Eight days have passed since the head-on car crash that resulted in the death of 16-year-old Zach Myers, a junior at Olathe Northwest High School.
And the public is still without an official explanation regarding the circumstances of the crash, which occurred on a narrow residential street about a mile north of a downtown trade school where Zach took some classes.
So, taking up where I left off on Monday — trying to get answers about this tragedy — I spent part of Wednesday surveying the crash scene and interviewing neighbors.
But first, here’s the latest from Sgt. Johnny Roland, public information officer for the Olathe Police Department. Roland said Wednesday afternoon that he did not expect the traffic unit’s report to be ready at least until next week, and perhaps later. (When it is finished, it will be a matter of public record.)
“There’s tons of data and information to gather,” Roland said, adding that it was “not uncommon” for a fatality investigation to take two or more weeks.
He said he did not know if toxicology tests were being conducted on any of the three survivors — the two boys that Zach was with and the 20-year-old woman who was driving the other car. No one was seriously injured besides Zach, who suffered a head injury.
The head-on collision occurred shortly before 10:30 a.m. Dec. 1 in the 600 block of North Iowa Street. Zach was in the back seat of what a neighbor said was a grey Hyundai Elantra, which was northbound, apparently headed from the technical school to Olathe Northwest on College Boulevard.
The woman, southbound toward downtown, was driving a small red car, the neighbor said.
Everyone involved in the crash apparently was wearing a seatbelt, including Zach.
The neighbor who described the cars, 35-year-old Kathleen McElliott, said she heard the crash and thought that her parked vehicle had been struck. She hurried outside, while her domestic partner was on the phone with a 911 operator. When McElliott looked inside the boys’ car, Zach was struggling to breathe. At that point, the belt was off Zach, she said, but she noticed that blood was on the lap part of the belt. “It looked like he was (had been) wearing at least the lap part of the seat belt,” she said.
She saw no blood on the shoulder harness, however, raising the possibility that that part of the belt was not around Zach’s torso at the time of the crash.
McElliott said she did not remember or notice if air bags deployed in the boys’ car but that the air bag in the woman’s car did deploy.
Zach did not have an open head wound, McElliott said, adding that an emergency medical technician who was at the scene and visited her house a day or two later told her that his injuries were internal.
McElliott said she strongly suspected that excessive speed was a factor. The posted speed limit on that part of Iowa is 25 mph.
“It’s my opinion that at least one of them (the drivers) — I don’t know who — had to be speeding,” McElliott said. “There’s no way that a collision at 25 miles per hour would take a life.”
Like everyone else who has come in close contact with the case, McElliott said her heart went out to the Myers family. “I am deeply sorry for their loss,” she said. “Our kids to go school with them (the boys who were involved.)”
Wednesday, looking south on Iowa
The crash occurred on a section of Iowa that is two lanes, divided by intermittent yellow lines, and where Iowa curves and rises slightly. At the crash site, narrow gouges are visible in the street on both sides of the yellow line. The roadway had been cleaned with a solution that left a large, bleached-out-looking spot in the road.
McElliott said that on the morning of the crash, a large truck was parked on the west side of the street and that the woman who was southbound in the red car could have been trying to navigate around the truck.
McElliott said a lot of drivers exceed the speed limit on Iowa. Indeed, as I was interviewing another neighbor, a car sped by at 45 miles an hour or more. “That’s part of the problem,” said the man I was talking to at his front door.
McElliott said that although she did not know Zach, she is haunted by the incident. “I wish I could have done something more,” she said.
The reason she didn’t, she said, is that the 911 operator had told her partner — who, in turn, had told McElliott — not to move him and to wait for emergency responders to arrive.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
Good reporting on what we discussed last week
1) appears no shoulder harness
2) speeding involved
3) no mention yet of my info that the driver was not driving his own car
I think the problem with this is that we see so few actual acts of journalism being committed anymore that we fail to recognize when someone does it.
This is top notch journalism. Yes, it’s tough to ask these questions now, but by shining a light on this case, the police may work just a little harder to research it fully. And perhaps they’ll enforce the speed limits on that street so that another student returning from classes won’t have to suffer a similar fate.
This isn’t voyeurism from an uncaring ghoul. It’s a thoughtful and thorough act of journalism that’s attempting to find out why this young man’s family had to grieve the loss of their son in the hopes that another family won’t have to experience this same tragedy.
Great job, Fitz, thanks for sticking with the story when people who should have applauded your efforts turned their back on you.
Kaler — It might seem like last week, but it was Monday that we talked, after my first post appeared.
John — Thanks for pointing out a couple of the good things that could come from shining a light on this case.
Jim
I agree with John. Why allow ignorance to prevail and possibly allow other people’s children to be hurt in a similar fashion if that could be avoided? It is ridiculous for people to accuse you of being a voyeur. Those people are simply reacting to their very real emotions of sadness and grief and turning it to anger toward an easy target. They are not thinking clearly at this time.
An excellent point. While I have immense respect for John Landsberg, I disagree with his writing on this, and in particular where he mentions that the majority of the comments below the articles are negative. Except he doesn’t place any of the comments in context. Some of them are trolls who make snide comments under every article – every article. And then there are the one of the type you mention that are responding viscerally to the article from the perspective of someone else who lost a child in a car accident, etc.
As someone who lost a granddaughter in a car accident I understand the emotion and grief they’re feeling. Indeed, this is hardly the first time a newsgatherer has been criticized for sticking a camera or microphone into the face of someone experiencing a traumatic event, but we need to stay focused on finding out what happened here so it doesn’t happen again. How many children are we willing to sacrifice to avoid a socially awkward moment?
Finally, I’m a bit offended that the PD would throw their weight around to silence a journalist engaged in legitimate research. Can I call the police and have them silence someone who wants to write about me? Can we call the police and have them hunt down the trolls who make disparaging comments on line that hurt our feelings? Can Jim call the police and have them hunt down the anonymous person at The Star who completely mischaracterized what Jim wrote? That’s more harmful than anything Jim has done in these two articles because it was not only downright false, it was designed to hold Jim up in a hateful light.
Sympathize with the family, but make sure we take the steps to protect the other kids who have to drive down that street, and we can only do that through research, painful as it may be.
I am seriously disgusted with the lack of respect all of you have for a grieving family! If a husband wants to protect his wife from another phone call that may upset her, he has every right to protect her by calling the police and asking that they not be contacted again. I don’t see it as the police throwing their weight around. I see it as they are doing their job!!!
As others said in previous comments and as advised by the Olathe police sergeant, the information will be available to the public when the investigation is complete. It is not necessary to try and rush an investigation because you all NEED answers. Mind your own business. It is also not necessary to bother a grieving family at home after they clearly asked for privacy.
What is wrong with you people? I, too, would like to know what occurred, along with others who are upset by this tragic event.
You all SERIOUSLY need to find something better to do with our time…You are all trolls.
The fact that some people resort to name-calling in their comments perfectly illustrates the point that they are not thinking clearly. Because they are upset…they get angry…and because they’re angry, they feel justified in calling other people names. You can read the comments here and quickly tell which writer is responding emotionally and which writers are responding logically. Name calling is unnecessary. Reasonable people can disagree.