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A Simple Case of Sudden Acceleration
--
Or So It Seemed at First to Bob Young

By ANNA WILDE MATHEWS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

MINNEAPOLIS -- Tires squealing, the police van lurched
forward, ricocheted off a squad car and careened through
the holiday revelers on the sidewalk. The runaway Ford
slammed into an office building and finally stopped, its
still-spinning wheels spewing burnt-rubber smoke.

Blood and glass littered the concrete where a woman
sprawled, dead. Next to her, an infant boy lay still in a
mangled stroller. His frantic mother snatched him up and
raced down the street. "My baby is dead!" she shrieked.

Four days later and 1,000 miles away, Bob Young sat down
in his tidy home office in the Maryland suburbs on a cool
gray December morning. He dialed up a voice mail from his
boss at the federal government's National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration: "There's been a double-fatality
sudden-acceleration involving a police van in Minneapolis.
The state police are asking that we help."

Mr. Young, a 45-year-old with a salt-and-pepper beard and
an easy manner, hung up the phone and grimaced. He didn't
really want to help. He felt sorry for the victims, but he
dreaded the scene he expected in Minneapolis -- lawyers
preparing lawsuits, reporters chasing stories, politicians
demanding answers.

Besides, Mr. Young figured
he already knew the cause
of this crash: The driver had
stepped on the gas instead
of the brake, and the van
had accelerated
unexpectedly. Mr. Young
had studied "sudden
acceleration" for more than
a decade. In the esoteric
world of car-crash
investigation, he was famous
for debunking every case he
had encountered in which a
vehicle was said to have
mysteriously lurched into motion. He believed the
Minneapolis accident would prove to be a typical instance of
a driver making a tragic mistake.

Still, his boss, Richard Boyd, chief of the NHTSA's vehicle
control division, worried that Minnesota's congressional
delegation might complain if the agency didn't get involved.
"Just go," he told Mr. Young, "and get it done quickly."

But answers didn't come quickly. Over three laborious
months, Mr. Young learned that the Minneapolis crash wasn't
typical at all. His detective work uncovered a peculiar safety
problem that affects tens of thousands of police vehicles
made by Ford Motor Co. And now, the case that Bob Young
never wanted to take up has become one he can't seem to
put down.

The crash took less than six seconds.

Just before 6:30 p.m. last Dec. 4, Katie McCarty, 19, and her
aunt, Denise Keenan, 49, joined the crowds along Nicollet
Mall for Holidazzle, a nightly holiday parade staged to draw
shoppers downtown. Ms. McCarty had been there the week
before, and her son Blake, five months old, had gurgled so
happily at the sounds of the Christmas songs and the sight
of Santa Claus that she just had to bring him back. Tonight,
snuggled in a navy snowsuit, he napped in his stroller as his
mother and her aunt chatted near the curb.

Up the street, two drunks had collapsed on the pavement;
one was out cold. A Minneapolis city police van pulled up,
lights flashing. As onlookers craned for a view, Officer Tom
Sawina shouted to his fellow cops that he would move the
1997 Ford Econoline closer, to make it easier for police to
load the passed-out man into the vehicle. Mr. Sawina put his
right foot on the brake, or so he thought, and yanked the
van's automatic gear shift into "drive."

The engine revved, and the van leapt forward. Mr. Sawina
jammed his foot harder on what he thought was the brake.
The van barreled into the office building, shattering a
plate-glass window. The Econoline's police and brake lights
still flashed in the dusk.

The van struck Ms. McCarty and slammed Ms. Keenan
through the window. Police covered Ms. Keenan's body with
a gray blanket. Ms. McCarty had tire-tread marks smeared
into her ski jacket and a broken elbow, but she barely
noticed as she ran up the street cradling her infant son,
Blake. An officer stopped her and laid her son down to
administer first aid. Blake died that night at a Minneapolis
hospital.

