Families behind the toll,
More than one person was killed per week on Canterbury roads this year – the worst rate for the region in a decade. Sam Sherwood speaks to some of the families left behind.
Glenys Melhop is sitting at the bench reading the newspaper when the phone rings. It is her daughter, Kylie. She tells Melhop to sit down. Police had just left her home after delivering some bad news.
Melhop’s 29-year-old son, Todd, had fallen asleep at the wheel of his car and crashed. He was dead.
‘‘I can just remember kind of moaning and saying to Kylie ‘no, no, no, it can’t be true’,’’ Melhop said.
Todd is one of 55 people to die on Canterbury roads this year. It is the highest road toll since 2007, when 56 people died.
Usually speed, complacency, distraction – or a combination of those – were to blame.
Several fatal crashes involved speeds of more than 190kmh. In another, someone drove 100kmh in a 50kmh zone.
Sitting in his police base, Canterbury road policing manager Inspector Phil Dean stares at a piece of paper with the list of names of all the people who died on the region’s roads.
‘‘It makes me feel sick when you see it all written down. It’s just so gutting.’’
‘If you’re tired, pull over’
When Melhop got the call, about 8.30am on March 31, she collapsed on her bed.
Todd had been in Australia for a week applying for a job. Before returning home, he fulfilled a dream of driving around Bathurst.
He spent his last night in a Sydney guesthouse, before flying to Christchurch the next day.
Todd arrived at Christchurch Airport about midnight and decided to make the five-hour drive home to Mosgiel. He went to a nearby petrol station, filled up the car and got a coffee before setting off.
Just over two hours into his trip Todd fell asleep at the wheel. The car crossed the centre line and into the path of an oncoming truck on State Highway 1, about two kilometres south of Makikihi. He was killed instantly.
‘‘[It] is the only thing that gives us a little sense of peace, that he knew nothing,’’ Melhop says.
For the family, there was no proper goodbye. Police identified Todd through fingerprints.
After the crash, Melhop went into autopilot. There was an undertaker, a coroner, police and a lawyer to deal with.
‘‘The undertaker came around and we were all sitting together in a circle and I can remember I just looked around and said ‘what are we doing? This is so wrong. Are we really making plans for Todd’s funeral?’ ’’
She last saw Todd three weeks before his death when the family celebrated his brother Luke’s wedding in Queenstown.
‘‘We all just came away and said that day was perfect."
‘‘We have some amazing family photos, which we wouldn’t have had if we didn’t have that wedding.’’
His two younger brothers, his brother-in-law and three of his friends were pallbearers at his funeral.
‘‘Such a difficult thing to watch these grown men carrying their mate, tears rolling down their faces.’’
His death still seemed ‘‘incomprehensible’’.
‘‘We’ve actually found that the tears come quicker now than they did back then.
‘‘Reality has kind of struck – it can take something really little and we’re just away with tears flowing again.’’
Looking back at her son’s death, Melhop says it was ‘‘straight out fatigue’’.
‘‘Todd would be absolutely horrified to think this happened to him. ‘‘I guess it’s what police tell everybody – if you’re tired pull over.’’
Why is the 2017 toll so high?
The road toll has surpassed 50 only three times since 2000.
Last year 28 people died on Canterbury roads, which was the lowest since 2011. Why was this year so much worse?
‘‘This simple answer is that we don’t know,’’ Dean says.
With him in the office are staff from the serious crash unit, Sergeant Nigel Price and Senior Constable John Isitt.
Price, who has worked in the unit since its inception in 1999 and now runs it, describes the team as ‘‘road detectives’’.
‘‘Detectives figure out ‘whodunnit’ on a murder. We know who done it – it’s our job to figure out how done it, why done and how fast.’’
When there is any fatal crash in the district, they get called. They head to the scene, map it out and work out the cause.
They’ve seen a lot and the workload is tough.
‘‘It’s put us under enormous pressure,’’ Dean says.
In the office is a calendar. Each fatal crash they have attended is represented by an F, written with a red whiteboard marker. If two people have died in the same crash, it says Fx2. When they’ve attended two fatals in the same day there are two Fs. There are no names.
‘‘It’s a protective mechanism,’’ Price says. ‘‘That’s one of the ways we’ve set this crash unit up to cope.
‘‘We stay sane because we focus entirely on the physics and mass of the crash.’’
This year complacency was to blame for about 36 per cent of the crashes – ‘‘that’s people not concentrating on the task at hand, they’re going through stop signs, they’re going through red lights – they’re distracted’’, Price says.
No seatbelts, drunk drivers and speed were common factors.
‘‘I think people get in their cars and just switch their brains off,’’ Price says.
Dean says policing alone will not bring the road toll down.
