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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFast, Precise, and Deadly: How Police Use a Dangerous Anti-Terrorism Tactic to End Pursuits
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/35201-fast-precise-and-deadly-how-police-use-a-dangerous-anti-terrorism-tactic-to-end-pursuitsAt 2:03 p.m., after 14 minutes and 21 miles of pursuit, Trooper Donnie ONeal Saddler decided that Calhoun had to be stopped to protect the lives of innocent people on the highway. Saddler pulled his car alongside Calhouns and performed, at 111 mph, what is called a Precision Immobilization Technique, or PIT maneuver, making contact with the back of Calhouns car and causing it to spin clockwise and careen off the side of the highway across the rumble strips and into a small embankment, eventually striking a tree. Calhoun was completely ejected from the car and sustained major injuries, but somehow survived.
If Calhoun had been alone in the car, he might have received little or no prison time, as he had with all his previous arrests for minor crimes. He was driving with a suspended license and some counterfeit currency was later found in the wreckage but his most serious offense was running from the police. That Tuesday, however, he had two friends as passengers, 20-year-old Relpheal Morton and 19-year-old Marion Shore. In court, Trooper Saddler described seeing Morton at the scene. He was still in the back seat, Saddler said. He was kind of just looking around I will never forget it. He just kept looking around.
Morton, whom I was not able to interview for this article, must have been stunned to be alive and relatively unharmed. The crash was so violent that the cars roof was ripped completely off. The car looked flattened, like a tank had ridden over it. In one of the police dashcam videos that shows the crash, pieces of the car fly dozens of feet in the air toward the camera. According to a report by the Georgia State Patrols Specialized Collision Reconstruction Team, The damage to the Toyota Corolla was too extensive to describe all the damage. It seems almost impossible that two people survived.
Marion Shore was not so lucky. She was sitting in the passenger seat, wearing her seatbelt, but the force of the crash was so strong that she was partially ejected from the car while it was flipping and rolling. Shore, the mother of a 3-year-old boy, was trapped halfway inside the car, in an in-between place where death was certain. The car rolled over her several times. The chief medical examiner for the state of Georgia examined Shores body and said in court that, as the car was rolling, the forces propelling it literally bent her body almost in half.
THE PIT MANEUVER is a modified version of an anti-terrorist driving tactic that has been taught for four decades by BSR, a private training facility in West Virginia that works with U.S. military and law enforcement personnel. According to BSR, the technique was originally developed by Germanys federal police to give security details the ability to take out a car that was threatening a convoy. In 1985, the maneuver was developed by the Fairfax County, Virginia, police department in order to end pursuits with little danger to police or the general public
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