this agency to my assistance.”

This event occurred several months ago.  I have never received an answer to my memo.  Apparently they did not see this as very important.  Color me surprised.  Yet another young idiot with no education, and no tact, taking the easiest point of entry to feeling important.  In the end, the patient was very grateful for our assistance.  I heard through the grapevine that that she was never charged with anything, and that even though no one ever answered my memo, it did contribute to making life a living hell for the officer.  I also heard that the young woman was shunned by the family of the deceased.  No one would speak to her during the funeral, and most went out of their way to shoot her looks of anger so that she would feel as uncomfortable as humanly possible at the funeral of her husband who tried to kill her.

Again, I find myself struggling to find a moral to this story.  But I am coming up empty.  The world is a dark and scary place, people.  Tread lightly.

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