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On several occasions, I have, as I would assume you have, as well, been required by circumstances to write out accident reports or witness statements and swear to their completeness and accuracy. In most instances I have been truthful and concise in my descriptions. A police officer once told me (I don’t remember anymore when or where) that I had authored “the best witness statement (he had) ever seen.” I hope he had read a lot of other reports before he issued that superlative; in any case, I was flattered.
I unfortunately did not keep a copy of that praise-winning report, but I do happen to have a fading photocopy of what was probably the first witness statement I was ever called upon to compose. My father found it just this past week in a box of old papers in his basement. It was part of a police report and a Release of Claims given to an insurance company. The documents were dated 1966. They were prepared following a collision between my Honda motor scooter and a Ford Falcon whose driver, according to what I wrote then and what I’ve remembered in the intervening years, ran a stop sign just as I was prudently entering the same intersection from a cross street. I was seventeen then; I am now seventy. The new-found document reveals, as you might suspect, that I have forgotten much more than I have remembered.
The remarked-upon report might have been the one I wrote when I was in my early thirties and chanced upon a burglary-in-progress at my Honolulu church on a Sunday afternoon. The previous week, I had ordered a package of Portuguese sausage, a fundraiser item, from my pastor’s middle-school-student son, and he had delivered it to me on the morning of the same day as the break-in. I had plans to go to the beach after church, so I left the sausage in the church office refrigerator, went to the beach, and came back for the sausage before going home. I had a key to the office. When I opened the door, though, I startled an intruder who, I could hear, fled through a door to the adjoining parish hall. I did not at that point get a look at the person. I found the refrigerator door ajar, my sausage gone, and a chilled bottle of Communion wine, its cap removed, leaving a ring of moisture on the church secretary’s desk. I called the cops. Several promptly arrived and almost immediately captured a bearded homeless haole man in T-shirt and cargo shorts in the alleyway behind the church. I did not recognize the man. They cuffed his hands behind his back and seated him on the church lawn while they asked me to tell what I knew. No one at that point asked me to write anything, but when I mentioned the missing sausage, a police sergeant gave the suspect a second pat-down and plucked from a pocket a paper sack bearing my name in bold, black Sharpie and containing what a jury could have inferred was my bought-and-paid-for Portuguese sausage.
There is more I might tell you about that incident, but let me go on to one last story, this one about a time when I might have written an out-of-the-ordinary report, one in which I described my decision not to honk the horn of my Dodge Caravan for fear that it would suggest impatience instead of alarm when the lady driver of a Cadillac taxicab, at a standstill in front of me at a shopping center exit, was moments away from driving over a schoolboy. Had I honked, I would have had to blame myself for what happened next. This, too, was in Hawaii, where luxury cars as taxicabs are not uncommon. A bit elevated above the cab, I had a clear view of the driver, and I saw that she carried no passengers at the time. Her right turn signal was flashing, but she was stopped, as I said, watching for traffic coming from our left. She had obviously seen the boy whom I just mentioned to you, the boy also coming from her left, on foot, as he crossed the shopping center driveway probably only a few inches in front of the taxi’s bumper. What I saw next, though, and what that driver definitely did not see, was the boy accidentally dropping a ballpoint pen onto the street just at the moment when he should have stepped past the taxi’s right front fender and out of harm’s way. In one second, two seconds, three, no more than four, the boy paused, turned toward the woman, and held up his hand, palm out, to indicate to her that she must wait while he picked up the pen from the pavement. I could see the woman’s profile as she still looked to her left. I saw in that same instant that at last there was going to be a break in the busy line of traffic. “No, no!” I shouted. “Whoa, no, don’t go!” I prayed. But no one, not even God, evidently, heard me say it. When the cab driver looked to her right, the boy was out of sight, bending down for his pen, and the taxi driver tromped on her accelerator to pull out onto the busy boulevard. The heavy vehicle crushed boy, book bag, and ballpoint, and proceeded a hundred feet farther before it came to a stop in the roadway. I am sure I did not write in quite this style when I filled in a form for the police who soon were summoned, but, still, every detail, as if in slow motion, was vivid in my mind that day, and those details remain vivid these couple of decades later.
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