Trooper Driving Corzine Was Involved in Prior Accidents
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By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
THE NEW YORK TIMES
CAMDEN, N.J., April 18 — In the seconds before Gov. Jon S. Corzine was critically injured in an accident last Thursday, the Chevrolet Suburban he was riding in was traveling 91 miles per hour, 26 m.p.h. over the posted speed limit, according to a crash data recorder retrieved from the vehicle.
The superintendent of the state police, Col. Joseph R. Fuentes, said Tuesday that the trooper driving the vehicle, Robert J. Rasinski, had told investigators that he did not know how fast he was traveling as he led Mr. Corzine’s two-car caravan, emergency lights flashing, from an Atlantic City speech to a meeting at the governor’s mansion in Princeton.
But the recorder clocked the speed at 91 m.p.h. five seconds before the Suburban collided with a white pickup truck, and at 30 m.p.h. when it slammed into a guardrail along the shoulder of the Garden State Parkway, the police said.
The trooper has been involved in four other vehicle accidents, two while on duty, according to records of the State Police and the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Mr. Corzine, who was not wearing a seat belt, was thrown from the front passenger seat to the back, breaking his thigh bone in two places, a dozen ribs, his breastbone and collarbone and a lower vertebra. He has had three operations on his leg, and today he remained in critical condition and on a ventilator.
Colonel Fuentes said that troopers who drive the governor and other state officials are given discretion to use the emergency lights and exceed the speed limit in cases of an emergency and, because of security concerns, are advised not to let the governor’s vehicle remain “bogged down in a traffic jam.” But “if it’s a nonemergency situation, we would ask them to obey the traffic laws and the speed laws,” Colonel Fuentes said in a conference call with reporters on Tuesday afternoon.
The governor was en route to a meeting with Don Imus and members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team.
In New York State, the law allows emergency vehicles to speed if they are involved in an emergency operation, but does not extend that right to elected officials. In New York City, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg ordered sirens and lights removed from cars belonging to 250 city officials in 2004, after one of his deputy mayors was repeatedly caught on camera in her official sedan, flashing its lights and blaring its siren to get home quickly from work.
Eugene O’Donnell, a professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that speed might be justified for a governor racing to respond to a natural disaster, but that ”an elected official trying to get a routine appointment would certainly be out of the scope of an emergency definition.”
Colonel Fuentes said he had asked the state’s accident review board to study the crash and whether additional training was required for the governor’s drivers. He has also asked the state attorney general to convene a special group to ”undertake a critical review” of the state police executive protection unit that drives state officials, including Mr. Corzine.
The results of the accident investigation contradict the original account the state police gave in the first 24 hours. Colonel Fuentes himself said Thursday night that ”speed was not a factor” in the accident. When asked Tuesday whether he now believed that speed played a role in the accident, Colonel Fuentes replied: ”What do you think?”
”Speed is always a contributing factor in any accident,” he added later. ”It goes to the heart of what damage you may have on the vehicle.”
The crash occurred at Mile Marker 43.4, about 75 miles from Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion, at 6:15 p.m. Aides to the governor said they did not know what time the meeting at the mansion was scheduled, but the Rutgers team arrived at 7:45, and Mr. Imus before that.
The police and other state officials also originally said the accident was caused by the erratic or out-of-control movements of a red pickup truck, whose driver, Kenneth Potts of Little Egg Harbor, N.J., was identified on Saturday but not charged.
It now seems clear that Mr. Corzine’s own vehicle was responsible for the crash: the pickup trucks were pulling over to the right to make way for the speeding motorcade, and when Mr. Potts swerved left from the shoulder to avoid hitting a signpost, the white pickup swerved to avoid hitting him, but collided with the Suburban. On Tuesday, the police said that Mr. Potts and the driver of the white truck, John M. Carrino Jr. of Glenwood, N.J., had both acted appropriately.
Trooper Rasinski, who was wearing his seat belt, suffered minor injuries and was expected to return to duty when cleared by his doctors. According to records with the State Police and the Department of Motor Vehicles, the trooper has had four previous accidents, including two while on duty.
On Feb. 22, 2003, he was behind the wheel of a State Police car that slid on icy pavement and struck a guard rail in Newark, causing no injuries and a small amount of damage to the vehicle. A State Police review of that accident found that the crash could have been prevented, according to Capt. Al Della Fave, a spokesman.
Trooper Rasinski’s other on-duty accident in occurred October 2004, when he was parked and operating a radar gun in Newark and a tractor trailer struck his vehicle.
Michael Horan, a spokesman for the Department of Motor Vehicles, said that Trooper Rasinski was not issued a summons for either of these accidents or his two minor off-duty crashes, one in April 1992 the other in October 1989.
“What that typically means is you were involved, but you weren’t at fault,” Mr. Horan said.
At the trooper’s home in Point Pleasant on Tuesday night, a man who answered the door would not identify himself and said ”there is no comment at this time.”
The passenger in the backseat of the Suburban, Mr. Corzine’s aide Samantha Gordon, was also not wearing a seat belt, according to the police investigation. She walked away from the accident and has declined to discuss it with reporters.
With witness statements and the findings from the crash data recorder, the investigation on Tuesday offered the most detailed account to date of last Thursday’s events.
After the white pickup truck collided with the governor’s vehicle, Trooper Rasinski lost control of the Suburban and it careered toward the wooded center median, investigators found. As Trooper Rasinski tried to steer away from the woods, the Suburban slid clockwise from the paved roadway and shoulder, and the passenger side collided with the end of a steel guardrail. The guardrail sliced into the passenger compartment, just in front of where Mr. Corzine’s legs would have been, and narrowly missed both the governor and the trooper as the Suburban spun and came to rest with its back portion on top of the guardrail.
Although the impact was on the passenger side, the only airbag to deploy was the side curtain bag between Trooper Rasinski and the driver’s-side door, according to Capt. Al Della Fave, a State Police spokesman. It was unclear whether the passenger side airbags had been disabled.
The speed limit on New Jersey highways was raised to 65 from 55 in 1998. Governor Corzine floated the idea of lowering it last year as part of an environmental package, but quickly dropped the idea in the face of public opposition.
The police had hoped to complete the investigation early this week, but are waiting to interview Governor Corzine, who is unable to speak because he is heavily sedated and has breathing and feeding tubes in his throat.
After completing the third operation on Mr. Corzine’s leg wound on Monday, doctors said they wanted to remove the breathing tube within a day to reduce the chance that Mr. Corzine might be exposed to pneumonia or other potentially life-threatening infections.
Late Tuesday, however, Mr. Corzine’s staff said that doctors had decided not to remove the tube yet, without providing any information as to why. Anthony Coley, Mr. Corzine’s communications director, said that Mr. Corzine ”was showing improvement from a respiratory perspective” and was able to respond to doctors’ questions by nodding.
Reporting was contributed by Ken Kelson and Cara Buckley in New York, David W. Chen in Trenton, and Nate Schweber in Camden and Point Pleasant, N.J. |
