June 16th, 2006
To Whom It May Concern,
In light of the horrific INTENTIONAL head-on collision today in Boise, Idaho, which killed two people, I am recirculating my account of SURVIVING a similar attempt by a similarly-crazed driver less than seven months ago. It might save your life if you ever are faced with something like this.
In today's sad case, apparently the driver who forced the head-on collision -- who survived and is now in police custody -- was so mentally unstable as to have his wife's severed head in his car at the time of the accident. His name is Alofa Time.
Mr. Time thought a cop had made a U-turn specifically to follow him (he was wrong, the cop had done it for another reason having nothing to do with Mr. Time).
That was apparently the triggering event that caused him to decide to "end it all" and commit homicide / suicide by smashing his car head-on at high speed into another driver's car.
In our case, the other driver was apparently driven to try to commit suicide because he was about to confess to bribery charges and resign from Congress, and publicly admit to disgracing his military service, his country, his family and himself.
Both suicide attempts failed, but for entirely different reasons.
Today's resulted in the desired head-on collision and the deaths of two innocent victims in the other car.
In my case I was able to avoid the head-on entirely, and it was "only" a "hit-and-run." A body shop estimated about $1800.00 damage to our car from the collision.
A wheel well liner, with an identifying sticker which could lead back to the exact vehicle which hit us, was violently ripped off the other car, and a mystery remains to be solved.
The mystery is: WHY wouldn't the police in my case go after the other driver? WHY did they fail their oath, refusing to serve and protect anyone but the assailant that night?
And for that matter, how DID they manage to pull off such a complete cover-up? How far UP did the COVER-UP go? WHO gets told when a Congressman falters?
In my case, record after record has been destroyed, mislaid, or its existence denied utterly. The police have stonewalled the victims, provided business cards with non-working email addresses, pretended to lose faxes, letters, phone messages, etc. etc., and, of course, said they would do one thing and then they do another (namely, nothing). They say they will pursue the other driver. But they don't.
When Alofa Time was arrested today, after the accident, he badgered cops to shoot him, waving what was apparently the same knife he had -- several hours earlier -- used to sever his wife's head.
Police in Idaho managed to arrest him and have him in custody. He is charged with two counts of manslaughter (for the two victims in the car he crashed into (another passenger survived with injuries)) and one count of murder (for his wife). Other charges will probably follow as the mess gets sorted out.
In both cases the driver had the same kind of utter disregard for the other people on the road, and the same deadly intent. How come WE survived and today's victims did not? Part of it was surely circumstance -- there but for the grace of God do surely go my wife Sharon and I.
The rest of the answer can be found in the story below, one of several descriptions of the accident I've had to prepare since it happened. This particular one was submitted to the "responding officer" about a month after the incident.
There is no doubt in my mind about who the other driver in my case was, and it's the only possible scenario which explains why the police have tried so hard NOT to find the other driver. In light of today's collision in Boise, Idaho, perhaps there will be a renewed interest in actually IDENTIFYING the other driver. But probably not.
The problem is, of course, that I'm sure the "responding officer" knew all along who had hit me -- which means that in my wife's and my case, the responding officer (SMSD #2004) was, at the time he was talking to me, covering up an attempted murder, while at the same time telling me there is no way the police would ever go after a "hit-and-run" as he kept calling it.
He was, in short, aiding and abetting the criminal evasion by the man who tried to kill my wife and I. And he continues to do so to this day. We have filed an official complaint with County Supervisor Bill Horn, who has passed it on to, of all people, Sheriff Kolender (who is just about the last person we think should be involved in any investigation of this incident).
The cover-up is a very serious crime, more serious, in some ways, than the original attempted murder/suicide, since it speaks to an entire corrupt system that lets the privileged few literally GET AWAY WITH MURDER.
That there is a cover-up in my case is obvious from this vantage point. We are sure about how low it goes -- right down to the responding officer, who took nearly 45 minutes to respond in the first place and who was undoubtedly told to shoo my wife and I away by any lie or intimidation necessary.
Later, when I tried to identify the other driver to the responding officer, I was told there was no way I could have recognized the other driver at the high closing speed I had been reporting. He therefore rejected my assertion that I could have seen that it was Cunningham.
An interesting argument, since if the collision was at high speed, it should be considered a serious accident and the subject of a criminal investigation!
Yet instead, he claimed this meant I could not recognize the other driver! But when a man is trying to kill you and breezes by you only 8 or 10 feet away, even at 70 or so miles per hour difference between your speed and his, you can see a lot if you look -- and I sure looked (my wife, frozen, did not).
And if you see him a few days later, it can be quite easy to make a POSITIVE, FOOLPROOF IDENTIFICATION.
Cunningham. It was Cunningham, and the cops knew it all along.
The only question I feel has yet to be resolved is simply how high up the cover-up goes.
Russell "Ace" Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
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Statement by Russell D. Hoffman December 30th, 2005:
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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 by Russell D. Hoffman December 30th, 2005:
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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.