Investigation of Death of Jake Hughes Demonstrates Systemic Problems
When the public does not have access to the basis for death investigations no questions are asked even when the basis is flawed. This also applies to families who are kept in the dark about how conclusions were reached in assessments of their members’ deaths. In many instances the recognition that evidence about an investigation is unknown does not reach the public psyche. One only needs to look at the results of the infamous Humboldt Broncos tragedy to see how the holding back of the police investigation report was hardly given any mention in the official news media, yet so many were willing to draw conclusions and instruct the public as to what they should believe.
A new revelation has unfolded in an article written by Mark Kelley, Co-host of the CBC “The Fifth Estate” and posted to the CBC website on April 7, 2019. The story revolves around the death of a 19-year-old man, Jake Hughes, who was killed in an ATV incident on August 20, 2012. The official story was originally publicized that Hughes was the driver of the ATV that was travelling along a woodlot trail when an impact occurred with a metal bar of a barrier that was placed across the trail. Another rider of the ATV, Taylor Rivando, 18, was determined to be the rear passenger.
The father of Jake Hughes, Sam, happened to be a 15-year member of the Niagara Regional Police Service and, in my view, this likely played a large part in why the story did not just disappear like so many other faceless problems of the past. By the accounts noted in the CBC article Sam Hughes did not just lie down and accept the conclusions of the OPP investigation. Through his request made via the Freedom of Information he “eventually got his hands on the details of the OPP investigation” which led him to more questions. The article described how Sam Hughes was in a better position than most to understand the tricks of the trade in that he recognized what typically happens in police investigations when one of two persons in a vehicle dies and the surviving person claims that the deceased was the driver. “It’s the oldest trick in the book” Hughes was quoted as saying.
Well yes, in my experience, it is a very old trick indeed. One that any investigator should consider. But few persons in the public world, who have never been involved with, or have little or no knowledge of police investigations, would think to consider that possibility. The public has grown up bombarded with various TV crime shows where the good guy always wears white, impossibly complex death scenarios are unraveled in 30 minutes, and the perpetrator either admits to his/her crime or meets a deserved, deadly reward. Well, real life is nowhere like that and Sam Hughes was in a position of experience to know.
As the pathology report concluded that Jake Hughes died from the metal bar striking his chest and proceeding into his neck and head, it is easy to see how the OPP investigation would conclude that it was the driver of the ATV seated in the front who would be exposed to such an impact. But the alternative hypothesis was that the driver, Rivando, ducked when he detected the bar at the last instance. At least that was what one witness heard from Rivando shortly after the collision. The OPP however determined that it was not possible for the driver to duck under the bar. Sam Hughes then went on to prove them wrong. He obtained a similar ATV and created a similar barrier and reportedly showed that it could be done.
Other information from witnesses at a beach where the two riders were seen before the crash indicated that Hughes was the passenger and that the two could not have changed places as claimed by others.
The most compelling evidence, from my viewpoint, is that scrapes were noted on the helmet of Rivando and red paint was noted on the bar of the barrier which might confirm that Rivando’s helmet just barely slipped underneath the bar. However the OPP did nothing further to match the scrape and paint transfer. Whether this is an incorrect conclusion or not is not the point. The fact that there was no attempt to conduct an inquiry is what matters.
One of the interesting parts of the CBC article is how the OPP delivered the investigation to the Peel Regional Police to review and also to the Missouri State Highway Patrol. The reason given for involving the Missouri police is because the “U.S. had state-of-the-art reconstruction software”.
I have some knowledge of what is available with respect to computer assisted reconstruction and simulation programs. Even when I first joined the University of Western Ontario Accident Research Team on October 1, 1980 there was a small room designated as the living quarters of the massive PDP-11 computer that housed the highly advanced CRASH program. I think the computer had the processing capability of a modern hand-held calculator. But it looked very impressive. You typed in responses to dozens of questions and then waited as CRASH spilled out the precise answers to how the collision occurred. While CRASH was state-of-the-art technology back then and youngens would snicker now at its base computing, it has been refined over the years and the physics behind its calculations is still valid. A similar cousin-program of CRASH was the SMAC simulation program which I later experimented with in the middle 1980s and beyond. Both programs were developed for the U.S NHTSA programs which still run today, operating a slightly different version of CRASH called SMASH I believe. I am also aware of PC-CRASH which is a program that came out of Europe and has become about as common in usage as the CRASH and SMAC programs. Various vendors have also jumped into the marketplace, sometimes using CRASH and SMAC as the basis for their own versions of computer reconstruction and simulation. I have always advocated that police should be exposed to and use computer reconstruction and simulation programs but that has never occurred. With the more recent advancements in event data recorders (EDRs), or “Black Boxes”, police have chosen this technology for their purposes, primarily, I believe, because EDRs provide a blind number to things like travel speed, speed change from impact and other pre-crash values that do not necessarily require much technical knowledge expect in knowing how to download the data and how to interpret it.
