After Major Traffic Accident, Elite CHP Investigative Team Must Make Sense of Mayhem : Profile: MAIT specialist unit that took over probe of Santa Ana church van tragedy sees the worst of street and freeway crashes.

California Highway Patrol Officer Ron Brame was at home in the Anaheim Hills when he got the call. It was 9 p.m. on Sept. 20.

“They told me there was a major traffic accident at the intersection of Civic Center Drive and Flower Street in Santa Ana,” said Brame, an associate member of the CHP’s elite traffic accident investigation unit known as MAIT (Multi-disciplinary Accident Investigation Team).

He knew it would be bad.

When he and other MAIT members arrived, they came across Orange County’s deadliest traffic accident in history.

Five people were dead at the scene. Three more would die later and 11 others were injured.

The dead and most of the injured were in a van headed for church services at the non-sectarian Church of God, or Iglesia de Dios, a congregation of predominantly Guatemalans in Santa Ana, when it collided with a pickup truck.

Dressed in blue coveralls, eight members of the team fanned out swiftly, in businesslike precision: one videotaped the scene, another photographed the damaged autos with a 35-millimeter camera, others measured skid marks, jotted notes and spoke with witnesses.

While Brame took photos at the scene, he thought of the Bibles strewn about.

“It was very difficult,” he said.

What the gun is to most officers, a calculator is the tool of preference for these specially trained officers.

“That, and a good beeper,” said Sgt. James Torpey, MAIT’s team leader based at the patrol’s Los Angeles headquarters.

Fifteen officers are broken up into three teams for Southern, Central and Northern California. They respond and investigate only accidents involving the death of a state employee, including state Department of Transportation workers and CHP officers, vehicle accidents with four or more fatalities, and major truck and aircraft crashes, Torpey said.

“We also do accidental spills or leakage of hazardous materials, and are called in when local jurisdictions lack the expertise and need help to conduct a thorough investigation,” he added.

Officers on the team are chosen from traffic investigators throughout the state and receive special training, which includes college courses and seminars on analyzing accident scenes.

The team was called to investigate the Palm Springs Girl Scouts bus crash in July, 1991, that killed four girls, two adults and the bus driver, and it was summoned on March 20 of this year for the 100-car pileup in dense fog near San Bernardino.

Last January, the team visited Orange County when a murder suspect was shot and killed by CHP officers after a 300-mile chase ended in Westminster.

Because the team is small, it relies on a network of associate members such as Brame, who works as a traffic investigator out of the CHP’s Santa Ana office, to respond and begin scene preservation because it could be hours before the rest of the team arrives. Associates are located in El Centro, Indio, Bishop and many rural areas, Torpey said.

In the Santa Ana case, Brame was among the first to arrive. He said he was shocked when he heard the number of fatalities.

Typically, the MAIT members meet with police investigators for a briefing and then Torpey splits the team up into different tasks.

“Initially, we try to document all physical evidence so we have a good understanding how the vehicles came into the collision, their actions while it was occurring and their actions afterward,” Torpey said.

“You don’t have to be a math whiz, but you have to be familiar with physics and familiar with math, trigonometry and algebra because they come into play on some accidents,” he said.

In addition to photographs, they set up a measuring system, using a base line they paint in the roadway from which all measurements must originate. Carrying large, 10-inch spools of measuring tape, they go about their business like a swarm of worker bees.

But the job does not stop there.

At a towing yard in Santa Ana, Larry Paustian, the team’s civilian motor carrier specialist, recently inspected the church van involved in the accident. During the accident, van passengers were thrown through the rear doors and, as a result, suffered critical or fatal injuries. Police said the van’s rear seats were not bolted to the floor of the van, and the van lacked seat belts in the rear compartment area.

MAIT members did not speak specifically about the Santa Ana crash, because the case, should any eventual criminal or civil charges be brought against the motorists, is in the hands of the Santa Ana Police Department--which refused comment. Results of the MAIT investigation could take six weeks.

No arrests have been made but police are looking for Fernando Hernandez Flores, 23, as the apparent driver of a pickup truck that crashed into the van.

An inspection is thorough, said Paustian. During his inspection of the church van, he pulled the tires off and inspected the brakes and the suspension. He looked at the tires to see if they had uneven wear from improper inflation. In the front, he checked the steering mechanism.

He and Brame also checked the latches on the van’s door. They opened and closed it. To accurately measure the extent of damage, they used a plumb bob. Then, they said, they plan to compare it to the vehicle’s original specifications when new by poring through the vehicle manufacturer’s manuals.

The team may conduct a simulation by finding a vehicle similar to the one involved in a car crash and put someone of the same height, weight and sex as the driver behind the wheel. “Then we mount a small camera at eye level and we then run through the crash site at the estimated speed of the accident,” Paustian said.

With field notebooks brimming with measurements, each team member then sits down and writes a report.

Team members agree that their task takes time. Lots of time. Sometimes officers work their normal eight-hour shift and then get called to a crash scene and put in more hours.

Brame knows about the long hours.

The night of the church van crash, he got home early the next morning. It was about 2 a.m.