Distracted Driver In New Mexico Charged With Vehicular Manslaughter – IOTW Report

Distracted Driver In New Mexico Charged With Vehicular Manslaughter

Las Cruces Sun News

In a news release sent days after the crash, New Mexico State Police reported alcohol did not appear to be a contributing factor and that seat belts did not appear to be utilized properly.

Authorities with the Office of the Medical Investigator told authorities that [Haley] Skufca [the deceased passenger] sustained injures to her right side eye socket and face and had an abrasion on her neck consistent with being struck by the vehicle’s gear shift. 

A medic who responded to the crash told investigators that when they arrived on the scene, [Sammy] Flores’ [the driver] pants were about mid-thigh. He was transported to MountainView Regional Medical Center with unknown injuries following the crash. More

21 Comments on Distracted Driver In New Mexico Charged With Vehicular Manslaughter

  1. …I actually saw something like this once, but it had nothing to do with blowjobs. There was this gal driving this old ’80s boxy Toyota with no air bags and, apparently, no knob on the gear shift with her ostensible boyfriend riding shotgun. I don’t know and will never know what her bag was, but a cop running radar that night said she blew past him doing 80+ in a 35 zone towards a commercial district that also had the municipal complex and the high school, but it was ~ 10ish so most things were closed.

    Anyway, before the cops could even lay out a pursuit plan, she solved the problem for them by apparently blowing a turn by trying to make it at 110% of design speed, beautifully threading the needle between a light pole and a traffic control box, and therefore very forcefully striking the extremely solid masonry base of a large sign in the corner that advertised all the shops in the strip mall behind, so it wasn’t a little sign.

    Conveniently, the firehouse was on the opposite corner, and we could see (and hear!) it was a RIGHTEOUS hit even though there was no fire, so a couple of guys actually hoofed over with some Ambu-bags while the rest geared up and jumped in the rescue truck, one of the pumpers, and the SWEET Chevy ambulance with the 454 gasoline engine in it, and converged on the crushed remains of the occupied vehicle. The advance guys were whistling for AirCare pretty much on sight, and I was late enough getting to the House that I got to set up the LZ on the firehouse apron, which was JUST big enough, but a little sloped, because that’s where the Assistant Chief wanted it.

    The gal driving the thing was written off almost immediately. She had submarined into the dashboard, meaning her body went forcfully forward (no seatbelt, natch, but probably wouldn’t have mattered at that speed) into the under part of the pre-airbag dash, so it broke both her femurs around the ball sockets and rammed them into the seat, pinning her into it. Normally this would be quite gory as this is MASSIVE soft tissue damage, femoral artery damage, AND the femurs are filled with marrow so a broken femur by itself can lead to hypovolemic shock, but her chest had ALSO come forward into the steering column (again, no airbag), breaking ribs but also effectively applying a precordial thump that instantly stopped her heart, so no pump = blood leaked rather than gushed.

    This was “Injuries Inconsistent with the Continuance of Life”. On to Patient #2.

    The right hand guy was a bit more promising at first glance. He had a lap belt so his ass, at least, stayed where it was supposed to, but his upper body had moved forcefully forwards, down, and a bit to the left in the car’s final gyrations, coming to rest on the center console. Dude was (mercifully) unconscious when the first win got to him, and he had a pulse, but they found out pretty quick on the assessment that extracation was gonna be a bit challenging because he was impaled to an unknown depth into his left eye socket on the gear shift.

    Because it’s generally a bad idea to remove an impalement from ANY part of a person, or a person from an impairment because you don’t know where the end is or what bleeding it’s holding back, double for a BRAIN impalement, this is why they called for the air ambulance even though it was about a mile to a regional hospital, because the regional was a splint and pill kind of ER and not a Level 1 trauma center. Standard impalement protocol was to cut the impalement off a distance from the body and immobilized, but a gear shift is not very long so this would also be problematic. Happily, in that time and that place, Air Care came with a flight nurse, whole Type O blood, and – most importantly – a flight surgeon.

    We got the helicopter down on our sloped apron that the pilot bitched about later because it almost exceeded his ship’s instability tolerance, beyond which it would have to be immediately grounded and flatbedded away to a hangar, but again in that time and place most of the AirCare pilots were ex-Vietnam so they were pretty damn good, and even better than in ‘Nam because no one was shooting at them. Anyway, we bussed dude and his 3/4 tons of equipment the half-block to the scene, where he jumped out and climbed right into the mangled car (it was a convertible at this point thanks to the enthusiastically applied “Jaws of Life”), spent a couple of minutes assessing Dude’s general health and the sharp stick in his eye socket, asked what time it was, and called it.

