Everyone feels a rush of excitement, and a jolt of anxiety, when police cars running lights and sirens scream down the road. But no one expects to get hit. Certainly not Carolyn Hoeger, a counselor at the Milton I. Schwartz Hebrew Academy, whose minivan was run into by a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police cruiser in 2003.
At first the police department indicated the crash was not her fault. But once she tried to press for medical damages, she claims the department blindsided her again, blaming her for the accident and refusing to cover her medical expenses.
On the evening of October 14, 2003, Hoeger was driving westbound on Tropicana Avenue, with her twin 11-year-old daughters, Alexandria and Olivia. She had the light. Officer Anthony Packe was running an emergency call northbound on Pecos. She says she didn't hear his sirens. As she saw Packe's cruiser fly across the intersection, too late for her to get out of the way, she knew it was going to be "quite an impact."
Packe smashed into the driver's side of Hoeger's Chevy Astro van, which propelled the van several hundred feet into a pedestrian walk signal. "His hood was all smooshed back and up," she says.
Hoeger and her daughters were taken to the hospital. The girls weren't seriously hurt, but Hoeger broke her right hand when her airbag deployed. She's already had one operation to insert a steel rod and pins, and she may require another. Even now her hand gets achy in the cold, and keys and other small items often slip out of her grasp.
The police accident report noted that Packe's car "collided into the left front" of the minivan, and doesn't indicate any culpability on Hoeger's part. Officer Jose Montoya, in an article that appeared in the Review-Journal a few days after the crash, said that Packe did not properly check the intersection before entering it. Further, at the hospital, Hoeger says one detective approached her daughters and assured them that their mom had done nothing wrong.
Metro was quick about taking care of the insurance for her to replace her destroyed vehicle. And it might have ended there. But when Hoeger tried to collect on her mounting medical bills, which were $30,000 and likely to rise, the department suddenly changed course. After months of negotiation, Hoeger was only offered $20,000 for her bills. She declined to accept the department's offer.
Last October, almost a year after the crash, Hoeger filed suitagainst the police, claiming that, "Only after it became known to defendants that plaintiff had obtained counsel and initiated a claim for damages resulting from the accident did defendants retroactively issue criminal traffic citations to plaintiff and allege she was partially at fault."
She is seeking damages for her medical expenses and attorneys fees. Police officials don't have much to say. "We don't comment on active lawsuits," Lt. Brett Primas, the head of the department's Risk Management Department, told the Weekly. "We prefer to handle it in the litigation department. Obviously there's a dispute."
The department maintains records on the number of traffic accidents involving police officers but declined to release them. In court filings, attorneys for the department do claim that Hoeger's injuries were "caused or contributed to by the plaintiff's own negligence, and such negligence was greater than the negligence, if any, of the defendants." And according to computer records at the Clark County Justice Center, officers cited Hoeger for multiple violations the same day as the crash. She was charged with not having a Nevada State driver's license (a $190 fine), failure to obtain Nevada registration (a $380 fine), and failure to wear a seatbelt (a $67 fine). She was also charged with failure to yield to an emergency vehicle (a $600 fine).
Hoeger says she didn't receive those citations until weeks after the crash—after her attorneys had first contacted department officials—and that the charges were untrue. She points out that if she hadn't been wearing a seatbelt, "I would have gone through the windshield." A judge later threw out the first three fines, and reduced the failure-to-yield fine to $80.
Hoeger's next day in court is pending. "That's the point, to assign some blame to me so they don't have to be responsible for the rest of this," she says. "I think that's an extreme abuse of power."