So coming back to the issue of the “state-of-the-art software” utilized by the Missouri State Police, I am aware of a number of forensic-engineering, consulting firms in the southern Ontario who possess such so-called “state-of-the-art software”. I have been battling it out over the years with many of these experts in exchanging expert reports so that our mutual clients could come to an agreement with respect to civil litigation claims rather than going to trial. While computerized reconstruction and simulation does not guarantee a proper and just analysis it is often said by some sarcastics amongst us that it allows the analyst to get to the wrong answer faster. There is some true to that. But an expert who is honest, properly trained, experienced, and is truly looking for the truth, can be greatly assisted by such programs. The point is that the OPP need not have gone to Missouri to get an opinion, there are many experts in the immediate vicinity in southern Ontario who would be happy to provide an independent opinion, often at no cost, if it meant that justice was properly served.
At the risk of sounding too critical of the OPP I have to respond to the comment reportedly made by Chief Supt. Bernie Murphy, commander of the OPP’s professional standards bureau, in his 2016 letter to Sam Hughes in which he reportedly wrote “Since the time of this motor vehicle accident, a three-tier review process has been put in place in the [Technical Collision Investigation] and Reconstruction Program”. If that statement is meant to provide some assurance that all is well, I can assure everyone that it is not. I will give two instances where I recently gave testimony at criminal trials involved serious motor vehicle collisions that demonstrates just part of the problem with some police investigations and the three-tier program.
With respect to an impaired driving case that involved the death of an innocent party in a head-on collision the OPP investigation was reviewed by two police reviewers. Yet none of these reviews found anything wrong with the following scenario: After a very severe impact one of the severely damaged vehicles sustained major damage to its wheels before it slid several car lengths to its final rest position. In conducting a momentum analysis the police reconstructionist determined that the vehicle had to be travelling at 2 km/h at the time that it separated from impact and it commenced its slide to rest. Think about that for a moment. Picture in your mind this heavily damaged vehicle with heavy damage to (at least) one of its wheels, separating from impact and commencing its travel to rest at 2 km/h, where would you expect it to go? Six inches? But the momentum analysis told the reconstructionist what the answer was. And apparently the two other police experts who reviewed the investigation also relied on the truth of this momentum analysis. But where was the common sense?!!
In a second instance a police reconstructionist had access to an eye-witness account of another police officer who claimed to have since the impaired driver travelling at over 150 km/h before impact. A proper momentum and energy analysis along with physical evidence proved that this could not be so. But to match the witness police officer’s account the reconstructionist conducted an analysis of the post-impact speed of the vehicle and then, knowing he would be in trouble once he completed the collision phase of the reconstruction, simply told the court that the massive destruction that could be seen in the crush of the two vehicles clearly demonstrated that the impaired driver must have been travelling much faster than the partial analysis that he conducted. Perhaps the most outrageous of his acts was to take a yaw mark, that was clearly visible as a yaw mark in the on-site photographs, and use it to decelerate the vehicle at a rate equivalent to a vehicle which is sliding with maximum brake application. When he saw my countering comments in one of my reports he then reduced the level of deceleration by dividing the maximum rate by two. For those unfamiliar the issue here is a break-down.
Maximum deceleration from braking on a dry pavement is often 0.7g or higher. Yaw marks are tire marks that are created when a vehicle rotates but its tires are not locked, thus producing a curved tire mark that contains striations and is very different in appearance from a tire mark produced by maximum braking. Deceleration from a yaw mark varies between 0.2 and 0.4g depending on the degree to which the vehicle has rotated with respect to its travel direction.
