The Death of Stella Corona

On August 1, 2010, I was driving home with my wife, at about 6:30 in the evening. We were going from Kailua-Kona to Ocean View, which is a 45-mile drive.
    About midway, in Honaunau, we were passed suddenly and unexpectedly by a small, silver car, that seemd to come out of nowhere. The car pulled in front of us, then started tailgating the vehicle that had been in front of us. The speeding car swerved side to side and repeatedly tried to pass the car it was following, on the left and right side of the road, while the speeder kept looking down at something inside his car, while simultaneously squirming constantly. We predicted that he would cause an accident. 

We followed the apparently drunk and high speeder for a few minutes, then stopped at the public water faucet to fill our tanks. We were there for about five minutes. We then got back on the road, and about ten minutes later, near mile marker 88, we saw several vehicles stopped on the side of Hwy 11, and two, separate, wrecked cars.
   I stopped my car, called 911 to report the accident, then got out to see if I could help. Sure enough, the reckless driver who had passed us earlier, had crashed his car at high speed, into the front, left side of an oncoming car. 
   

I can’t remember which car I investigated first, but I remember walking up to the speeder’s car, and saw that he was laying on the side of the road, and someone had already put a blanket over him. He was alive and conscious, and he sounded drunk, as two people talked to him. The interior of his car smelled of alcohol. I walked away, with extreme disgust and hatred for what he had just done.
 

In the other car were three people. The front, left side of the car was crushed, and the driver was pinned between the collapsed, firewall and the floorboard. She was barely conscious. Behind her, sat an older woman, also trapped, barely conscious, and bleeding slightly around her mouth. In the front, right seat, a man sat with an apparently broken leg. Everyone was breathing, and there was no obvious, heavy bleeding, so all we could do was wait for the emergency vehicles to arrive. It took about 25 minutes for the first one to come, which was a fire truck.

The firemen removed the man first, and put him on a backboard on the ground. I then walked up to the man and gave him my blanket, and offered to make a phone call for him. He accepted the blanket, but he said that there was no one for him to call, and that the driver’s mother was the victim in the back seat.

The firemen then started using their, “jaws of life”, and extracted the driver’s mother, then they started working on freeing the driver. It took the longest time to extract the driver, as the car was so tightly squeezed around her legs and lower body. But eventually, the firemen bent back the car and tried to pull the driver out.
It was then that I saw that her legs had been brutally severed at the knees, in not clean cuts, but with ragged, ripped and torn flesh and bone.

The firemen eventually got her out, and she was flown away by helicopter.
So I took pictures of the overall accident, in the hopes that it might do somebody some good, some day. But no, I didn’t photograph any gore, as I didn’t want to invade the privacy of the victims.
When the police arrived, I spoke to two separate officers, told them what had happened prior to the accident, and tried to get them to take my name and phone number. But neither officer asked for my name, nor recorded anything I said.
I pointed out the injured man lying on the ground, and I encouraged one of the officers to talk to the man, and the officer did talk to him, but the officer asked for no name and wrote down NOTHING. The police were more interested in using their measuring wheel, to measure the distance between the two, crashed cars. I can’t figure out why that is.
Now, the highway between Captain Cook and Ocean View, where the accident occured, is about 25 miles of winding road, that is an unpatrolled SPEEDWAY, where reckless drivers tailgate other cars relentlessly, pass illegally and recklessly, and crash quite often. This has been going on for YEARS, and still the police WON’T patrol this area. And I’m SICK OF IT.
So I got it in my head to offer a deal with the newspaper, “West Hawaii Today”, for them to include my pictures with whatever story they might print about the crash. I called, and told the Editor, you can have my pictures, if you include my commentary with them. But the Editor refused my offer, and not only that, he wasn’t much interested in the story I had for him, EVEN THOUGH A WOMAN’S LEGS HAD BEEN CRUSHED OFF.
As a condition for WHT using my pictures, I wanted them to publish my public warning about the DANGEROUS SPEEDWAY OF SOUTH KONA and how there’s NO POLICE THERE, and that NOBODY IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT GIVES A SHIT about what is happening there. This is NOT about drawing attention to myself, this is about GETTING THE WORD OUT TO SAVE LIVES. But WHT just doesn’t care. The Editor DIDN’T EVEN KNOW ABOUT THIS UNTIL I TOLD HIM.
So I have given the story and pictures to YOU, in the hopes that you will spread them to the appropriate people, and that we can GET SOME POLICE PROTECTION ON THE HIGHWAY IN SOUTH KONA.