Police worked through the weekend investigating the crash.
In addition to the two fatalities -- Blake and Ms. Keenan --
Ms. McCarty and 10 others were injured, including seven
children. Federal authorities were contacted, as they often
are in high-profile auto crashes. On Friday, Dec. 11, Mr.
Young, vehicle-defects investigator for the NHTSA, arrived
at the suburban Minneapolis office of State Patrol Sgt.
Chuck Walerius.

Grumpy after a canceled flight, Mr. Young was in no mood
for local officials' theories about the crash. "I didn't need to
come here," he told Sgt. Walerius. "I already know what
happened."

Mr. Young then offered a short lesson on how a car
accelerates. He held up a prop he uses in the many seminars
he gives on sudden acceleration -- an aluminum device a bit
larger than a softball. "This," he said, speaking slowly, "is a
throttle body." Flicking open the valve, he added, "This is
the throttle plate." And flicking it closed: "This is idle." Then
the clincher: "In that van, the only way you're going to get
wide-open throttle is if you've got the gas pedal mashed to
the floor."

The tutorial annoyed Sgt. Walerius, a gray-haired man of 43
who had investigated plenty of auto crashes in his nine years
with the Minnesota State Patrol. Mr. Young hadn't even seen
the van. "Very condescending," Sgt. Walerius thought.

The sergeant already had his own notions about the
accident. He had spent six days interviewing witnesses --
including Mr. Sawina, the driver of the van. On the night of
the crash, the two officers, casual acquaintances, had sat in
a conference room at city hall. Sgt. Walerius read Mr. Sawina
his rights.

Mr. Sawina, 49 and a 23-year veteran, stared into space as
he answered the sergeant's questions. According to police
transcripts, Mr. Sawina said: "To the best of my recollection,
when I put it in gear, it made a loud noise or a rev, and the
thing just went forward rapidly, and I was totally shocked by
what happened."

"I know in some of the squad cars you've got to step on the
brake to put it in gear first," Sgt. Walerius said. "Is that so
with the van as well?"

"I believe so."

"So," the sergeant asked, "was it like an accelerator sticking
all the way to the floor type thing?"

"Something like that, yes."

In the days following that interview, as speculation over the
possible causes of the tragedy blazed in the media, the
state police received hundreds of calls from citizens who
insisted that their vehicles, too, had accelerated when they
hit the brake pedal. By the time Mr. Young showed up in
Minneapolis, Sgt. Walerius was convinced that some
mechanical defect, not a mistake by Mr. Sawina, had sent
the van careening into the crowd.

None of this surprised Mr. Young. He had personally
investigated 63 cases of sudden acceleration in his 17 years
at the NHTSA. In each case, there were suspicions that the
vehicles were faulty, but each time, Mr. Young found no
evidence of mechanical flaws. Instead, he had to conclude
that drivers inadvertently had dropped the car into gear and
pressed the wrong pedal.

But lawsuits alleging that defects had caused sudden
acceleration hounded auto makers in the 1980s, and they
adopted a solution: the "shift-lock" device. Developed by
Audi, which had suffered a wave of bad publicity over
sudden-acceleration episodes, the device prevents drivers
from shifting vehicles into "drive" without first stepping on
the brake pedal. With a shift-lock, if the driver steps on the
gas, the gear-shift won't move out of "park." Today,
shift-locks are standard on most new passenger vehicles.

Had the runaway police van's shift-lock worked properly?
Now, as Sgt. Walerius and Mr. Young drove to inspect the
van, the question loomed large. Seeing the battered
Econoline parked in a cavernous Hennepin County garage,
Mr. Young couldn't help but recall the science-fiction film,
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind." The van squatted in
the darkness, bathed in the glow of spotlights.

It had not been opened since the accident. An officer sliced
the red evidence tape on the driver's door, and Mr. Young
climbed in. The air inside was stale. A confiscated bottle of
vodka still sat in a plastic crate in the back of the van. Sitting
where Mr. Sawina had sat, Mr. Young jotted notes on the
position of the gear-shift lever and the driver's seat. Then
he turned the ignition key.

