Halloween morning wreck - more (or less)

Gus Philpott
Woodstock Advocate
November 22, 2010

Early on Halloween morning (4:00AM) there was a wreck in McHenry County, when a driver rolled his pick-up onto its roof.

Was he injured? The report of the McHenry County Sheriff's Department says that the driver told the deputy that he was "okay", and the report reads that he was treated and released at the scene. The type of crash reported on the Crash Report is "B Injured."

The report of the Woodstock Fire Rescue District says he refused treatment, and the "Casualties" box is left uncompleted. The "Person Involved" information fields are blank, which means they either were not completed with the driver's name or the information was redacted. If it had been redacted, there probably would have been an entry on the report so stating.

Hoping to see evidence of the driver's condition, I ordered a copy of the in-car video from Dep. Dillon's squad car. I figured that he would have run "hot" to a reported roll-over crash during the 12 minutes that it took him to respond. Any in-car videocamera should operate as soon as the emergency lights are activated.

The response to my FOIA request was that there is no in-car video during the two-hour period of his response, time on-scene or transporting the driver to his home. I had hoped the audio would pick up conversation between the deputy and the driver that might reveal speech patterns.

The in-car audio during videocamera operation (had emergency lights been in use) also would have picked up the deputy's voice during any cell phone conversations while enroute to the scene. It is common knowledge that deputies use cell phones for off-police-frequency communications.

Did the deputy know before arrival that the driver of the crashed truck was an employee of the McHenry County Sheriff's Department?