My first week

It was within my first week in the Police. As everyone knows, the general rule when you're that green is that you can barely breathe without permission—let alone drive a police vehicle by yourself.

I'd been sent down to the Coroner's to pick up or deliver some paperwork, one of those entry-level jobs we all get when we're first starting out. While I was there, a call came in: a single-vehicle crash, about 20 kilometres south, on a straight piece of road.

Sure enough, the Sergeant came over the radio, reminding me that I was the only unit available and asking me to head to the job—what we called a 1V. I was so green that I actually had to ask whether I was allowed to turn the red and blues on. That probably gives you a pretty good idea of where I was in the pecking order.

I arrived first.

One car versus a tree. The road was dead straight, but the vehicle had gone off a steep bank, hit a tree and effectively had the roof taken off. There had been five people in the car.

What I saw when I looked inside is something I'll never forget. One occupant was impaled by a tree branch through the centre of the back seat. The other four were deceased.

The scene was horrific. One woman, who I later learned was the injured man's girlfriend, had suffered catastrophic injuries to her head. Her hands were still perfectly cupped in her lap, holding one half of her brain, while the other half lay outside the vehicle near my boots.

The man impaled on the tree branch was still alive and surprisingly alert. He had been sitting amongst the others and had just purchased and consumed drugs with them. With the airbags deployed and powder hanging in the air, he was convinced the vehicle was on fire and was desperately trying to get out.

Every instinct in him was telling him to escape.

Every instinct in me was telling me not to move him.

I knew that moving him was going to finish him, but he was fighting to get free. Somehow, I managed to get him out of the vehicle, taking only a couple of minutes, and he collapsed beside the road as my Sergeant arrived.

A media helicopter was flying overhead, the scene was unfolding around us, and there I was—barely a week into the Police—standing at my first major fatal crash. I was send down the road to the next intersection, as traffic control, while the boss took over.

It was one hell of a way to learn just how quickly the job could go from delivering paperwork to dealing with the worst day of someone's life.