New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
State police: Cluster of wrong-way crash deaths reported in Conn.
After a number of recent deadly accidents, Connecticut has recorded as many fatalities involving wrong-way drivers in the first four months of 2022 as in all of 2021.
In 2021, seven people died in wrong-way car accidents in the state, according to the University of Connecticut’s online Crash Data Repository. Seven people have died in wrong-way crashes so far in 2022, according to State Police.
In one deadly weekend in February, six people were killed in two separate wrong-way accidents on the same night. And a seventh fatality was reported in a crash March 24.
But State Police Trooper First Class Pedro Muniz told Hearst Connecticut Media that wrongway accidents do not seem to be increasing despite the cluster of recent fatalities.
“From the data I’ve got, they don’t look like they’re on the rise necessarily,” Muniz said. “It’s been happening more frequently in these last few months. For some reason they’re happening closer together.”
After the latest deadly crashes, “a lot more people are picking up on fact that there’s wrong-way drivers,” he said. But he pointed out: Wrong-way driving is “definitely something that’s not a new issue.”
In 2015, 615 wrong-way accidents were reported in Connecticut, according to the Department of Transportation’s open data portal. The numbers declined in the following years, with 588 wrong-way accidents in 2016, 564 in 2017, 536 in 2018 and 507 in 2019, according to the data.
With fewer cars on the highways after COVID-19 hit, the number of wrong-way crashes dropped to 449 in 2020 and 497 in 2021, according to the state data. So far this year, there have been 77 wrong-way crashes in the state, according to the data.
But the number of deaths related to wrong-way accidents hasn’t seen the same decline.
Between January 2015 and April 2022, there were nearly 4,000 wrong-way crashes in Connecticut, according to the UConn data. Of the 3,833 crashes, 250 resulted in serious injuries and at least 70 included fatalities.
The deadliest year was 2016, with 16 people killed and 45 people seriously injured, according to the data.
The second deadliest year was 2019, when 11 people died and 41 were seriously injured. In 2015, 2017, 2020 and 2021, seven people died in wrong-way crashes each year, just as in 2022, according to the data.
Deadly weekend
Two deadly accidents happened in the early hours of Feb. 26 on the state’s highways, according to Connecticut State Police.
Two first collision happened at about 2:25 a.m. on Interstate 91 northbound between Exits 18 and 20 in Meriden. Charde Monet Spates, 21, of New Haven, and Judith Melvin-Levy, 50, of Windsor were pronounced dead at the scene by EMS, state police said.
The wrong-way vehicle was a 2020 Toyota Camry driven by Spates, according to the accident report. She was traveling southbound in the left of three lanes on I-91 northbound when she collided head-on with a 2012 BMW X5 driven by Melvin-Levy, the report said.
About 20 minutes later, the second crash occurred, killing four people, on Interstate 84 eastbound between Exits 49 and 51 in Hartford, Muniz said.
All four were occupants of a Chevrolet Equinox that was going the wrong way on the highway near Exit 51 were killed in a crash, state police said. Their car slammed head-on into a vehicle driven by a 38-year-old Ellington man, who was driving in the left of four lanes, police said.
He was taken to the hospital with minor injuries. But the four Hartford women in the Equinox — the driver, 41-year-old Natchia Izekia Rivera-Hall, and the passengers, April Slade, 41, Yarelis Ramos, 37, and Quashonda Grant, 32 — were declared deceased at the scene, state police said.
In the seventh wrong-way death in 2022, Walter Turner, 43, of Berlin, died March 24 on I-84 westbound near Exit 33 in Plainville. Turner was traveling east in the westbound lanes when his Ford Focus hit a Toyota RAV4 head-on, according to state police said.
Turner was pronounced dead at the scene, while the other driver was taken to the hospital with possible minor injuries.
Both the DOT and UConn data portals report only five deaths in wrong-way crashes in 2022, but the website says reporting of data can be delayed.
Police tactics
In responding to wrong-way crashes, the first tactic for police is to drive alongside the vehicle, on the correct side of the road, while flashing the cruiser’s emergency lights and blaring the siren, Trooper Muniz said.
“If a trooper’s coming from the same direction, but on the correct side, they’ll drive alongside trying to stop the vehicle,” Muniz said.
“If a vehicle is traveling in the wrong direction, say in the northbound side traveling south, if we are heading north, we will try to slow traffic down, try to possibly get in their way to stop them without getting into a collision. If they get around, we start using stop sticks,” he said.
But if a wrong-way driver is traveling north in the southbound lane and an officer approaches by traveling on the opposite side of the highway, heading in the proper direction, the officer’s first move is to ride alongside the driver across the highway and attempt to catch their attention with lights and sirens, he said.
Most often, the lights and sirens alert the driver and cause them to stop, Muniz said.
If an officer is approaching the driver on the same side of the highway, they will try to stem the flow of traffic around the wrongway driver and create a block, he said.
No matter the circumstances, however, police officers do not drive in the incorrect direction to catch or stop a wrong-way driver, Muniz said.
“We would not drive in wrong direction. We would stop traffic,” he said. “Depending on the time of day, the majority (of wrong-way drivers) occur at night, so there’s not that many vehicles. But there are times when it does happen with a higher volume of traffic. But we do not travel in the wrong direction. We always travel in the correct direction.”
In a wrong-way crash on April 16, a state trooper’s cruiser was hit by a wrong-way driver on Route 9 in Cromwell, state police said. The driver, a Meriden resident behind the wheel of a Honda, failed a field sobriety test and faces several charges in connection with the crash, Connecticut State Police said.
The state trooper had moved toward the center lane and activated his emergency lights to slow or stop the Honda, police said. But the Honda then hit the front driver’s side of the state police cruiser, the incident report states.
While neither the officer nor the driver suffered life-threatening injuries, the officer has yet to return to work since the accident, Muniz said.
Most wrong-way accidents are the result of intoxicated drivers, although some are due to elderly and disoriented drivers, he said.
“The majority are driving under influence of alcohol and/ or drugs,” Muniz said. “There’s also mental health crises or the operator is disoriented and experiencing some effects of an illness. It’s usually the majority are impaired drivers, but we do have elderly drivers that are driving in their 80s and shouldn’t be behind the wheel.”
Most wrong-way crashes happen on the state’s larger highways and in the bigger cities, and result in only property damage, according to UConn’s data.
Preventative measures
To mitigate the number of wrong-way accidents, DOT has upgraded wrong-way signs and pavement markings on more than 700 highway ramps in the state, DOT spokesperson Josh Morgan said.
“The signs used are oversize, installed on both sides of the roadway, and include retroreflective strips to improve nighttime visibility,” Morgan said.
“A new wrong-way actuated flasher pilot program is also underway at 15 high-risk locations across the state. That pilot includes a wrong-way detection system which activates flashing LED lights when a wrong-way vehicle is detected.”
When police receive reports of wrong-way drivers, state police respond “swiftly as we fully recognize the imminent danger involved,” Connecticut State Police Sgt. Dawn Pagan said.
“We urge the public to continue to call 911 immediately when they witness these drivers on the roadway,” Pagan said.