Chaos on Valley freeways ends in officer's death
Arizona Department of Public Safety dispatchers fielded more than 30 calls from motorists reporting a wrong-way driver on Valley freeways in the moments before the fatal crash that claimed the life of an off-duty Mesa police officer early Monday, records show.
Drivers described seeing or almost being hit by a speeding oncoming vehicle as it traveled more than 30 miles from north Scottsdale to the interchange of U.S. 60 and Interstate 10 on the Tempe-Phoenix line.
Each call ended with an assurance from the dispatcher that help was on the way.
The driver of the wrong-way vehicle died when he collided head-on with Officer Brandon Mendoza's Volkswagen Passat. Mendoza, 32, was heading home after finishing his shift at the Mesa Police Department.
As his family and fellow officers mourned, the crash raised questions about how someone could drive into oncoming traffic for more than 30 miles without being stopped. The inquiries also caused some law-enforcement officials to wave off any hint that staffing cuts experienced by some police agencies in the past five years might have played a role.
At about 12:30 a.m. Monday, the DPS received its first call of a motorist driving the wrong way in the southbound lanes of Loop 101 near Cactus Road, said Officer Carrick Cook, a DPS spokesman.
"It flew by me pretty fast," the first caller told a 911 dispatcher, according to recordings the DPS released Monday afternoon.
The wrong-way driver continued west in the eastbound lanes of Loop 101, then south in the northbound lanes of State Route 51, Cook said.
A DPS officer attempted to stop the vehicle on State Route 51 near Thomas Road, but the driver went around the officer and continued east onto the westbound lanes of I-10, Cook said.
Investigators had not identified the wrong-way driver by Monday night, but police suspect he was impaired.
"I was looking down at my radio, but I just looked up and I thought I was daydreaming because I just see headlights coming fast at me," said another caller, who was driving on State Route 51 near 32nd Street.
"Oh boy, was that close," another caller said. "He was in my lane, I just swerved at the last minute. ... I hope you get him before he kills somebody."
Still another caller said, "Yeah, there's a guy going southbound in a northbound lane on 51. He almost hit me. He's probably doing, I don't know, he's going 80, 90 miles an hour right now."
There are two techniques officers can employ to debilitate a vehicle headed in the wrong direction on a highway, Cook said.
The best-case scenario, he said, is to use "stop sticks" — spiked strips that, when run over, deflate tires at a controlled speed. This method presents a minimal threat of injury to all parties involved and causes the least amount of damage to vehicles, he said.
A second option, the one attempted by an officer Monday, is "ramming," when an officer intentionally crashes into a suspect's vehicle in an attempt to render it inoperable. Cook said the officer was slowing traffic down when he had the opportunity to attempt the hit.
"That has its inherent dangers," Cook said of the maneuver. "It's the last thing we want to do, but our duty is to protect others. He put himself at risk."
Officers may drive parallel to the vehicle on the correct side of the freeway in an attempt to get far enough ahead of it to initiate contact, Cook said, but they will not engage in a chase.
"It's more dangerous to have two cars going the wrong way than one," he said.
Cook said officers never had the chance to get in front of the vehicle on Monday morning to lay down the spikes.
Cook said the time of day was likely a key factor in how the driver managed to continue his run for more than 30 miles unimpeded.
"It was a Sunday evening, Monday morning," he said. "Should this have been a busier night, the reality is that he probably would have crashed a lot earlier."
Wrong-way vehicles are an often-fatal form of reckless driving and an ongoing issue plaguing roads and highways nationwide.
A total of 7,324 people died in motor-vehicle crashes involving wrong-way drivers from 2008 to 2012, according to data provided by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Nearly 80 of those fatalities occurred in Arizona.
Public-safety officials are consistently searching for ways to curb the problem, but solutions are elusive.
Several years ago, the Arizona Department of Transportation commissioned a research report on the effectiveness of the different styles of sensors in detecting wrong-way vehicles along freeway on-ramps.
"It verified that wrong-way vehicles can be detected by sensors that are available for use," ADOT spokesman Doug Nintzel said. "(But) that is only part of the equation. Each system also had 'missed' or 'false' calls, something that needs to be further addressed."
Nintzel said that over the years the department has taken steps to address the issue, such as installing wrong-way signs at freeway interchanges and changing their locations on poles to make them more visible to wrong-way drivers.
On Monday morning, operators in the department's control room were able to put a message up on several overhead boards in areas where it appeared the wrong-way driver was heading.
"The message said, 'Oncoming traffic ahead, keep right,' " he said. "They can't always spot where a wrong-way vehicle is going, especially at night, but it's an example of what they can try to do with our existing technology."
Nintzel said the department is interested in more research, including finding the best ways to try to alert wrong-way drivers as well as those who are traveling in the right direction.
"Would it involve posting alerts on additional message signs, using flashing lights or something else?" he said. "That's the type of next-step research we're looking at."
DPS officials were quick to rebut any suggestion that inadequate staffing played a role in the tragedy.
The agency is still healing from the Great Recession and the four-year hiring freeze of sworn officers that accompanied the economic downturn.
The department has 131 Highway Patrol officer vacancies statewide, according to the DPS, though the agency has managed to fill some of those empty slots in recent years. When a hiring freeze ended in April 2012, the DPS had 640 sworn Highway Patrol officers and 103 sergeants, according to the department. By April 2014, the number of sworn officers had grown to 671, while the number of sergeants had dropped to 99, according to the DPS.
Arizona Fraternal Order of Police President John Ortolano has been a vocal supporter for DPS raises, which he said would attract the officers needed to fill the gaps and enhance public safety on Arizona's highways.
But Ortolano said there is no way of knowing whether higher staffing levels could have prevented the crash. "Even with the authorized staffing levels, if they were full, there's no way to tell if this wrong way driver could have been stopped," he said. "Each one of those situations is so dangerous and so unpredictable, it's hard to tell what the outcome would be."
DPS spokesman Bart Graves maintained that the Monday morning tragedy was not the product of a manpower shortage, and he said the graveyard metro-east squad — the one handling the incident — is staffed with eight of the possible nine officers, plus the sergeant. He said that all eight were working the call and that one officer from the metro-central squad assisted.
"The theory that because we're down officers, that that had a role in it, is not true," he said. nforcement."
Word of Mendoza's death spread quickly throughout the law-enforcement community Monday morning and, by about 9 a.m., nearly two dozen people waited outside as Mendoza's body was taken out of Maricopa Medical Center.
A group of officers and others close to Mendoza, 32, walked out of the medical center alongside his body, draped in an American flag. Officers stood at attention and saluted while others hugged and held each other as the body of the 13-year police veteran was placed in a white van.
A police motorcade escorted the van on the short journey to the Maricopa County Medical Examiner's Office.