Nothing happened. "That battery is toast," Mr. Young
thought. The Minnesota investigators had been so afraid of
destroying evidence that they had left the van's police lights
and radio going, which drained all the power. Now they
recharged the battery, bringing the van back to life.

Mr. Young squeezed his burly frame beneath the dashboard.
Using a tape measure and woodworking calipers, he
measured the gas and brake pedals. He thought they were
set unusually close together. A tiny spot on the brake
pedal's lower right-hand corner was rubbed down to shiny
metal.

"This is the worst pedal-pad wear I've ever seen," he told
Sgt. Walerius. Mr. Young thought Mr. Sawina, after dropping
the van into drive, easily could have aimed for the brake and
hit the gas instead. Or he could have stomped on both
pedals at once, which would have disabled the shift-lock
while powering the van forward.

Mr. Young started up the van. The lights weren't flashing, as
they were when the crash occurred; Mr. Young had let a
State Patrol officer shut them off while the battery charged.
Mr. Young gripped the gear-shift and tried to pull it out of
"park." It refused to budge until he stepped on the brake.

The shift-lock worked fine.

Sgt. Walerius sat in the passenger seat while Mr. Young
conducted other tests. In one, he attached to the pedals a
device that measured how easily the van could accelerate if
the driver was depressing both the brake and gas pedals.
Easily enough. Even though Mr. Young's device was
depressing the brake, the van jumped forward. Startled,
Sgt. Walerius grabbed his seat. "That's what happened,
wasn't it?" he said.

The sergeant climbed out and sat on the garage floor,
shaking his head. He had changed his mind about what
caused the incident on Nicollet Mall. "I don't believe it," he
told Mr. Young. "There's nothing wrong with this van."

Case closed, Mr. Young thought.

He returned to Washington and began to tie up loose ends.
He faxed Sgt. Walerius a list of questions that hadn't been
answered in the state patrol's two-inch-thick report on the
crash. Things like: How wide were Officer Sawina's shoes at
the ball of his foot?

Fellow investigators knew Mr. Young as meticulous and
proud of his work. In his home, he kept souvenirs of the
flawed auto parts his investigations had uncovered over the
years. Friends called his lawn "Camden Yards," after
Baltimore's major-league park, for the precise checkerboard
pattern in which Mr. Young mowed it. He hoped to live up
to his e-mail address -- which spells out "rapid Robert" --
and wrap up his report quickly. But snags developed. He
had to cancel a planned Christmas getaway with his wife,
and spent Christmas Day working.

Mr. Young stayed in touch with Ford, the largest vendor of
police vehicles in the U.S. The company, like Mr. Young,
believed all along that the Econoline had likely functioned
properly, and that driver error probably caused the tragedy.
The post-crash lawsuits filed so far hadn't named Ford as a
defendant. There was no record of Econoline vans ever
being involved in other sudden-acceleration incidents.

Mr. Young's final report, released Jan. 12, was good news
for Ford, not so good for Mr. Sawina. It concluded that the
police officer initially had applied both the brake and gas
pedals, thus disengaging the properly working shift-lock.
There was nothing wrong with the vehicle.

Mr. Young believed he was done, except for one last
courtesy call that Sgt. Walerius had asked him to make.

The slide on the projection screen showed the Three
Stooges mugging in Sherlock Holmes costumes. "This is the
highly trained staff of the Office of Defect Investigations,"
Mr. Young deadpanned. His audience of Minnesota
state-police officers chuckled.

It was Feb. 23, and Mr. Young had come to a hotel
conference room outside Minneapolis to discuss sudden
acceleration and how he solved the Nicollet Mall case.
Feverish from a three-week flu, he downed glass after glass
of ice water. Near the end of his three-hour talk, he was
explaining how shift-lock devices work, when a hand shot
up in the back of the room.

"I had a squad car that I could get into gear without
stepping on the brake," state Trooper Don Marose said.
When his police lights were flashing, he said, the shift-lock
just stopped working.

