Fast Cars – Fun Life

Confessions of a State Trooper Pt. 2

By Kyle L. Haas

“Oh, you mean the Pop Tart crash right?” said Sergeant Carol Nero to Schwanke over lunch.

“We had a crash, it was about 3 o’clock in the morning and this guy goes through this intersection, roles his car and hits a tree in the front yard of this house,” Schwanke says. “The family never heard it or anything and they got up at about 3:30 to let one of their dogs out and here’s a car with a dead body in it in their front yard. The lady at the house was so distraught by it they chopped the tree down and by late morning she has an angel planted where the tree was. It was a messy crash, and the coroner missed some body parts. I had to go out and pick up an ear the next morning. Just flicked it into a plastic baggy.

“So I’m talking to the officer and I’m getting the information and I’m getting hungry. So I have this Pop Tart in my car and so I’m walking around eating a Pop Tart. So (the Sergeant) she asks if she can have a Pop Tart. So that one we call our Pop Tart crash.”

“We have a sense of humor most people don’t understand, you’ve got to be careful,” Nero says. “Humor is the way we deal with stuff and what we find humorous as a relief is seen as vulgar to the general public. But that’s how we deal with the crashes. It’s like eating Pop Tarts at a scene. We’re not doing it to be disrespectful; we call it the Pop Tart thing because that’s how we deal with it.

“You take it seriously but you don’t dwell on it. It’s not a… you can’t take it personal. Because it’s not. You don’t know these people. You feel sorry for their family, sorry for what happened to them, but you don’t know these people.”

“And dealing with kids are the worst,” Schwanke said. “I had a dad who ran over his 3-year-old daughter once on father’s day. Fifteen-year-old son wanted the truck backed out to shoot hoops, dad backs his truck up and runs over his daughter. I thank god I never got to see her. They scooped her up and took her to the hospital. She died at the hospital. I think of that every father’s day. I think of that crash.

“Two kids were coming from a Fish concert at Red Rocks,” Schwanke said. “They got hit head on. It was their fault, they were high on cocaine and whatever drugs but they were both burned to death. And it was weird to see them. Bubbles were coming out their nose. That one was gross, it didn’t look real – it looked like a horror movie.

“I say a prayer over every one of the fatals I’ve had. And that’s me, that’s part of my release of tension. Rather than remember the worst things we remember the Pop Tarts.”

***

He’d hid in the back seat of a neighbor’s car after ducking out the back of the house. He managed to escape that day, but police found him a week later after tracking a cell phone he’d stolen and capturing him after a five-hour standoff outside an apartment in Fort Collins. The driver of the red truck, the one who’d pulled a gone on an officer, Shawn Lee Todaro plead guilty to a 30-year sentence for, “…possession of $18,000 dollars worth of methamphetamines, possessing a firearm as a drug offender, two counts of vehicular assault, menacing with a deadly weapon, and admitting to being a habitual criminal,” according to the Daily Camera. The couple in the sedan – parents of a family of four – was seriously injured. Schwanke’s heard it from several of his fellow officers. It if had been them, the trigger would have been pulled. But he says he’s glad he didn’t take a life that day. He admittedly broke down on the phone call he made to his wife. He says she’s the only one who agreed with his choice.

It made him appreciate the slow days at the office, he says. But for him the job is 90 percent common sense. And so he’ll continue to be the officer who saves cows from a fence, and who only likes to radar for two hours a day. He finds humor in the, “I was driving fast because I’m cold,” excuses he gets, but he appreciates it when a driver is honest and takes responsibility.

“I got teased when I first got this job by my friends in high school. They’d say you’re too nice to be a cop, you don’t have the heart to write people tickets. There’s that persona of everyone’s mean and there are mean cops. But that’s in every profession, and you know there’s always going to be a bad apple. But there are some pretty good guys out there.”

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