McCullom Lake PD squad car crashes

Gus Philpott
Woodstock Advocate
April 16, 2011

On Thursday a McCullom Lake P.D. officer was about to chase down a speeder but, instead, he was involved in a two-car crash himself.

The unnamed officer was eastbound on McCullom Lake Road when he decided to make a U-turn and stop a westbound vehicle.

Details were sketchy in the Northwest Herald article this morning, making it impossible to assess the cause of the crash. If I were to venture a guess, I'd say he whipped a U-turn without checking for following traffic; bu tthis is only a guess. An unnamed deputy of the McHenry County Sheriff's Department investigated the crash, and no press release has been posted on the Sheriff's Department website at http://www.mchenrysheriff.org/

The driver of the other car, a Dodge Intrepid, also was not named in the article. No mention was made of any citation(s) issued. There seems to be agreement between the Intrepid's driver and the police officer that emergency equipment on the squad car was not in use.

OK, so crashes happen. It won't take a month to investigate that crash. The investigation was probably complete an hour later. Why is there no reporting of the drivers' names? Why is there no report of a citation issued to the at-fault driver? Who is Unit 1 on the crash report?

Oh, well; there is always FOIA... What a shame that it's necessary to bother the FOIA Officer at the Sheriff's Department for information that should have been quickly released to the media and also placed in a media release on the sheriff's department website?

Will things be any different when Sheriff Nygren returns from his Panama Canal cruise? Will he be living in his new condo residence in Crystal Lake? His drive-time to the office will now be a little longer than from Hebron. What are the CALEA standards for how quickly a media release is made?