Benefit of the doubt? Not for Murray
January 10th, 2012
Lieut. Gov. Tim Murray has forfeited the benefit of the doubt.
Murray, in a recent letter to political supporters, complained that he has been subjected to “false rumors and wild speculation” in connection with the crash of a state-owned car last Nov. 2 on Interstate 190 in Sterling.
Perhaps he would have had a legitimate complaint if he had been completely transparent from the start. But his account of the crash is contradicted in almost every detail by what was more recently revealed from the vehicle’s black box. If anybody is causing problems by saying things that are false, it is Murray.
The lieutenant governor claimed he had been obeying the 65 mph speed limit. He wasn’t. The black box data showed that he been traveling in excess of 75 mph, and shortly before the crash his speed increase to 108 mph.
He claimed that he had slid on black ice. Not according to the black box, which showed he had never applied the brakes. He claimed he had been wearing his seatbelt. False again.
To call all of these contradictions “mistakes” is laughable. They call into question the rest of his account. Murray said he had gone for a drive to check out storm damage – at around 5 a.m. in the pitch dark. Now he says that he went out for a drive because he couldn’t sleep. And, he now says the reason for the accident is that he fell asleep the wheel.
So for Murray to complain about the press demanding his cell phone records is both unseemly and suspicious. He contends that he was not talking or texting on his phone any time during the drive. But, he does not want to release the phone records.
If Murray wants to end rumors and speculation, he will stop stonewalling. That is only feeding them. If his phone records back up what he has been saying, he has nothing to worry about. But he can’t complain that people don’t trust him. In this case he doesn’t deserve it.
Entry Filed under: Better Government, News, Transparency
1 Comment Add your own
1. Ed Cutting | February 13th, 2012 at 6:01 pm
One has to know the road he had the “accident” on to truly understand the situation. It was built to be a backup landing zone for Westover in the event of a nuclear war and there are what the MSP report referred to as “snow shelves” on both sides of the road in places.
In other words, they cut the road 20′ or so deep into ledge where it would be protected from the blast, and they cut it wide enough to land big planes on. And paved it all — so there are the two 12′ lanes and the breakdown lane — and then another 20″ or so beyond that on both sides that are painted green, and then some grass, and then the ledge.
So he went across the rumble strip, through the snowbank, across the paved “snow shelf” that had standing slush on it, across the grass (ground not frozen yet) and then sideswiped the ledge. And black box says that in the course of doing this, he went from about 1/3 throttle to FULL throttle.
Yes, driving at night is hypnotic. People fall asleep. But rumble strips wake you up, you know when you hit a snowbank, even a slushy one, and you know when you suddenly aren’t driving on dry pavement anymore. None of this is consistent with falling asleep….
Further, I have never driven a Crown Vic, but every rear wheel drive car I ever have driven had the drive shaft turning in a direction that — when you stepped on the gas, the angular acceleration of the drive shaft tended to pull the rear end to the RIGHT, not left, which would pull the car back onto the road, not sending it off into the snow.
Did he intentionally wreck the car?
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed