Top cop opens up about being the first on the scene at ‘horrific’ car crashes while revealing the emotional toll his ‘traumatic’ job has taken
- Queensland senior officers opens up about trauma of attending fatal chashes
- Sergeant Carl Cutler says job never gets any easier after 25 years in policing
- He issued an ambitious challenge to motorists to make his job redundant
Sergeant Carl Cutler still vividly recalls the first fatal crash scene he attended after joining New Zealand Police.
Now a senior investigator with Queensland Police’s Forensic Crash Unit, he has since attended hundreds of fatal crashes in the last 25 years.
Being one of the first emergency workers at the scene to a fatality never gets any easier, regardless of experience.
Sergeant Carl Cutler (pictured) has been called to the scene of hundreds of fatal crashes
Sergeant Carl Cutler says all crash site investigators remember and are impacted by every ‘traumatic and horrific’ crash they’re called to because they become the ‘custodians’ of that person’s end of life.
‘We need to be able to, at that time, disassociate with what is in front of us, so we can gather the evidence, to tell the story of what’s happened,’ he told Yahoo News Australia.
The hardest thing for Sergeant Cutler is breaking the tragic news to the next of kin, which he described as ‘destroying a family’.
He says there’s no easy way telling a family their loved one isn’t coming home.
‘You haven’t done the action yourself that has caused that destruction, but you’re about to be the bearer of bad news which is going to devastate people,’ he said.
A mother and teenage daughter were tragically killed in a horrific three-vehicle collision (scene pictured) along Warrego Highway, 155km west of Brisbane in October 2018
Sergeant Cutler believes most crashes occur because a motorist has done either something they should not have or didn’t do something they should have.
He issued this challenge to motorists.
‘Make a crash investigator a redundant job, make me unemployed. Make it so I don’t have to go to another crash,’ Sergeant Cutler said.
With the holiday season now in full swing, he urged motorists to keep their phone out of sight and reach and to pay attention while on the road.
For those making a long road trip, he advises to not drive if tired or fatigued, swap drivers and take breaks along the way.
The Queensland road toll for 2019 stands at 216, currently below last year’s road toll of 233.
A man died when his ute slammed into the back of a truck north-west of Brisbane in May