Sheriff John Kelleher #2004
Traffic Investigator
San Marcos, CA
Fax: (760) 510-....
December 30th, 2005
Here is a description of the accident my wife and I experienced on November 25th, 2005, which you responded to and which we spoke about briefly this evening. I have also included some information regarding what one can see in the blink of an eye during a "dogfight" and something about my background as an expert in various related subjects.
My offer, which I made on the phone to you, to take you out on a skid pad and teach you the defensive driving maneuvers explained in detail here, which saved my life, my wife's life, and the other driver's life -- in all probability Randall "Duke" Cunningham -- remains.
By the way, just to let you know, I have absolutely no interest in punishing Cunningham for this, if it was him. I feel that his apparent cooperation with Federal agents on bribery charges is sufficient "payback" or whatever you want to call it. If the other driver WAS Cunningham, then regardless of what can be PROVEN about the circumstances of this accident, l personally will always KNOW that it wouldn't happen (his cooperation with Federal agents) if he had successfully committed suicide and a double homicide. That's plenty good enough for me.
But if, by some MIRACLE, it turns out NOT to be Cunningham, all bets as to what legal steps I might want to try to take are "off." I personally consider that possibility highly unlikely, because I SAW the man who drove that Chevy Tracker.
This was a very serious assault, and it shocks me that so little attention is paid to something like this by the legal system. How is it possible that San Diego's highly esteemed law enforcement has time to investigate, for example (and, with luck, solve) a silly string of stolen plastic Baby Jesus Christmas Ornaments, but does not have time to "find" a suicidal / homicidal driver?
Sincerely,
Russell D. Hoffman
Concerned Citizen
Carlsbad, CA
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Statement (part one of three) by Russell D. Hoffman December 30th, 2005:
Subject: How to out-smart a suicidal driver intent on having a deadly head-on collision with you
At about 8:35 pm the day after Thanksgiving (Friday, November 25th, 2005), my wife and I were in our Honda Passport on a five-lane road in Southern California. There were two lanes in each direction and one in the middle which can be used by either direction for making left turns. We were in the left lane of our direction's two lanes. The road ahead was empty. The closest car was a few hundred feet behind us in the lane to our right.
Suddenly, a car comes flying around an "S" curve 500 to 600 feet ahead. The oncoming driver had crossed not just our lane, but most of the way into the lane to our right, too. It's a long way ahead, but it's very strange.
What would you do?
Here's what I did: I immediately braked fairly hard. It's one of several maneuvers over the next five to seven seconds which saved our lives. I alerted my wife to the erratic driver ahead. I said, "Look at this guy!"
He straightened out -- but didn't go back to his side of the road. Instead, he straightened out in MY lane, coming right at us -- and he was ACCELERATING!
I am going very slowly now, under 25 miles an hour. I slide towards the right lane to give him room.
So what does the other driver do? He turns to his LEFT -- "tracking" our car precisely -- still aiming for us! And, he is STILL accelerating.
He's got some real speed now. I expect to see a line of cop cars chasing him or something next. He's in a terrible hurry.
There is a curb on the right side of the road. Our wonderful California Driver's Manual says not to box yourself in, if at all possible, during emergency situations, and this is clearly a very dire situation. So I move back to my original lane, where I have more options available.
Sure enough, the other driver tracks this maneuver as well.
So I stop maneuvering and slow down even more. Neither driver is turning at all anymore. He continues to accelerate.
I say something like "Oh, Geez." I think about air bags and whether they can save us at these closing speeds. I conclude that they cannot.
The gap between us is closing rapidly. We had started this last straight-away 250 to 300 feet apart. (For reference, a vehicle covers 88 feet in one second at 60 miles per hour.)
What happened next? I waited, because I could clearly see that the other driver was getting a huge head of steam up -- he had the "pedal to the metal" as the saying goes. All the time, this was reducing HIS maneuverability.
In the final fraction of a second, at the last possible moment, when it was clear that there was no avoidance maneuver the other driver could make which would save him from going through my "box," and when he had NO chance to track my sudden maneuver, I finally gunned the motor, let out the clutch, turned hard to my LEFT, and accelerated and turned as hard and as tight as possible. (Michelin radial tires.)
After turning hard to the left, I turned hard right, in order to prevent getting t-boned as the other driver CONTINUED TO TURN TOWARDS US. He was trying until the very end to have a high-speed head-on collision.
As we passed I could see he was turning the steering wheel to his right -- towards us. His fatal intent was absolute, but I THOUGHT we had completely avoided him.
My wife also thought we had avoided the accident at the moment he passed us. But alas, the other driver managed to clip our tail. BANG! What a noise! An accident at 60 to 80 miles an hour is surprisingly violent, even if you yourself are barely going 15 miles per hour.
I brought the car to a stop. The other driver skidded around a bit, but then quickly drove off wildly.
However, he left a piece of his car in the road, and I have it. It has a sticker on it which has a variety of pieces of information which can undoubtedly be used to positively identify the other car.
We immediately called 911.
I forget exactly how the 911 operator phrased the question of whether I could recognize the other driver, but by the following Monday, I was going to tell the police that IF they could find the guy based on the car part I had recovered, I could probably pick him out of a line-up.
But instead, I saw him on television that morning. I believe the other driver was Randy "Duke" Cunningham -- my Congressman. The Congressman who, the following Monday (November 28th, 2005), confessed to taking over $2,000,000 in bribes and tearfully resigned. I think he was trying to get out of Monday's duties.
Whoever came at our car that night did so with deadly precision and unwavering suicidal intent. This went on for 5 to 7 seconds, during which the other driver could have slowed down or returned to his side of the road at any time.
Fortunately, the driver made a serious tactical error by thinking I had resigned myself to his plan, and by getting TOO MUCH SPEED to match my final maneuver. And so we three are alive today.
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Statement (part two of three) by Russell D. Hoffman December 30th, 2005:
Subject: Vision capabilities during high speed encounters:
One can start by listening to Cunningham's own words. He can be seen talking about "dogfights" in a recent HISTORY CHANNEL show on the very subject (which is basically what this event was -- a "dogfight"). In the History Channel documentary, Cunningham describes seeing the "Gomer" goggles and even the facial expressions of the other pilot (who he called a "Gomer" in the video). It aired most recently just a week or so ago.
Ever since I was a kid, I've had an interest in fighter planes and fighter pilots. I have, for example, read about 200 books on war, mostly regarding fighter pilot aviation. (My father, an infantryman with Patton's Army (3rd Chemical Mortar Battalion) during WWII, wrote one of them (Archives of Memory; University Press of Kentucky, 1990). Howard S. Hoffman, who currently resides in Pennsylvania, a mortar crewman and forward observer, took part in hundreds of actions including Cassino in Italy, and then across Europe, where he took part in the Battle of the Bulge and was part of the relief of Bastogne, a month-long battle with heavy losses on both sides. He witnessed first-hand numerous Nazi atrocities as his company fought their way into Germany. After a lifetime of teaching at various prestigious East Coast colleges, he retired years ago from Bryn Mawr, and he and I together created an educational tutorial used all over the world called Statistics Explained. We are also completing an educational tutorial on the physiology of vision. He is in his 80s.)
At least one of the war books in my extensive collection quotes Cunningham extensively -- it's a nonfiction book called Fighter Combat Tactics and Maneuvering by Robert L. Shaw (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 1985).
Try this quote, and then try to tell me I couldn't see what I saw! In this scene, the MiG-17 is coming straight for Cunningham and his RIO, Driscoll. This was to become their fifth kill, making him an "Ace" (my wife and I were to be Cunningham's sixth and seventh "confirmed" kills):
"The MiG's entire nose lit up like a Christmas Tree! Pumpkin-sized BBs went sailing by our F-4. I pulled sharply into the pure vertical to destroy the [enemy's] tracking solution. As I came out of the six-G pull-up I strained to see the MiG below as my F-4 went straight up. I was sure it would go into a horizontal turn, or just run as most had done in the past. As I looked back over my ejection seat I got the surprise of my life [note: up till then -- rdh]: there was the MiG, canopy to canopy with me, barely 300 feet away! . . .I began to feel numb. My stomach grabbed at me in knots. There was no fear in this guy's eyes as we zoomed some 8,000 feet straight up."
MiGs and F-4s go at least 10 times as fast as we were going. We weren't 300 feet away, we were barely 10 feet away. Can Cunningham tell me I couldn't get a chance to recognize him? Can anyone really tell me that? I can find plenty more quotes like that one, from dozens of other pilots. Yes, you CAN see a man who is trying to kill you in exquisite detail. I have a picture of him from a media web page which shows him at the angle I saw him at, and I have very little doubt about who was driving that car.
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Statement (part three of three) by Russell D. Hoffman December 30th, 2005:
Subject: Some biographical notes regarding Russell Hoffman (b. 1956):
My reputation is very dear to me. Mine is a one-person educational software development company with customers in scores of countries, and in all 50 states. Customers include the U.S. Navy and numerous other Federal, State, and local agencies, schools, hospitals, and businesses. My web site gets more than 10 million "hits" every year -- more than many government agencies, for example -- and I have customers at more than 1000 colleges (yet I have no college degree, myself). They buy my animated educational tutorials which I wrote or co-wrote, and programmed.
I am an expert regarding what one can see in the blink of an eye, and my animations (which make constant use of this knowledge) have been used in court in the past. My software's "frame rate" of over one MILLION frames per second was much higher than anyone else working with PC's had available to them for nearly 20 years. In the mid 1980s, I programmed high-powered (weapons-grade) lasers with this software, for example, allowing accurate and instantaneous joystick control, or automated program control, of the direction and/or intensity of the laser beam. This software was subsequently licensed to the U.S. Government without restrictions on their use of it.
Also, let me quote you the last paragraph of a personal letter I received last summer from California Attorney General Bill Lockyer. The three page letter was sent me on June 29th, 2005:
"Thank you again for your thoughtful letter. I appreciate the obvious passion and intelligence you bring to this issue."
The topic was a highly technical one -- nuclear power.
Earlier this year, I created detailed animations of typical nuclear power plants such as San Onofre and Diablo Canyon. The head of nuclear engineering at Purdue University (Dr. Lefteri Tsoukalas) described the animations as "excellent" and asked for permission to use them at Purdue. That was the same word the head of nuclear issues at the Union of Concerned Scientists (David Lochbaum) used to describe the same animations.
As an example of my work, the nuclear power plant animations are available online here:
or try:
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