For crash victims’ families, the moment of truth about the worst

Part of a Kansas Highway Patrol trooper’s job is notifying next of kin when a person dies in a car crash. One trooper remembers a mother collapse in a doorway. Another caught a mother crumpling to the floor. This is the second story in the four-part series involving KHP death notifications. 

 Watch Trooper Hileman's video and read the story below.

‘Squeezing each other’s hand so tight’

Technical Trooper Tod Hileman

Technical Trooper Tod Hileman has done a “handful” of death notifications over the years.

“One sticks out the most to me,” he said. In a way, it was personal for Hileman.

It was a double-fatality crash on a highway at the edge of a town. There had been three teenage girls in one car that crossed into the oncoming lane, hitting the other car head-on. In the other car, the two occupants had been buckled in. When Hileman arrived, they were standing outside their car.

It was different at the girls’ car: The driver had been “jettisoned” through the windshield. She was dead, lying on the pavement in front of her car, a sheet over her. A girl in the back seat had been wearing only a lap belt, high over her stomach. She also died. Only the front seat passenger was properly buckled in. She had injuries, but they weren’t life-threatening.

The last thing the survivor remembered was a cell phone going off. It appeared the driver had reached down for the phone when she veered over the line.

Hileman had work to do with the team of Highway Patrol investigators who collect evidence, take measurements and diagram the scene – to reconstruct what happened. It was hectic because traffic had to be redirected on the busy highway. He was going through the car, looking for items that might need to be collected as evidence. So he had to look through the girls’ personal items. All had IDs.

Part of the process is to make sure that victims are being correctly identified. It involves taking the ID and matching it to the person – a body.

So Hileman was at the point where he had to walk over to the girl covered by the sheet, lift it. She was on her back. He lowered the ID close to her face and quickly confirmed a match.

He was still over her body, he recalled. “And it just dawned on me …. All these thoughts and emotions were going through my head.”

She was the same age as his daughter, and like his daughter, she was tall, “very pretty,” same hair color, same eye color.

“I just kind of had a flash that it was my daughter lying there.”

 And then he paused in retelling it -- paused maybe five seconds.

“So that really hit me,” he said, finishing.

Later, “being a dad,” he reacted to the crash by beseeching his daughter: “Please. Please,” he told her. “Pay attention. This is horrible.”

That day at the crash scene, after the bodies had been removed and car towed away, he was notified that the driver’s parents were waiting on the other side of town, at the father’s workplace. On his way, he thought to himself: “This is the worst part of our job.”

He explained: “It’s very emotional, and I’m a soft-hearted person anyway.”

He pulled up to the father’s business in his official car and uniform and saw her parents, standing, surrounded by people he assumed were relatives.

“Looking at them, already I had this covering of dread all over me, especially with a young person that’s just starting life ….

“So dad was standing on my right, mom’s on my left. Dad has his arm around mom’s shoulders.” The father was taller, so “she’s got her arm around his waist,” he recalled.

“And they were grasping hands in the middle, between them. … What caught my attention was they were squeezing each other’s hand so tight … I just got the sense, like if they could squeeze each other’s hand tight enough,” that he would “tell something else,” he recalled.

“Their knuckles were white.”

After he had parked his car, “all eyes were on me.” As he was trained to do when getting out of his car, he grabbed his trooper hat. But that time, he threw it back into the car, walked up to them and “told them the words they never ever wanted to hear in their life.”

The parents sobbed. He doesn’t remember what they said, because in that moment he was emotional too.

 “You try to save kids’ lives,” Hileman said. “I have to relive this over and over again. And maybe I can reach someone with that story.”

Still, he said, it’s so emotionally taxing for him, he doesn’t tell the story often.