Police beat – Unnecessary tragedy

by Senior Constable Mick Emery

A couple of months back we reported about a traffic crash on Rainbow Beach Road that I described at the time as a ‘near miss’.

Somehow no-one was killed, despite one of the cars swerving onto the wrong side of the road and causing a head-on collision.

The reason for the erratic driving has now become evident – with toxicology results revealing a high concentration of illicit drugs in the driver, who will now face court.

I’ve previously made the point that you don’t know the state of the driver coming towards you, and this was again emphasised only weeks ago when yet another car strayed onto the wrong side of the road before rolling off into the trees.

Again there was evidence of drug and alcohol use, only this time the driver was killed.

The only good news out of the whole thing was that there was no one coming the opposite way at the time…

Now I’ve heard it said that if someone gets blind drunk or stoned before driving into a tree and killing themselves, it may be considered ‘natural selection’.

Yet if they end up killing someone else in the process (as could easily have been the case in either of the above two crashes on Rainbow Beach Road) it is nothing short of an unnecessary tragedy.

With that in mind, we continue to breath test and drug test drivers, and welcome any calls about ‘suspect’ drivers.

Some recent tip-offs we’ve received go to show that everyone can play their part in keeping our roads free of these dangers.

On a lighter note, we recently received an interesting bag of found property at the office – but had trouble finding the owner.

The bag had fallen off a ute heading to Fraser and was found to contain an expensive camera and an expensive laptop – but neither had a contact name or number to assist with reuniting them with their owner.

I continued to search through the bag – only to find a sandwich bag containing drugs (needless to say there was no name on that bag either!).

About half an hour later a sheepish looking bloke knocked on the door and asked if his bag had been handed in.

“Well actually…” I said, pausing for effect, “I have some good news, and some bad news…”

The man was reunited with his camera and laptop – and spent a memorable and drug-free weekend on Fraser Island.

He then drove home without hitting any trees, and will attend a Drug Diversion program to learn about the health consequences of drug use.

A memorable weekend indeed…