FARMINGTON – In the third day of the manslaughter trial in which a Lincoln man is accused of operating his vehicle while intoxicated when it crashed in 2007, expert witnesses gave two different accounts of what happened after the car left the road.
Ryan Hurd, 23, of Lincoln, pictured at right with is attorney Richard Hartley, faces charges of manslaughter and aggravated operating a vehicle while intoxicated. Police say that Hurd was the driver of a 2002 Pontiac Grand Prix, which he owned, when the vehicle failed to navigate a turn in the road along Route 27. The car went off the road, shearing through a utility pole and eventually ending up upside-down. The Pontiac then burst into flame.
Terry Richardson, Jr., 34, of Dover-Foxcroft, was killed as a result of the crash, while Chad Bernier, of Medway, was trapped inside the car and had to be extricated by rescue workers. Hurd was found outside of the car, and was eventually questioned by police and ultimately charged.
Previously, the state had presented its case through the testimony and evidence presented by a series of state and local police officials. The jury also heard from Bernier, who claimed that Hurd had been the driver of the vehicle before it went off the road.
The defense began presenting its case today, in the form of Professor Dale Syphers, who teaches physics at Bowdoin College. Syphers was employed by Hurd’s attorney, Richard Hartley, to study the 2007 automobile crash.
Syphers, who testifies at trials as an expert witness on physics-related issues, said that his conclusions indicated that only the passenger of the vehicle, not the driver, could have been ejected from the crashing automobile. As Hurd was ejected and Richardson was not, Syphers conclusion, if correct, would be an important piece of evidence for the jury.
Syphers said he reached the conclusion by studying the broken utility pole, destroyed by the Pontiac, and a stump which was 44 feet away. The stump, shown to the jury in a series of photographs, was damaged and held traces of red paint.
Syphers testified that he was able to determine where the car collided with the stump by examining the remains of the vehicle. He said that the vehicle had struck the stump on the driver’s side, rear bumper, pointing to photographs of cracked fiberglass and a broken metal strut.
“I matched [the stump] to the damage in this corner,” Syphers said, indicating the corner of the rear bumper. “That’s the only area that could have impacted the stump.”
Using an initial speed of 86 mph for the vehicle, data which was determined by a Maine State Police mapping unit, and the distances and angles between the utility pole and stump, Syphers determined how much he believed the vehicle rotated prior to striking the stump. He told the court that he believed that the vehicle had left the roadway, struck the utility pole and maintained contact for .07 seconds and rotated somewhere between 90 and 120 degrees before striking the stump.
This, Syphers calculated, indicated that roughly 60 gees of force would be applied to the passengers. He said that he believed that the driver would have been forced down in his seat, with his head, neck and shoulder out the window. The front-seat passenger, however, would have been forced toward the driver, over his seat and back, out of the vehicle. Therefore Hurd couldn’t have been the driver, as he was thrown clear of the vehicle while Richardson remained trapped inside.
“Would physics allow the driver to get out of the vehicle?” Hartley asked.
“Not in this case,” Syphers said.
During his cross-examination, Assistant District Attorney James Andrews had a Pontiac door wheeled into the court room. Noting that Richardson was 5’8″ and somewhere between 220 and 240 pounds, the lighter Andrews leaned his head, neck and shoulder through the window, pointing to the limited amount of space available for Hurd to slip above him. He also questioned Syphers’ contention that the crash could be even somewhat accurately modeled through “very simple, straightforward physics.”
Andrews also called a rebuttal witness, Wade Bartlett, who is an engineer and accident reconstruction specialist. The state asked Bartlett, who trains police officers and engineers in his field, to review Syphers’ assessment.
On the stand, Bartlett said he did not think that Syphers’ conclusion on the accident was the correct one. He noted that Syphers was using a “two-dimensional model,” which did not consider that the Pontiac would not only be yawing, or rotating on a vertical axis like a merry-go-round, but also altering its pitch. He noted that accident reconstruction was complex, and involved taking “hundreds of measurements.”
“I don’t think hand calculations do it justice,” Bartlett said, having studied Syphers’ notes.
Bartlett pointed to the defense’s pictures of the stump, noting that the damage was on the quadrant of the wood facing away from the road. A vehicle rotating merely around the y-axis, Bartlett said, could not strike that part of the stump with its rear driver’s-side bumper. Instead, he testified, the car must have also rolled, changed its pitch dramatically, effectively placing it on the driver’s side as it flew toward the stump.
In Bartlett’s scenario, all the primary force on the occupants would have been down, toward the driver’s side of the car. This would make it more likely that if one person was ejected, it would be the driver and not the passenger.
Hartley did not get a chance to cross-examine Bartlett, but will do so when the trial resumes on May 26. Hartley also intends to call an expert witness in “blackouts,” where memory is impaired through the use of alcohol.