So imagine the tire mark is 10 metres long. Using the maximum braking deceleration of 0.7g the reconstructionist comes up with a speed loss of about 42 km/h in that 10 metre distance. Since the mark showed that the vehicle had been at an early stage of rotation the reconstructionist should have used the lower end of the yaw deceleration near 0.2g which would have resulted in a speed loss of about 22 km/h. In attempts to repair the erred calculations by dividing the maximum braking deceleration by two he would have used a rate of about 0.35g, which is better, but it is still wrong. It is wrong because that is not the way that the process of analysis works. It demonstrates that either the reconstructionist did not know how to handle a yaw mark deceleration, or worse, he did know but he was attempting to increase the speed calculations where ever he could to match the witness police officer’s statement. The point is that if he had used a computer reconstruction or simulation program the “cleverness of his confusions” would have been easily revealed because his inputs could be easily seen. But by conducting a home-made analysis that sounded plausible to the court these problems were not easily detected.
While I believe that the vast majority of police are good and honest, I have also observed instances like those noted above where either improper training, lack of understanding, or purposeful attempts to reach an unwarranted conviction or result are never drawn out and corrected. That process leaves a black mark on all officers including those who do not deserve it. It is damaging because persons such as myself must spread such news to others in articles like this, who then pass it on to yet others and so on.
Police, like myself, and everyone else around me, are not perfect. We all make honest mistakes and sometimes we twist the truth without recognizing the seriousness of the consequences. What we all need, to control the times when we do not function as perfect snowflakes, is a system that is in place that reduces the frequencies of those imperfections while also reducing the consequences of them.
The OPP had it right, to some degree, in creating a so-called three-tiered review process. But it has failed to understand that even three police officers may not have the technical knowledge, experience or motivation to correct an error. Yet, family members like Sam Hughes are far more motivated to expose problems even though they may, at times, also be in error. The point is that the exposure of police investigations outside of the police community may be uncomfortable to police but this exposure can lead to the correction of errors and may provide greater justice. Surely police have broader shoulders to understand that what criticisms may develop are minimal if an unjust result is overturned as a result of the exposure of their erred conclusions. Alternatively, even when persons like Sam Hughes are wrong, family members can rest with some greater peace through the education they gain by conducting their own analysis and being exposed to countering opinions that demonstrate where their conclusions failed.
Where we presently fail is in the degree to which we hold police investigations secret from the public and particularly family members who deserve the answers to the questions they ask. We are not a society that kicks over the wheelchair of an invalid just for our amusement. We are a society that attempts to be impartial, fair, and unrecognizing of skin colour, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability and so on. In compliance with those beliefs the majority of us who sit quietly on the sidelines while injustices prevail need to listen and watch more closely, and speak up when we detect that those injustices are at play.
I am very much appreciative of Mark Kelley and the CBC for creating the article about Jake Hughes that may draw attention to the systemic problems in police investigations that are often unexposed.
New Head-Up-Display On Windshields Is Not A Distraction?
What do we define as distraction? Is it additional information that is processed thus slowing a drivers perception/response to the outside environment? If so then more detailed information being displayed on windshields of new vehicles could be viewed as distractions.
New technology like advanced HUD sounds great but does it also bring with it new problems?
In a March, 2019 article by Dan Carney of the Automotive Engineering magazine discussing head-up-displays (HUD) the market for greater information being displayed on vehicle windshields revealed that more information of greater brightness is expected in the future.The article quoted other research sources that indicated the worldwide HUD market in 2017 was 2.9 billion and would rise to 18 billion by 2027. Improvements in the image quality and size being projected on windshields mean than more information will be able to be moved from the instrument cluster and onto the windshield. As noted in the article:
“Larger and brighter full-colour displays provide the opportunity to move more driver information off the instrument panel and onto the windscreen, where it can be seen more effortlessly by the driver. In addition to the typical digital speed reading, the HUD can convey data about the current speed limit, adaptive cruise control system’s status, indicate turn signal use, and flash collision-avoidance warnings. In manual-transmission-equipped sports cars, HUDs provide upshift lights light those in Formula 1 race cars.”
There can be a conflict between useful information and too much information, even when the information being displayed appears to be relevant to the driving task. When a driver needs to detect information about the exterior environment he/she does not need to know that the turn signal has been activated or other non-emergency information. While some information is nice to have, too much information can also distract the driver from detecting the most important information for the current scenario at hand. This can be no different than texting on a smartphone as some portion of the driver’s information processing is taken away from detecting the most relevant information.
