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Caught in the middle of a high-speed police chase, driver painfully recounts her experience

6 min read
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Tina Nichols

Holly Tonini/Observer-Reporter

Tina Nichols of Washington describes how her car was struck by a state police cruiser last week in Houston.

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Lew Marchand, owner of Marchand Auto in Washington, prepares to move Tina Nichols’ 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt. “It’s totaled,” Marchand said Friday.

Barbara S. Miller/ Observer-Reporter

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Both sides of the front end of Tina Nichols' car were smashed in an accident Monday resulting from a state police pursuit.

Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Tina Nichols was literally caught in the middle of what she described as a high-speed chase when a state police car pursued a motorist from Interstate 79 through Houston Borough Monday.

Nichols, 55, was taking a lunch break from her 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. shift at a racetrack-area hotel where she works as a housekeeper and laundry attendant.

She was headed toward a Canonsburg grocery store and waiting at a red light to turn right from Route 519 onto Pike Street, behind the wheel of her 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt at 10:05 a.m. when the pursued vehicle sped up behind her and scraped the side of her car.

She heard the pursued vehicle jump a high curb beside a parklet, blowing out two tires and careening along the sidewalk on at least two rims.

Nichols, 55, heard the screech of a siren, and as she looked into her rear-view mirror, she saw the pursuing patrol car.

“I had nowhere to go,” she said Thursday. “I couldn’t even yell. There were cars coming around. I was thinking, he’s not going to be able to stop. He’s not going to be able to stop. You could see the speed – that’s how I knew.” A gray car, she said, was in front of her, and a white truck had stopped to her left.

She braced herself, and when the patrol car struck her car, she blacked out.

Nichols regained consciousness as a half-dozen people were peering into her car, seeing her sprawled onto the passenger side of the front seat. The onlookers were asking about her condition, and an ambulance took her to Washington Hospital.

She said a state trooper who was not involved in the crash talked with her at the hospital. She doesn’t recall him asking how she was doing, only if she was wearing a seat belt.

She told him she was not. “I didn’t lie to them,” she said Thursday. “Thank God I was by myself.”

State law requires both drivers and front-seat passengers beyond car-seat age to be buckled.

She left the hospital about 4:30 p.m. Monday.

Information from a state police report issued by email Tuesday identified neither the state trooper nor “the driver” whose vehicle was stopped at the red light.

Nichols identified herself Thursday as the driver. She was angered by an account from state police, published Wednesday in the Observer-Reporter, that deemed the driver’s injuries as “minor.”

Nichols said she suffered a concussion, one cracked rib, one fractured rib, and bruises on both thighs.

She described pain that travels to her hip, and said of her legs, “It feels like they’re going numb. … They said it might get worse before it gets better. I’m out of breath. It’s just crazy.”

Before she reported for work Thursday, Nichols hoped the state would help her obtain a rental car. She said she was told to pay out of pocket for a rental, for which she would eventually be reimbursed, which she described as “give me the runaround, and then ask me for money.”

“With state police I thought it would be simple. I’m not a rocket scientist,” said Nichols, who has made a list of her many phone calls, which included the state attorney general’s office and the state police barracks to determine where her car had been towed.

She said she asked, “‘How long is this process going to drag out?’ They said it might be a year. They’re making me feel like I did something wrong. I’m mad at them right now, very mad.”

Her oldest daughter gave her a lift to work Thursday, but she said she was told she couldn’t work until she is medically cleared.

She has medical insurance through the Affordable Care Act, but said she is upset she can’t return to work. “When you’re just hired for a new job, I feel terrible,” she said.

Nichols cares for another daughter’s infant and a 5-year-old who will soon be attending kindergarten.

“She needs shoes,” Nichols said. “I’ve been married for 23 years, but my husband and I are separated. I get a couple little food stamps to feed these kids.”

Nichols is scheduled to meet with a lawyer and go to a followup medical appointment next week.

She has scant recollection of the driver of the white sedan being pursued.

“It was a guy, one guy,” she said. “I don’t know what this dude did. I don’t care. Was it that important? Unless this guy’s a murderer, let up. At the intersection there’s cars. I don’t get it. I don’t get it.”

State police said the driver of the vehicle being pursued is still being sought.

Ryan Tarkowski, communications director at state police headquarters in Harrisburg, said the department’s pursuit policy is confidential because it would provide too much knowledge to those who are on the run.

He said, however, when engaging or terminating a pursuit, the top priority a trooper is to consider is the safety of the general public, the trooper or troopers involved and even that of the suspect.

The policy also addresses the nature of crime committed, the amount of vehicular or pedestrian traffic in the area and weather conditions.

At the beginning of the chase that led to Houston, the trooper spotted a white sedan traveling at 85 mph in a 55-mph zone on Interstate 79 northbound. The driver of the white car began to drive erratically, weaving through traffic and exited at Houston, according to an email to the newspaper from Trooper Melinda Bondarenka from Troop B.

Cpl. Adam Reed, who is also based at the headquarters, said he could not comment on whether the pursuit policy was followed Monday in Houston.

“I don’t have that information,” he said, “If there were injuries, it would still be under investigation.”

Any comment on potential discipline of the trooper “would be entirely too early,” said Reed, who declined to identify the trooper, saying it would be up to Troop B.

Trooper Robert Broadwater, the Troop B public information officer, said, “We’re not going to release his name.”

As to the suspect, Broadwater said, “No one’s in custody. They’re still actively investigating that.”

The state police Bureau of Research and Development compiles annual reports on police pursuits from departments throughout Pennsylvania. In 2016, the last year for which statistics are available, there were 1,803 chases.

The 627 pursuits resulted in 826 crashes, with 203 of them causing injury to the violator, police or uninvolved persons. Of the three fatalities, all were violators.

“Few areas of police work raise as much public scrutiny as police pursuits,” the report concludes.

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