Woman Upset Over Encounter With Deer, Wsp

The last thing Carolyn Magee needed after hitting a deer and rolling her Subaru was a lecture and a $137 impound bill.

The Washington State Patrol says it didn’t lecture, but handled Carolyn with businesslike efficiency.

Either way, Carolyn’s early morning encounter with WSP on June 10 exasperated her for its lack of compassion.

“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” she says, her frustration hardly diminished a week after the accident.

“She (WSP’s dispatcher) didn’t even ask how I was.”

Carolyn had left Wenatchee at 2 a.m. to reach Coeur d’Alene and her job as a swim coach by 5:30 a.m. She lives in Coeur d’Alene and her husband lives in Wenatchee. They spend weekends together.

Her apple-red 1995 Subaru, a wedding gift from her husband of less than a year, was fresh from the body shop. Her daughter had driven the car to Montana weeks earlier and had spun out on ice. Repairs cost $13,000.

Carolyn was cruising on Interstate 90 just west of Cheney when the deer darted in front of her. She hit it on the driver’s side. The car rolled over once into a ravine. When it stopped, Carolyn’s seat belt was still on. She was a mess of shattered nerves but had no obvious injuries.

Dazed, she drove the battered car with flattened tires back onto the freeway’s edge, parked and walked in the first light of day to the dead deer. Two trucks roared past, then a van stopped.

The woman driving the van helped Carolyn drag the deer off the road and offered her a ride to Coeur d’Alene. They discussed whether she should leave the scene, but Carolyn saw no better option for herself as a stranded woman at 4:30 a.m.

“You don’t know if the next person who goes by is going to stop and kill you,” she says.

Forty-five minutes later, Carolyn arrived home and telephoned WSP to report her accident. After she gave her name and said she’d hit a deer, the dispatcher replied that Carolyn’s car must be the one WSP was impounding at the moment.

Surprised, Carolyn quickly explained that she had been upset and had accepted a ride home to get another car and go back to the scene.

She told the dispatcher she would arrange her own towing to a body shop through the Automobile Association of America.

The dispatcher countered that Carolyn’s plan would take at least an hour, which was too long. Carolyn should have stopped at the nearest phone or hailed a passing car because most have cellular telephones, the dispatcher said, then told Carolyn where she could pay to release her car from the impound lot.

The dispatcher’s failure to acknowledge Carolyn’s traumatic experience infuriated the swim coach. She said she was lucky to be alive and thought she’d made the right decision at 4:30 a.m. The dispatcher politely told her she hadn’t.

“The whole scenario doesn’t make sense,” Carolyn says, disgusted. “They’re supposed to be out there to help people in distress.”

Sgt. Chris Powell, WSP spokesman, listened to a tape of Carolyn’s conversation with the dispatcher. He heard no problems.

“The communication officers are just answering phones and dispatching troopers,” he says. “They certainly can’t read how someone’s feeling.”

Besides, Carolyn made mistakes, he says.

She went home. WSP has encountered too many drivers who leave accident scenes to hide alcohol in their systems, Powell says. Dispatchers tend to treat with suspicion anyone who leaves.

She abandoned her car. Abandoned cars on Washington’s freeways are safety hazards, so WSP removes them immediately. Other drivers stop, get out to check if anyone’s hurt and then are in danger of getting hit by passing cars, Powell says.

She hadn’t done her homework. Carolyn thought she would have had no ride back to her car from a pay phone, so she accepted a ride home. But Powell said troopers would have picked her up from wherever she found a phone at 4:30 a.m. and taken her back to her car. She should have known.

Now Carolyn knows.

But she feels the lessons were unnecessarily callous.

Car accidents get to be routine to troopers, so WSP periodically reminds them to show some compassion to distraught drivers, Powell says.

Maybe it’s time to share that lesson with dispatchers, too.

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