City Using Deep Public Pockets In An Unreasonable Court Challenge
When you have unlimited tax dollars to pay the costs you can challenge court rulings all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC). That is the knowledge that can be gained from the recently released judgment of the SCC involving the liability of the City of Hamilton with respect to a 2007 collision at the intersection of Upper Centennial Parkway and Green Mountain Road.
“Gentlemen, it is obvious that I have struck out, however, I am The Mighty Casey, and Article 56 of the Municipal rules governing baseball etiquette indicates that I get another try because I am so nice”
The subject collision involved a female driver, Dawn Safranyos, who attempted to make a left turn from westbound Green Mountain Road, onto southbound Upper Centennial Parkway. A northbound Chevrolet Cavalier driven by Daryl McHugh struck the Safranyhos vehicle in the intersection thus causing serious injuries to several child occupants. This collision occurred at approximately 0100 hours and therefore the darkness would have been a factor in Ms. Safranyos’ evaluation of where she should stop at the stop-sign-controlled intersection governing her direction of travel. A traffic stop bar (a wide, white painted line) is generally painted at such a location to guide drivers to the correct stop position where she could properly see approaching traffic on Upper Centennial Parkway. Because the City of Hamilton removed the stop bar Ms. Safraynos testified that she stopped at the stop sign, further back from where she would if the line had been present. This, along with the presence of a guardrail which partially obstructed her line of sight, were the key features of the site that led the trial judge to determine that the City of Hamilton was 25% at fault. Ms. Safranyhos was judged 50% at fault and Mr. McHugh was 25% at fault for the collision.
The Appeal Court enlightened the ongoings of the original trial which were not published. For example the trial judge observed that the City of Hamilton failed to deliver three key witnesses who were City officials that would have explained the intersection design and the City’s policies with respect to matters such as painting stop bars. The judge inferred that this was because, had those municipal officials testified at trial they would have prejudiced the City’s stance. If this tactic by the City appears unusual it is not. It is something that I have personally experienced while testifying at trial. In some instances a judge recognizes the tactic for what it is while in other very similar instances it is never addressed.
By common sense the City of Hamilton should have recognized that it shared some liability for the collison. The 25% determined by the trial judge should have been accepted and the matter should have been done with. But that was not the case. The City first appealed the matter to the Ontario Court of Appeal. The Appeal court judgment was written by Justice Paciocco. In the Appeal judgment the liability of the City of Hamilton was upheld whereas the liability of Mr. McHugh was dismissed. If I read the result correctly, If McHugh’s 25% was removed from the equation then the remaining liability was shared by the two remaining parties, Safranyhos and the City of Hamilton. So it would seem that the Appeal process would result in the City of Hamilton being responsible for more of the damages after the appeal than beforehand. Not satisfied the City of Hamilton then Appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, where it lost that appeal without explanation.
While I am not a legal expert I recognize the substantial costs that would be incurred by the City of Hamilton in the two Appeals that it lost. These costs are not borne by the City’s representatives, whether they be the staff or politicians. They are borne by the general taxpayers of Hamilton. What notice is made to the general taxpayers of the conclusions of these legal proceedings is likely to be very minimal. Although the Hamilton Spectator newspaper published an article about the matter it also published another article explaining that the latest tax hike would be 2.5%. No doubt the average taxpayer would pay attention to the second article because it is a direct reference to his/her pocketbook. But the taxpayer would be clueless to the implications of that first article.
The point is, certain deficiencies in roadways do not need to exist. They can be simply identified by conducting regular inspections of roads. Does the City of Hamilton conduct such regular inspections of their roadways? And if they do why were these problems, that became so costly to the City, not identified and corrected? In my experience the City of Hamilton is not an exceptional case. The very problem of identifying and correcting road safety hazards before they become deadly exists throughout Ontario and beyond.
Failure To Reveal Evidence Is The Secondary Humboldt Broncos Tragedy
Strong opinions have been expressed about fault and what requires changing as a result of the Humboldt Broncos tragedy. Yet there is an unexplainable unwillingness to recognize crucial evidence affecting the validity of those conclusions is still missing. Above all, the RCMP report of their investigation has never been made public. Yet it is only the RCMP who had exclusive access to the evidence that no one else could document or examine. If we truly want to make changes that are based on the objective evidence we need to examine the evidence ahead of time.