The other officers turned to stare at the trooper. "You're full
of it, Donny," someone said. From the front of the room,
Mr. Young calmly explained that the lights could have
nothing to do with the shift-lock, because the two would
be wired into completely different circuits.

"Mine did it," Mr. Marose insisted. "That's all I know."

Mr. Young felt his pulse quicken and his face redden. In his
mind, he went back to the county garage where he had
conducted all those tests on the van. And he remembered:
He hadn't tested the shift-lock device with the van's lights
flashing. The battery had been dead and he had allowed a
patrol officer to switch off the lights while the battery was
recharged. Mr. Young hadn't thought to turn the flashing
lights on again once the van powered back up and he ran
his tests. On Dec. 4, when the van barreled through that
crowd, the lights had been flashing.

A tiny oversight. Maybe it didn't matter. Maybe Mr. Marose
was wrong. "Let's go out and look," Mr. Young told his
audience.

Mr. Young and half a dozen officers bounded out to the
hotel parking lot, their breath billowing white in the winter
air. Sgt. Walerius trotted to his Ford Crown Victoria squad
car. Leaving the door open, he turned the key and flipped
on the police flashers. Then, without touching the brake, he
grabbed the gear-shift and pulled. The car leapt forward,
nearly hitting the squad car parked in front of it. The
shift-lock didn't work.

Engines roared to life across the parking lot. A shout came
from a nearby car: "Mine does it too!" Mr. Young, his
shoulders slumped, paced in a tight, three-step circle. "How
could this be?" he thought. He marched to Sgt. Walerius's
car. "Show me," he said. The sergeant's car lurched forward
again.

And Mr. Young knew: "Damn, the report is wrong."

Heading back into the hotel, Mr. Young's mind buzzed:
"This could ruin my reputation ... When can I look at the
van?" Sgt. Walerius whipped out his cell phone and called
the garage where the van was stored. He got his answer:
When the van's lights were flashing, the shift-lock didn't
work.

Sgt. Walerius felt numb walking to the room where Mr.
Young was about to resume his talk. Before the sergeant
had a chance to speak, Mr. Young said: "I can tell by the
look on your face that we need to go look at that van
again."

Mr. Young spent the next 24 hours checking shift-lock
devices on every vehicle he could find. At a Minneapolis
Ford dealership, he flashed his NHTSA business card and
commandeered a small fleet of cars and trucks; none of
them had a problem. He called his wife, Maria, and asked
her to go test their Volkswagen Golf. It worked fine. "You
won't believe what happened," he told her. "I've got to redo
the entire investigation."

"Oh -- my -- God," Mrs. Young replied, pausing between
each word. She felt as if a bomb had gone off. The case,
she thought, had already taken an unusual toll on her
husband, even when he was so certain that he knew what
had happened. The crash had stirred up a hornet's nest --
litigation, criticism leveled at the Minneapolis police,
clamoring media. Mr. Young felt more pressure than usual
to deliver an airtight report. His standard stress-busting
weekend rides on his spotless Harley-Davidson had gone by
the wayside as he worked the case almost around the clock.
"I wish it wasn't so intense," his wife had told him as they
stood in their yard one day in December.

Now the case was revving up all over again. Mr. Young
drove through a snowstorm to the county garage, where he
saw for himself that the van's shift-lock didn't work when
the police lights were flashing. He also noticed that with the
police lights on, the van's brake lights flashed, too. That
didn't seem right, but he didn't know what to think
anymore.

Four days later, Mr. Young and a mechanic for a police
department in Maryland squatted beneath the dashboard of
a Ford Crown Victoria squad car. The car's shift-lock didn't
work when the police and brake lights were flashing, and
Mr. Young wanted to know why.

The mechanic pointed to a device he had just that morning
planted under the dashboard. Mr. Young saw a black plastic
cube attached to a wire. This device made the brake lights
flash on and off repeatedly when the police lights were on.

