In the late 80s, I was a police officer assigned to uniformed patrol. Early (0100 hrs) one morning I saw a motorcycle with two people on it - a rider and a passenger. Neither was wearing a helmet. At the time, helmets were required by state law.

I tried to stop the motorcycle, but the rider decided to flee. A pursuit followed - just me alone in a patrol car and the motorcycle with a rider and a passenger. The rider initially went down secondary streets. There was little to no traffic. Speeds were 55-60 mph. The rider continued to flee and I followed him.

The rider eventually turned onto a residential street and drove into a residential neighborhood. This particular street has several abrupt dips in it for flood control. These dips are immediately before and after each cross street. The motorcycle hit the first set of dips and nearly wrecked. At that point, I decided the danger to the rider and passenger outweighed the traffic violation. I decided to terminate the pursuit.

I slowed my patrol car, looked down to turn off my emergency lights and pick up the radio mic to tell communications that I had disengaged from the pursuit. As I was doing this, the motorcycle hit the set of dips at the next cross street, lost control and ran into a utility pole. Both the rider and the passenger were ejected. The rider was seriously injured and the passenger was fatally injured - she survived transport to the Level One trauma center but died during surgery.

All this took place early in the morning on 10/31 - the morning before Halloween.

The motorcycle rider admitted he’d drunk two twelve-packs of beer and admitted he was drunk. The rider had a bad internal bleeding, which required surgery and multiple blood transfusions. As a result of all this, when a blood sample was taken after surgery, it showed almost no alcohol in the rider’s blood - the blood with the alcohol was lost due to internal bleeding. Transfusions of fresh blood were clean of any alcohol. So the blood containing alcohol was gone and replaced with fresh blood that had no alcohol in it.

The district attorney rejected the DWI case against the rider, commenting for the news that he’d never seen such a low blood alcohol concentration.

All this took place before body-cameras and before video cameras were mounted in the patrol cars. I had zero evidence to support my story of how things happened. The PD I worked for made it clear they didn’t believe I’d backed out of the chase before the motorcycle wrecked. The department accused me of ramming the motorcycle with my patrol car and causing the fatal wreck.

The case was presented to a grand jury and I was no-billed (there was no evidence I had rammed the motorcycle. Then the victim’s parents sued the police department and me individually. The lawsuit dragged on for a decade until it was dismissed.

So in the end, a lot of people within the department actually believed I’d rammed the motorcycle - in spite of the fact that an internal affairs investigation with forensic examination of the patrol car concluded there had not been any physical contact between the patrol car and the motorcycle. Internal affairs cleared me of any wrongdoing, and a grand jury no-billed me, citing clear evidence that the patrol car had not made contact with the motorcycle.

Still, a young mother was dead. Two little boys were deprived of their mother. There were people I worked with at the PD who still thought i was responsible for the death of this female passenger.

The Moral Injury: I reassured myself that I had been doing my job as I was supposed to do it. I’d backed out of the pursuit when it got too risky, but hadn’t had time to let the dispatcher know I’d backed out of the pursuit - it happened in seconds.

In my mind, I had the guilt of conflicting feelings. I had the stigma of not being believed by my peers. Someone died because of the chase I started. And I still can’t clear that in my mind - was a traffic violation worth someone’s death?

Two little boys grew up without their mother. The fact that it happened on the morning of Halloween, those kids likely never had another good Halloween. The accident took place directly under street lights - I saw the woman go flying through the air twenty feet off the ground, then land on concrete.

After the lawsuit was over, I talked to the victim’s mother and she was very understanding, and told me she never believed I’d rammed the motorcycle and caused the wreck. But the victim’s father believes in his heart and in his mind that I caused his daughter’s death.

I know there are two men who grew up without a mom, and were told that I caused their suffering.