As an accident investigator, reconstructionist and road safety researcher for the past 38 years I can see there are many concerns about this tragedy. Having examined numerous expert reports and police investigations I am aware of how conclusions can become vastly astray of what they should be, even when they are drawn by seemingly reputable, educated and experienced individuals. My advice is that all involved, whether they be family, politicians, news media reporters or the general public, request that the report of the RCMP investigation be made public so that independent investigators, reconstructionists and researchers can examine the data and provide independent comments for all to evaluate. Not doing so makes the tragedy that much more tragic as lessons that could be gained from it will never be learned.
Police Nab One Tail-Gater But 87 Others Missed
A London Free Press website article discussed the OPP use of an aircraft to catch tailgating vehicles. A photo was displayed showing a tractor-trailer that was travelling along Highway 401 east of London, Ontario on the afternoon of Sunday, March 24, 2019. The truck was allegedly travelling at less that 10 metres (i.e. about 2 car lengths) behind another truck in the middle lane of the highway. It was noted that the offending trucker was charged with stunt driving. Such a charge caused a seven-day license suspension for the driver and an impoundment of the tractor-trailer. While the action of the tailgating truck driver was dangerous there is more to this issue.
What has not been discussed is how often this action of tailgating occurs on Highway 401. In the vicinity of where the charge was laid Highway 401 has a traffic volume (AADT) of over 70,000 vehicles per day and the numbers of vehicles performing these tailgating actions is so large there would not be enough OPP officers in the whole Province of Ontario to ticket them all. This comment is not made without supporting research.
Recently Gorski Consulting has been conducting traffic observations along Highway 401, including the incidence of tailgating. In a recent news item uploaded to the Gorski Consulting website (“Highway 401 Safety Issues – Gaps Between Vehicles”, December 16, 2018) data was presented from videotaping at four sites between London and Tilbury, Ontario. Part of the research involved documenting the time gap between the rear of a lead vehicle and the front end of a following vehicle as they passed a specific reference point on the Highway. Fifteen minutes of videotape was taken from each of the four sites and numbers of vehicles travelling at gaps of less than 2 seconds we counted. Out of 532 vehicles, 98 such vehicles, or about 18.4 %, were found to be travelling below the noted 2-second gap. If there were 70,000 vehicles passing the 400 metre distance were the observations were made then about 12,880 drivers would be driving at less than the 2-second gap each day. At a speed of 100 km/h a 2-second gap would be about 55 metres or over 10 car lengths. So it is substantially longer that the 2-car-length gap reported in the London Free Press article.
In order to come closer to the gap discussed in the article, the Gorski Consulting data was re-examined to select only those incidents where the gap was less than one second. Only 16 vehicles were found to be tailgating in this fashion, or about 3.0% of the observed vehicles. Never-the-less, this would mean, given a traffic volume of 70,000, that about 2100 such tailgaters would exist in that 400 metre distance, every day. This could be narrowed to at least 88 vehicles every hour. This represents a great many drivers who tailgate but are not nabbed by the OPP.
This reality is not convenient because in order to reduce these numbers police would have to employ vast numbers of cruisers stopped along the highway to catch a reasonable number of offenders. Yet it is known that conducting traffic stops along the busy Highway 401 is dangerous to police, and also to other road users if a chaotic event is created. Aerial patrols can only catch a limited number of offenders and there is still the issue that these offenders must be pulled over.
In this example from videotaping of westbound traffic on Highway 401 near Elgin Road, a transport truck is tailgating another truck in the right lane while a third truck is in the process of entering the lane from an on-ramp. The tailgating driver cannot see the truck entering the right until the truck in front changes lanes, as shown in the photo below.
Fortunately, this instance the tailgating truck was able to see the truck entering the right lane in time and a collision was avoided. However these are the kinds of complications that occur when visibility ahead in reduced by tailgating.
A solution is not easy or simple. However in order to consider some solutions, the Ontario Ministry of Transportation, police and the public first need to recognize and acknowledge the extent of the problem. Publicizing that a single driver was nabbed and faces dire repercussions will not solve the problem when so many other offenders escape those repercussions. When many drivers travelling along Highway 401 are from out of the Province and many are from U.S. states, it is of minimal benefit to publish an article in a local news outlet about the fate of one driver as those out-of-town drivers will likely not even hear/read of the charges.
Yet the consequences of tailgating are major. Tailgating reduces the line of sight of drivers who cannot react to events that they cannot see. This may be one of the reasons why so many multi-vehicle, rear-end collisions occur, often with fatal results. Our society needs to spend more time discussing this difficult problem with a provision of cold hard facts.
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