‘‘By the time we’re involved it’s too late. Either the crash has happened, or the person is already committing the offence.’’
‘You either sink or swim’
Thomas Alton had no time to react. He was 150 metres into his trip from his Parklands Dr, Christchurch home on February 23 to help at Adventure Scouts.
Robert Kruger, 18, was driving on a restricted licence with an unlicensed passenger. He was travelling too fast as he rounded the left-hand bend and veered onto the wrong side of the road.
Alton, who was travelling downhill on his bicycle, struck the centre of the front of the car.
His wife, Lindsey Alton, was at home with the couple’s 1-year-old daughter, Ashleigh, when she heard the collision. She knew straight away it was her husband.
Unable to leave the house as Ashleigh slept, Lindsey called a friend to come over.
A police officer gave Lindsey a ride to hospital where she stayed at her husband’s side.
Tom was kept alive for several days for his organs to be donated and for his parents to travel from Britain. His life support was switched off on February 23.
When asked to describe her husband, Lindsey Alton replies: ‘‘How do you describe someone who, in your eyes, is perfect?’’
At his funeral Tom Alton’s friends wrote in his memorial book quotes about a ‘‘special and unassuming man’’, who was liked and respected.
‘‘He used every opportunity to make life a little better for everyone while taking time to appreciate everything life had to offer.’’
Ashleigh, now 21 months old, keeps Lindsey Alton going.
‘‘I have to look at her every day and I see Tom and all the things she’s doing now compared to nine months ago.
‘‘I wish he could see her, pick her up and just watch her – and I wish she could watch him.’’
The couple, both from the United Kingdom, met just over nine years ago through a tramping club. Tramping became their passion, with the couple spending weekends exploring the outdoors. Married for three years, the Altons did everything together.
‘‘We weren’t one of those couples who did separate things. The things we enjoyed, we enjoyed together. Tramping, running, even cooking dinner.
‘‘I have to do all those things without him and it reminds you of him and it reminds you of what you’ve lost.’’
Coping day by day is hard. Some days are better than others, thinking long term is almost impossible.
‘‘You either sink or swim.’’ Kruger was sentenced to 200 hours of community work in October. He was ordered to pay $2000 emotional harm to Tom Alton’s family and was disqualified from driving for a year.
Lindsey Alton met Kruger at a restorative justice meeting before he was sentenced.
She left the meeting confident Kruger was sorry for what he did.
She remains terrified of biking, but continues to cycle to work because that is what Tom would have wanted.
‘It’s just been a fog’
For two hours Ethan Crone lay near his crashed car, thick fog hiding the wreckage.
The 24-year-old left for work at building relocation company FIL about 6.30am on May 30. Less than
1km along Rangiora’s Easterbrook Rd he missed the corner.
His car went down a bank and hit a tree. The force threw him out. There were no skid marks.
Neighbours heard the noise and went to inspect, but could see nothing.
A woman walking her dog stumbled across the scene about
8.30am.
Hours later Crone’s mother, Natasha Richardson, was out feeding stock when she received a call from her neighbour saying there had been a fatal crash on the road.
She tried ringing her son, but there was no answer.
Her partner eventually phoned and told her to go home. Police were already there when she arrived.
‘‘We’d never dealt with anybody’s death like this before, it was just like – what are we doing? Who do we call? What do we do from here?’’
She then had to break the news to Crone’s two younger brothers.
It wasn’t long before the house was full with friends and family offering their support and condolences.
‘‘Other people were amazing. People would turn up with food, bags of groceries, the support was actually quite humbling.’’
The family last had a meal together the night before the crash. Ethan sat down for dinner with the family and helped his brother with his homework. After the boys were in bed he went back to the living room to debate equal rights with his mum.
‘‘Whether it was 1080 or conspiracy theories, he always had an opinion.’’
Crone loved hunting, diving and ‘‘always had a big smile on his face’’.
Nearly seven months later, Richardson still cannot bring herself to read the coroner’s report.
‘‘I’m assuming he wouldn’t have had a seatbelt on because he was slack with his seatbelt . . . I’m assuming he would’ve been going too fast for the conditions.’’
Richardson is sad at the things her son will miss this summer – camping, spending time with his brothers.
He was at that age where he was just coming and going . . . it almost still feels like he’s just at work or hanging out with his friends.’’
Looking at the crash trends, Price admits a sense of disappointment with motorists.
‘‘They read it in the paper that somebody else has died because they’ve crossed the centre line or gone to sleep or failed to stop at a stop sign.
‘‘They read it all and they ignore it – and the exact same thing happens again.’’
‘‘It makes me feel sick when you see [victims’ names] all written down. It’s just so gutting.’’ Canterbury road policing manager Inspector Phil Dean