The Carnage Continues ...crashSan Jose crash

Deadly Chases

"I'm talking about the senseless death of 15-year-old Leyda Montufar in San Jose last Tuesday. She was doing nothing more than riding with her mother and her brother and sister in a Mitsubishi Mirage at 10th and San Fernando streets." writes Scot Herhold of the Mercury News on July 18, 2010.

by Candy Priano
Executive Director
Voices Insisting on PursuitSAFETY

Crashes due to California police chases have killed at least three innocent bystanders and an officer within a 33-day period:

  1. Leyda Montufar, 15, a passenger in her mother’s car, killed; CHP chased a driver for a traffic violation in San Jose (July 13)
  2. Walter Williams, 37, a child counselor, picking up his paycheck, killed because Baldwin Park police officers chased a suspected car thief. (June 18)
  3. CHP motorcycle officer Tom Coleman, 33, Redlands, killed while pursuing a traffic violator. (June 11)
  4. Kayla Woods, 6, playing outside her home, killed when the LAPD chased drug-dealing suspects. (June 10)

Police chase tragedies repeat themselves throughout the United States. In New York, a nun walking down the street is killed. An officer is killed in Florida. Two mothers are killed in New Mexico. An 11-year-old girl is killed in North Carolina. …

USA Today reported that about 360 people are killed each year in police chases, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). 

Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina who has studied police pursuits since the 1980s, says the actual number of fatalities is "three or four times higher" than NHTSA’s voluntary tracking system. Data collected by NHTSA is at the discretion of law enforcement officials.

I am the executive director of PursuitSAFETY.org, a national nonprofit organization that assists families of innocent victims. My family also became innocent victims of a pursuit that resulted in my teenage daughter’s death. There is no national database that successfully tracks pursuit fatalities. The government simply releases information that has no state or federal oversight and calls it a “report.”

With no mandatory reporting requirements, the deaths of law-abiding Americans continue to climb in obscurity. It is imperative that mandatory reporting be implemented for pursuit and pursuit-related crashes.  If the actual number of innocent victims were known, more people would be appalled and would demand sensible reform.