Police Employ Electronics To Investigate Serious Accidents

By Andrew Gorosko

Town police recently employed an array of electronic devices during an equipment training project at Fairfield Hills intended to keep them prepared to thoroughly investigate motor vehicle accidents involving fatalities and serious physical injuries.

Police use the sophisticated electronic measuring devices to record the technical data that may be used as evidence in court proceedings in such cases, explained Officer David Kullgren, who is a member of the police department’s traffic enforcement unit.

Officer Kullgren took part in the training project with Officer Steve Ketchum, who also is in the traffic enforcement squad, and Officer Jeff Silver, who is the department’s commercial truck inspector.

On a street corner near Shelton House at Fairfield Hills, the three officers reviewed the correct use of several expensive electronic devices that police use to create three-dimensional diagrams and generate mapping that documents the dynamics of serious accidents.

The electronic equipment is similar to the devices that surveyors use to record spatial measurements.

Besides manipulating the electronic measuring devices, police practiced using equipment that allows them to gauge the minimum speed of vehicles which have left evidentiary skid marks on pavement.

The data that police glean during the investigations are inserted into mathematical formulas that provide them with empirical information that can serve as evidence in court proceedings.

Such detailed data that describe the dynamics of collisions are especially useful to police in investigating accidents in which no witnesses are available, Officer Kullgren said.

As the three policemen practiced using the electronic equipment at the four-way intersection, a number of pedestrians and people walking their dogs passed through the area, observing as the men calibrated the gear.

Police Chief Michael Kehoe said, “There’s a genuine need for that [equipment] when it comes to a need for re-creating accidents.”

“It helps us mark [evidence] very accurately at the scene,” he said.

The gear is useful in documenting evidence that is found at accidents in which the collision debris is spread over a wide area, the chief said.

The last fatal motor vehicle accident that the town police department investigated on a local road was a late night one-car collision that occurred on Mt Pleasant Road on Easter Sunday in April 2006. A Danbury woman died in that crash.