High number of fatalities slowing police

No one has been charged in an accident on Interstate 70 that killed two people and injured another nearly seven weeks ago because of a backlog in accident investigations at the Columbia Police Department and the complexity of the crash.

Columbia police said the accident occurred when a truck crashed into the back of a stopped car in a construction zone near the U.S. 63 exit. The driver of the stopped car, Cheryl Card, 54, of Lincoln, Neb., was killed, and her husband, Kirt Card, 56, was seriously injured.

The truck — a tractor without a trailer — then pushed a minivan under a tractor-trailer. The minivan’s driver, John Ferkel, 40, of Saint Peters, was killed.

Carl West, the driver of the truck, and the driver of the other tractor-trailer, Robert Montgomery, 45, of Lakewood, Ohio, were not injured.

West was driving for B&C Trucking, a company based in La Plata, when the accident occurred on April 28. Elosie Bangert, manager of B&C trucking, would not say Wednesday whether West is still driving for the company. But Columbia police Officer Scott Sergent said when he last talked to B&C Trucking in mid-May, West was working in the company’s office.

No charges have been filed because the Boone County Prosecuting Attorney assigned to the case, Chastidy Dillon-Amelung, said she was awaiting Sergent’s full accident report.

Sergent said he will finish the report by Friday, but Friday is Dillon-Amelung’s last day of work in the prosecutor’s office. As of Wednesday, the office had not assigned her cases to another prosecutor.

Sergent said he had not finished his report because he and the department’s three other accident investigators have been busy with an unusually high number of fatal accidents this year.

Nine people have died in eight accidents thus far in 2006, making the year one of the deadliest for Columbia motorists since 2000. Charges have only been pressed in one crash this year because the other crashes killed the driver who caused them, Traffic Unit Supervisor Sgt. Tim Moriarity said.

He said he usually gives his investigators 30 days to complete a report on a fatal accident because the reports are so complex. In this case, Sergent has taken nearly 50 days.

Unlike officers in other units, traffic officers are specially trained to create their own accident-reconstruction diagrams, interview witnesses and write reports about the accident scene.

“They’re working on very intensive reports...which means they’re not on the street like I want them to be,” Moriarity said. Their presence on the streets helps deter bad driving, he said.

Sergent said that while he normally spends half of his time on the street and half working on reports in the office, he hasn’t spent any time on the street since he began investigating the double fatal accident.

Moriarity said the traffic unit is short one motorcycle officer who was promoted to another position in October 2005. Since October 2005, the police have responded to 13 fatal accidents with 14 fatalities.

Sergent said the families and commercial vehicle owners involved in the crash have contacted the police, wanting to know what his investigation has found.

“I get calls just about every week from one of the parties involved,” he said. “Everybody’s anxious to know what’s gonna happen.”

However, Rebecca Wood, daughter of Cheryl and Kirt Card, said her family has been so busy dealing with Kirt’s injuries and the process of mourning her mother that they have not been worried about charges for the accident.

“We’ve been dealing with stuff here, so we haven’t thought much about it,” she said.

Wood said her father has not been contacted by Columbia police about their investigation since he left the hospital five days after the accident.

Kirt suffered multiple fractures in the accident. When the accident occurred, the Cards were driving back to Lincoln from a doctor’s appointment in St. Louis where they had learned that Kirt is a candidate for a lung transplant.