    Dude was officially dead. We were in body retrieval now.

    We packed the doc back out and into his waiting ride that was on hot standby, commiserated a bit with the difficulties we had presented the pilot with and promised never to do again, then watched him slowly angle off from our little hacienda to disappear into the starlit night.

    So we’d split the car pretty good at this point and the doc had thoughtfully pulled Dude’s head off the stick shift after his heart stopped, so he was pretty easy to backboard onto a waiting cot and into an ambulance, and we slipped him into a fluid containment bag in there. The gal was a bit more challenging to get out of the seat, so we ended up cutting the seat back off, sliding it backwards off her amputated and jagged femurs, pulling traction as well as possible, then onto a backboard, into the unit, and a fluid containment badly for her, too.

    Fluid containment bags are NOT body bags. It’s kind of a clear, Hefty garbage bag grade device with a zipper, intended, as implied, to capture postmortem fluids from trauma victims, including blood, shit, piss, bile, all the jolly liquids that decant when you’re dead. A body bag is a heavy canvas construct with sewn-on handles all around that is intended to actually schlep dead bodies with. They’re expensive, so we didn’t have a lot, and didn’t use them unless we had to.

    The coroner is supposed to investigate non-hospital deaths, but because thus was pretty straightforward he bitched out and didn’t come. However, because we were a municipal service and our business was with the viable, he agreed to send a paid ambulance to get our erstwhile patients.

    Paid services generally are staffed by ex-firehouse medics, often opting for the more sedate life of transporting the elderly to doctors appointments because they couldn’t handle actual emergencies. This can make them grumpy when interfacing with actual, you know, front line medics as they feel inadequate, and the senior guy on this one was no exception. He came to take charge of our passed passengers, signed the paperwork, and he and his cowed junior partner laid rough hands on the fluid containment bags.

    We tried to warn them about the weaknesses and the jagged nature of the after end of our lady victim and offered our back boards for their temporary use, but he was having none of it. Maybe he didn’t want to bring them back, I don’t know. Anyhow, they jockeyed Dude onto their cot and into their bus with little difficulty, but that meant they had to flop Lady onto the bench seat after a lengthy hands carry.

    Surprisingly they got her all the way into their unit before she folded up.like cheap lawn furniture, her jagged bones pierced the low point in the bag, and hours of postmortem body fluids smellily enhanced the inside of their box.

    Not wanting to endure smug “I told you SOS” from us, he angrily belted the broken Lady in, did nothing about the mess, and bawled for his meek partner to get in the front. That cleanup must have been AMAZING later, but I bet the nasty Glork idiot wasn’t the one that DID it.

    ..anyway, you have no idea how fast you move in a high-speed impact, and ZERO time to react, so this can happen to ANYONE, no blowjob needed. Just keep your shoulder belt on and your gear shift properly knob bed, and a bunch of bloggers won’t be talking about YOU.

    I know something about high speed impacts from breaking my own steering wheel in my ’73 Cutlass Supreme with my head, but that’s A different story for another day…

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  2. …as to actual car crash during blow job injuries, sadly I never saw a verified example of this, but if you read the cheating wife scene in the novel “The World According to Garp” or watch the Robin Williams movie of the same name (worth it for hearing Robin Williams angrily tell his wife “no last fucks for the road” ALONE), you will get a somewhat detailed explanation of this, although the book covers it better right down to when she spits the guy’s bloody member she bit off during the accident out, but both are enjoyable, and make guys wince at the same time, but only if you ignore the tragic child death…

    https://youtu.be/aW17Mtu9log?t=8

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  3. The nastiest thing I ever saw while driving on the highway was somebody’s head in the driver’s lap while passing them. What made it even nastier was miles down the highway they had caught back up to us and passed us and it was two guys in the little car.
    My husband was driving and was laughing the first time when I told him what was going on. He was throwing up in his mouth the second time when I told him it was two guys.

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  4. @ Old Racist White Woman AUGUST 27, 2020 AT 11:57 PM

    Saw that in a Mini Cooper up by Rainy Pass. They passed us towing our hauler and about five minutes later they were in the ditch on the right side of the road. I stopped and told them I would call when we got reception over by Mazama. I told my wife there was a poofster giving the driver a knob job when they passed us and she didn’t believe me until we saw them in the ditch.

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  5. I guess we are both lucky to be alive.

    Thanks Melanie! (wherever you are)

    I’ll never forget ya on the Queen Elizabeth Way in T.O. in that Green 5.0 Mustang GT!

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