Brookfield woman seeks answers in husband’s highway debris death
Investigation leads to few results; wife alleges negligence and errors
Before he left his office in Madison for the commute home to Brookfield each evening, Jay Tichelaar usually sent his wife a quick text to let her know he soon would be on his way.
No text came on May 22, 2017, but his wife thought little of it. At least not at first. Their son and daughter were away at college; she was making turkey burgers for two at home.
“We were so, so connected. I had this horrible feel-
ing come over me around 5:20. I tried to ignore it. He usually pulled into the driveway between 6 and 6:30,” said Joleen Tichelaar.
As the time ticked away, she began calling and texting his cellphone. Jay didn’t respond. But sometimes he turned off his phone while he was driving, so she didn’t get alarmed.
As the afternoon shadows turned to dusk, however, panic started to set in. She called local law enforcement and then the State Patrol. Each time she called — at 6:12 p.m., at 8:28 p.m., at 9:15 p.m. — State Patrol dispatchers told her the computer system was down or records were being checked and someone would get back to her.
In between those calls, Joleen, an occupational therapist at Elmbrook Memorial Hospital, started contacting hospitals between Milwaukee and Madison. He wasn’t listed. She checked with relatives and friends. Nothing.
At 9:35 p.m., Brookfield police officials arrived at her home. Joleen learned that her husband had been driving east on I-94 when pieces of a brake drum fell off a semitrailer truck. One of the pieces pierced Jay’s windshield. Joleen said she was told her husband was responsive when the first officer arrived on the scene but later became unresponsive. Her 51-year-old husband was dead. In the days after her husband’s death, Joleen figured the State Patrol would collect evidence, document the scene, talk to witnesses, view traffic camera video, figure out what happened and, with luck, identify the truck.
Days turned to weeks and months. And while Joleen understands that sometimes law enforcement does not catch criminals or find those responsible for fatal accidents, she is upset over how the State Patrol handled the investigation into her husband’s death. Among her complaints:
Shortly after the crash, authorities began searching in the wrong direction for semitrailer trucks. Joleen said it should have been apparent that the brake drum shot directly through the front windshield. That meant it had to come from a truck traveling in front of her husband’s vehicle, which was heading east, not west on I-94.
Some pieces of the brake drum and other evidence were still on the side of Jay Tichelaar was killed on I-94 in Jefferson County while traveling home to Brookfield from his job in Madison on May 22, 2017. I-94 several days later.
Witnesses who reported seeing the accident or seeing something fall off a truck were not interviewed until Joleen asked to see dispatch records, noticed their names and asked officials to contact them.
The idea of her husband initially surviving the incident haunted her. Would he have survived if someone arrived quicker? Did he die with no one comforting him? She eventually called the Milwaukee County medical examiner, which handled the autopsy, and learned that her husband had actually died immediately. Incorrect information had been given to Brookfield police.
She learned from a Milwaukee TV station on June 28, 2017, — more than a month after the accident — that the State Patrol investigation into her husband’s death had been closed.
When she asked whether traffic cameras might have recorded the accident, she said, she was told that video was being reviewed. She later learned that because of miscommunication, the Department of Transportation footage was not ordered to be saved until too late. Traffic camera video is erased after 72 hours. In other words, no video had been reviewed, and none was available.
“I am normally a very positive and supportive person, and I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. I’m not a person to point fingers. But this really is not acceptable what they did. At all,” Joleen said.
“I know this is a stressful job for the State Patrol,” she continued. “I thanked them for their service. But no grieving family should have to go through this.”
High school sweethearts
Joleen and Jay were high school sweethearts in Rochester, Minnesota. She lured him to her locker with Jolly Rancher candies when he was a junior and she was a sophomore. They began dating the following year, going to a movie and playing pinball on their first date. They both attended Minnesota State University. She transferred after a year to the University of Minnesota to study occupational therapy. He earned his doctorate in molecular biology at Mayo Medical Graduate School.
They married on his father’s birthday, June 24, 1989, and spent their honeymoon camping in the Apostle Islands. A verse from 1 Corinthians was read at their wedding and printed in their wedding program: “Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”
At his funeral four days after the accident, dishes of Jolly Rancher candies were set out; his prayer card was printed with the wedding verse, along with the words “Jay loved … and will forever be loved.”
A researcher who concentrated primarily on lung cancer, Jay worked at the University of Cincinnati and Washington University in St. Louis, before moving to the Medical College of Wisconsin in 2010. They raised two children, Zach, 22, a mechanical engineering student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Kendra, 20, a UW-Madison nursing major.
Jay enjoyed gardening, hiking in state parks with his family, playing on his church soccer team for guys over 40 and cheering for Minnesota’s pro sports teams and Liverpool soccer. At the time of his death, he was a medical writer for Covance Laboratories in Madison.