The Ghost of Dome Rock Road

Crash Scene Investigation

"Sheriff Koontz, is it?" Damian asked, extending his hand to the sheriff. "Damian Fernandez. I'm the lead investigator from the Yuma office." For a moment, the sheriff just stood there. Damian couldn't see his eyes behind those Ray-Bans, but he could feel the sheriff sizing him up for what seemed like an eternity. After a long awkward pause, the sheriff finally reached to shake Damian's hand, "Fred Koontz, trooper – what d'ya need from my team?" The sheriff's grip was so firm, and it startled Damian at first.

"What happened here?" Damian replied as he tried not to show his surprise at how aggressively the sheriff greeted him. Koontz looked at the wrecked vehicles littering the roadway. "That truck there started this mess," he said, pointing to a late model Ford F250 Raptor. The truck was in the eastbound lanes at a slight angle. Its nose, or what was left of it, was pointed in the wrong direction - towards the oncoming traffic.

A few feet in front of the truck was a mangled semi-truck with an Amazon Prime trailer attached. The front third of the Raptor was gone entirely. The Raptor was one of those 'monster' trucks you see young men driving. All jacked up, with big, oversized tires. About ten feet in front of the Raptor were two yellow-colored plastic sheets. One covered a body whose cowboy boots were slightly visible from the back edge. A few feet away was another yellow plastic sheet that covered something that looked like it was about the size of a basketball.

"Poor guy lost his head over the whole thing," joked one of Koontz's deputies. The sheriff turned away from Damian briefly and gave the deputy a piercing glance as if to say - what the hell did you just say? Koontz shook his head and turned back to the trooper. "The body under the sheet, or should I say sheets, is a suspect we were pursuing. We were pursuing him from Parker. He made a mistake and barreled up the off-ramp to evade us." Damian turned away from the sheriff and began his survey of the crash scene.

Crammed up into the back of the Prime trailer was the burned-out hulk of what looked like a minivan. It was challenging to identify the make and model. The van and the back end of the trailer were intertwined, still smoldering from the fire. Luggage and personal effects were scattered in a large debris field on either side of the trailer. Firefighters continued to shoot water on the wreckage.

A Jeep Cherokee was lodged upside down against a giant saguaro cactus off the freeway's right shoulder. Paramedics had just extracted two occupants from the vehicle. They were wheeling them to a medevac helicopter that landed several hundred feet down the roadway. In the freeway median were two cars that had collided, one rear-ending the other. Paramedics were attending to the injured.

"It's a real mess, isn't it?" Koontz said matter-of-factly. "The guy we were pursuing is a local named Barry Jankins. He lives, I mean lived, just outside of Parker." Just then, one of his deputies, Rufus Thomas, interrupted the sheriff, "I responded to a 911 call from the Jankins residence. Dispatch informed me that Ms. Jankins had stated that her husband had shown up very drunk, or high, or something and allegedly said, 'Let me see my daughter right now, or something terrible will happen!'"

Sheriff Koontz became agitated and injected himself into the conversation. "Deputy Thomas reached out to me to inform me of the situation. The La Paz County Sheriff's Department has a long history with Mr. Jankins. He has a history of violence. I decided to handle it as the pursuit of a suspect who posed a grave threat to public safety." Damian feverishly scribbled notes as the Sheriff continued. "We proceeded with a Code 3 response and pursued Mr. Jankins for several miles on county backroads. Then he entered southbound State Road 95 and through the town of Quartzite - veering out onto Dome Rock Road."

The Sheriff's voice began to crack a little, "I had one of my deputies block Dome Rock Road at the Interstate underpass. I chased the young man westbound on Dome Rock Road. The Jankins kid got to the spot where the I-10 off-ramp intersects Dome Rock Road. He must have spotted my deputies blocking the road in front of him, so he proceeded up the off-ramp and past the WRONG WAY signs and onto the freeway. We ended the pursuit at that time." Damian thought to himself, did the sheriff just call him 'the Jankins kid'? Just then, Damian's discussion with the sheriff and his team was interrupted by someone who had just interviewed one of the crash witnesses.

The witness claimed they were following the minivan that crashed into the Amazon semi-truck just before it burst into flames. The witness said it was the same minivan they had seen at a restaurant earlier that morning when they stopped for breakfast. They reported they saw a man and woman get into the van with four young teens and two infants - maybe twins. Everyone stared at the ground in horror, shocked by what they had just heard. Damian excused himself and told Sheriff Koontz he'd have someone on his team follow up later.

Walking back to his car, Damian thought about his conversation with the Sheriff and his men. He felt something was off about what he had just heard. He couldn't put his finger on precisely what it was, but the conversation seemed scripted, and he couldn't help but think that there was way more to the sheriff's story.

As he walked back to his police cruiser to make a phone call, Damian passed by the two yellow sheets near the mangled Ford truck. He got this creepy feeling that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He remembered when he was a kid, Damian told his dad about a dream he had where creepy people kept following him. After that night, when the two of them would see something Damian thought was disturbing, his dad would jokingly ask him, "What's your creep-meter on now, son?" Damian would play along and say, "Oh, it's a 2, or it's a 6." The game seemed corny, but it would always make him feel better.

Damian slid into his cruiser when he noticed a slight aroma. It smelled like men's aftershave. It was cold in the vehicle – really cold! Damian had left the air conditioner on low when he arrived on the scene. Now, the inside of his cruiser felt as cold as the old ice locker he worked in when he was trying to earn some extra money back in high school. Damian reached for the cell phone in his shirt pocket when he heard faint sounds like whispering coming from the back seat. He looked back and saw nothing. When he turned back around, he briefly glanced at the rear-view mirror and noticed the faintest outline of someone sitting in the back seat. Abruptly turning to look, he saw no one in the back seat.

For a split second, his 'creep meter' was suddenly on 10!