The police accident report came out the following Wednesday. Joanne’s friend in the ER, a nurse whose husband was a Maine State Police trooper, helped Bernadette request a copy. It cost $10.
The report was six pages long, and I read it at Bernadette’s kitchen table in Brewer on a cold gray afternoon while she made tourtière, the meat pie her mother taught her to make in Van Buren up in the County.
Monday night, 9:47 p.m., Route 9 near the Hermon town line. Road conditions: snow-covered with patches of black ice. Vehicle 1: a 2009 Honda Civic, green, driven by Elijah Thibodeau, age 17, eastbound. Vehicle 2: a 2021 Freightliner box truck owned by North Woods Freight LLC, westbound.
Then I read the trooper’s narrative, written in that flat, careful police way.
“Witness statement from driver of Vehicle 3 (traveling behind Vehicle 2) indicates Vehicle 2 was traveling at approximately 55 mph in a posted 45 mph zone at time of incident, under snow and ice conditions. Witness observed driver of Vehicle 2 looking down at a handheld device immediately prior to the vehicle crossing the center line. Vehicle 2 crossed into eastbound lane. Vehicle 1 swerved to avoid head-on collision, lost traction on ice, left roadway, and struck a utility pole. Driver of Vehicle 2 did not stop at scene. Vehicle 2 was located 2.3 miles west at North Woods Freight terminal. Driver cited for failure to stop and render aid, speed greater than reasonable and prudent, and use of handheld device while operating a commercial motor vehicle.”
I put the report down.
It wasn’t black ice that put Eli in that hospital bed. A truck driver on his phone, going ten over the limit in a snowstorm, crossed the center line and ran him off the road. Then he drove away and left a seventeen-year-old boy unconscious in a ditch, in a crumpled Honda, in the snow.
And four days later, his company’s insurance carrier mailed his grandmother a fifteen-thousand-dollar check offer with a ten-day deadline.
“Bernadette,” I said quietly. “Who found him? On Route 9? Who called 911?”
She set down her rolling pin.
“A plow driver for the Town of Hermon,” she said. “He saw the headlights in the ditch. He said Eli’s car was half buried. He said if he’d come by twenty minutes later, Eli would have frozen to death.”
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