Reporter finds important information

Gus Philpott
Woodstock Advocate
July 20, 2012

Northwest Herald reporter Sara Sutschek uncovered important information related to the early morning fatal accident on July 1 that claimed two young lives just outside Woodstock.

She wrote in this morning's Northwest Herald article that Jacob Norys and Alec Kaiser had talked to a friend in a Woodstock gas station parking lot shortly before the crash. Then she wrote, "Norys and Kaiser switched spots, with Kaiser getting behind the wheel."

This would indicate to me that Norys drove from his home to Kaiser's home and then back into Woodstock to that gas station parking lot, which location was not identified in the Northwest Herald article.

At that point a Woodstock officer in an unmarked car pulled in. From the article it appears that just-barely-16 Alec Kaiser was behind the wheel of the Norys car. It may be that the officer felt he did not have cause to ask for identification, if the car was on private property.

Before that, when Kaiser was passenger, there were 22 outgoing calls from his cell phone.

Depending on what "shortly before 2 a.m." means, the boys must have left that convenience store and perhaps drove south on Dean Street, crossing U.S. 14, and turning right on Davis Road.

There was a cell phone call at 1:58AM from Kaiser's phone to "Potatoe", and the crash time is reported as 2:02AM. "Potatoe" will know whether he was talking to Kaiser or Norys (on Kaiser's phone) at the time of the crash and what their conversation was about.

Norys' cell phone was damaged in the crash, and deputies were unable to extract a record of his cell phone usage from the phone. They could have obtained call records from the cellular service provider, but those records were not in the Coroner's file last week.

The question now is, what will parents and friends do, so that crashes like this one don't happen in the future?