Incredulous, Mr. Young barked at two police officials who
were watching: "Why are you guys doing this?" They
explained that the department had been using the devices,
easily obtainable from car aftermarket suppliers, for more
than a decade. They liked how the devices enhanced the
squad cars' visibility.

But Mr. Young still didn't understand the connection
between the brake lights and the shift-lock. Weren't they on
separate electrical circuits? The mechanic spread a wiring
diagram on his workbench. Amid a squiggle of black lines
and boxes sat circuit No. 511, which controlled the
electricity both to the brake lights and to the shift-lock. So
they were on the same circuit. Each time the device flicked
on, it disabled the shift-lock. "I see how this is working
now," Mr. Young said.

Once again he flew to Minneapolis, bringing along a NHTSA
engineer to inspect the police van once more. Working with
Sgt. Walerius, they took just five minutes to find the
handmade shunt that a city mechanic had spliced into the
wiring. A tangle of red, blue and black wires was attached to
a chunk of gray plastic pipe. When Mr. Young and the
engineer disconnected the device, the van's shift-lock
worked fine.

"If this wire hadn't been connected," Mr. Young told Sgt.
Walerius, "we wouldn't be having this conversation."

On March 3, Mr. Young called Bill Bohan, a Ford safety
official. "It looks like the shift-lock in that van wasn't
working," Mr. Young said. "I need some help."

That call touched off days of emergency meetings at Ford
headquarters in Dearborn, Mich. Although the company still
wasn't involved in any of the seven lawsuits filed since the
crash, one plaintiff had warned that Ford was likely to be
named, and Ford officials wanted a ready explanation for
the problem.

After a battery of tests, company engineers reached much
the same conclusion as Mr. Young. But they remained
puzzled. Ford knew that suppliers sold devices that made
brake lights flash; in its owner's manual for police vehicles,
Ford had warned customers not to meddle with certain
electrical configurations, noting that "connection of
aftermarket electrical equipment into the brake light circuit
... will cause vehicle malfunction." But Ford's databases
contained no record of the devices causing safety problems.

On March 19, the NHTSA released Mr. Young's "supplemental
report." It concluded that the shunt installed by the
Minneapolis police mechanic had "compromised [the van's]
shift-lock performance, thus increasing the probability a
pedal error would result in a sudden acceleration incident."
In other words, the report said, Mr. Sawina did mistakenly
step on the gas, but if the shift-lock had been working
properly, it wouldn't have mattered.

Five days later, Mr. Young, Ford engineer Michael Blackmer
and three other company officials gathered at a garage in
Maryland. Mr. Young showed them police cars from five
local departments, each of which had been fitted with a
different device that made the brake lights flash. The group
moved to a conference room, where Mr. Young had set out
an array of the devices. He read aloud the cautionary note in
Ford's owner manual.

"It seems to me the warning isn't working," he said. He
suggested that the NHTSA send a written warning through a
proprietary wire that reaches 17,000 police departments
across the country. "It's a great idea," Mr. Blackmer
declared.

While such a warning might draw the attention of potential
plaintiffs in Minneapolis, it also might solve the problem
elsewhere. Mr. Young didn't want it stalled by any legal
nitpicking from Ford. (No such problems have been found
with Chevrolet police vehicles.)

The alert went out on March 31. It explained the
Minneapolis accident, urged police departments to check
their shift-locks, and reprinted the warning from the Ford
manual. Later, Ford sent its own bulletins to dealers and
fleet customers.

A month later, Ford was added as a defendant in lawsuits
filed by Katie McCarty and on behalf of the estates of Blake
McCarty and Denise Keenan.

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On July 2, a bouquet of flowers and balloons bloomed on
Nicollet Mall, placed there by Ms. McCarty to mark what
would have been her son's first birthday. After taking several
months off, the young woman has started a new job as a
receptionist at a pediatric clinic.

Mr. Sawina wasn't charged by prosecutors, and hasn't been
named as a defendant in any of the civil lawsuits filed in
connection with the crash. Mr. Sawina declined to be
interviewed. A spokeswoman for the Minneapolis police says
Mr. Sawina retired from the force in August.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuits have dropped Ford as a
defendant, but the company still faces potential litigation. In
June, a Minneapolis officer reported that another Ford
Econoline van accelerated without warning, forcing him to
slam the brakes as hard as he could and to wrench the gear-
shift to neutral to regain control. With this new information,
the city of Minneapolis, which has already set aside $750,000
to pay victims of the crash, is considering suing Ford. Mr.
Sawina's lawyer, Fred Bruno, says Mr. Sawina also is
considering suing Ford over a potential defect in its vans. A
Ford spokesman says there is no evidence that the accident
van was defective when it was originally sold. "It's hard, and
even impossible, to see how Ford could have any liability
whatsoever," he says.

But Ford does plan to change future Crown Victorias so that
the brake lights and the shift-lock are on different circuits,
the spokesman says. The company is considering whether to
do this with other models, such as the Econoline van, but
has focused on the Crown Victoria because it is targeted at
the police market.

Mr. Young, once so reluctant to pursue the case, now seems
unable to drop it. He knows that some law-enforcement
departments -- including the Minneapolis police -- have
corrected the problem his investigation uncovered. Getting
a clear picture is difficult because the NHTSA has no power
to require departments to report on how they've responded
to the warnings. Mr. Young also knows that many
departments, including the Maryland State Police and
Arizona's highway patrol, still have the devices in their
fleets. Police officials from both Arizona and Maryland say
they have tested their devices and have found they do not
affect the shift-locks.

Equally troubling to Mr. Young, several aftermarket suppliers
continue to sell devices that make brake lights flash.

Mr. Young confronted one of them in August at a
convention of Ford fleet managers in Nashville, Tenn.,
where he was a guest speaker. Before his talk, Mr. Young
tucked his name tag into his shirt so he couldn't be
identified as a NHTSA official and cruised the convention
booths, looking for suppliers of the brake-light devices. He
got good news from Whelen Engineering Co., a major
maker of police equipment based in Chester, Conn. It had
stopped selling the devices.

But a few steps away, Mr. Young learned that SoundOff Inc.,
of Hudsonville, Mich., was still selling them. When Mr. Young
pulled out his NHTSA business card, the company's sales
director, Walter Hill, said he was aware of Ford's warnings,
but that SoundOff's device was designed to tap into the
Ford circuit without affecting shift-locks. "As long as they
want them, we're going to sell them," he said.

"Even though Ford has a warning out on them?" Mr. Young
asked. "You're really exposing yourselves." Furious, he
walked away.

The next day, Mr. Young delivered an emotional speech,
urging police department representatives to disconnect
their brake-light flashers. The NHTSA has no authority to
order departments to do so, nor can it prevent suppliers
from selling the brake-light devices.

In addition to Whelen, Able 2 Products Co., of Cassville,
Mo., says it has stopped selling products that tie into Ford's
brake-light circuitry. SoundOff and several other companies
continue to sell the devices, with various warnings.
SoundOff's Mr. Hill says his company's device is mainly
targeted at vehicles other than Fords. In SoundOff's written
warning to customers, it says that "some automakers may
not allow" the use of the devices, and instructs customers to
check their vehicle owner's manuals. Says SoundOff's Mr.
Hill: "The device we sell is compliant with federal
regulations. It is wanted by the industry and there is no
legality that prevents it from being produced."

Mr. Young doesn't sleep well some nights. He periodically
calls retailers of the devices, to make sure they know about
the problems the parts can cause. He has spent hours
combing through old NHTSA archives, looking for past
sudden-acceleration incidents that might have been
misdiagnosed. He estimates that the devices are still
operating in as many as 50,000 police vehicles.

And the chorus goes...

Can you say, "OFF-topic?" C'mon everybody, sing! Off-topic, off-topic, o-f-f to the t-o-p-i-c, yeah.