By Jeremy Arias
The Frederick News-Post
FREDERICK, Md. — A steady rain fell on Tracy Ann Parker as she stood off the southbound lanes of U.S. 15 near Fish Hatchery Road at 11:35 a.m. Wednesday.
It was supposed to be her wedding day.
Instead, she was placing flowers on a makeshift memorial for her fiancé, 36-year-old Thurmont resident Ray Lee Pullen Jr., who died May 25 when Parker lost control of her 2012 Scion TC, flipping the vehicle over the guardrail and landing it on its roof in a shallow creek off the road.
“I had doctor’s appointments that morning but after that we were going to pick out our wedding rings,” Parker said, sitting in a rental car — her Scion was totaled — to take shelter from the rain. “... We were soulmates, we were the loves of each other’s lives.”
Parker doesn’t remember much of the crash. She does recall using the left lane to pass a slower-moving tractor-trailer in the right lane before losing control of the Scion as she merged back into the right lane in front of the truck. She believes she was driving approximately 60 mph, only slightly faster than the 55 mph speed limit.
“I probably slammed on the brakes but I’m not sure, and they said I hit the end of the guardrail. I don’t remember that. There’s a possibility that I blacked out,” Parker said. “But then I remember starting to roll and we rolled about five times, and then I remember all of the sudden I was underwater.”
The Scion had landed on its roof in a rain-swollen creek off the highway.
Parker, her eyesight obscured by having lost her glasses as well as the cold, murky water filling the car, was able to unfasten her seatbelt and catch a quick glimpse of her fiancé, slumped over in the seat next to her, as she forced his door open.
After freeing herself from the car, Parker began screaming for help and was quickly spotted by police and rescue workers who had been summoned to the scene by witnesses. Pullen was eventually freed from the car and brought up to the highway, where Parker saw him only briefly before she was bundled into an ambulance and rushed to the Meritus Medical Center near Hagerstown.
“The last two memories I have of him are the most heartbreaking,” Parker said, tears streaming down her face. “The memory of him sitting next to me, underwater and slumped over ... and then him laying on [U.S.] 15 and them working on him.”
Pullen was the 13th person to die in a crash on U.S. 15 in Frederick County since Jan. 1, 2015, according to data collected by Maryland State Police’s barrack in Frederick.
While the number of fatal crashes on the highway dropped from six in 2015 to just three last year, there have already been four fatal crashes resulting in four deaths so far this year on U.S. 15 in Frederick County, according to state police data.
In an effort to curb further deaths and promote safety along the busy north-south corridor ahead of yet another busy summer vacation season, state and Frederick city police once again participated in the annual Operation: Border to Border campaign from Friday through Sunday in Frederick County.
A multi-state effort originally conceived by the Virginia State Police, Border to Border uses federal and state grants to fund everything from late-night sobriety checkpoints to daylong commercial vehicle enforcement efforts all along U.S. 15, from New York to Florida, said Lt. Wayne Wachsmuth, commander of the Frederick Barrack of the Maryland State Police.
This year’s effort began with a DUI checkpoint at 11 p.m. Friday on U.S. 15 near the West Seventh Street exit, where nine state troopers and two Frederick city officers handed out more than 1,000 educational brochures to motorists over the course of about three hours.
“I’ve been out on checkpoints where we would get 10, maybe as many as 15 DUI arrests a night,” Wachsmuth said, waving another group of motorists into the checkpoint area. “But now, everyone has cell phones and stays up on social media and word gets out pretty quickly where we are ... sometimes we’ll consider it a ‘busy night’ if we get just one.”
As if on cue, Wachsmuth’s radio crackled to life.
“We got one inbound,” a trooper down the line announced, gesturing with his LED traffic baton.
Sure enough, Frederick Officer Andrew Coady was guiding a female driver out of the line of cars to the side of the road in front of the state police’s massive mobile breath testing command truck.
After putting the driver through a series of tests, including checking her eyes and a step-and-turn test, Coady led the young woman back to the truck in handcuffs to either complete a breath test or fill out a waiver form.
Even before the Frederick officer had finished, a state trooper elsewhere in the line was leading another driver, a man driving a white Chevy pickup, out of the line of cars to complete a field sobriety test.
By the time the checkpoint ended at 2:15 a.m., police had made two DWI arrests, opened a theft investigation for some stolen items found in a vehicle search and pulled an additional nine motorists out of the line to allow sober friends or relatives to come pick them up, said Sgt. Dale Smith, who coordinated the checkpoint.
“Anyone who comes through who has a measurable level of alcohol we can detect, we don’t let them drive home, even if we don’t end up charging them,” Smith explained. “Sometimes it’s enough for them to realize that, while they weren’t technically driving while impaired, they probably should not have been behind the wheel.”
Last year, state troopers and their local police partners made two DUI arrests, eight drug arrests, issued 114 speeding citations, caught five suspended or revoked drivers, made 253 commercial truck inspections and handed out 978 safety brochures during the three-day Border to Border campaign, according to state police data.
“Our primary goal is always education and awareness,” Wachsmuth said as the driver of the white pickup truck was led in handcuffs to the back of the breath test command truck. “Police omnipresence is another thing. We’re just kicking off the summer, so it’s important to let people know we’re out here.”
While DUI enforcement is an important part of each year’s Border to Border campaign, the majority of fatal crashes on U.S. 15 in recent years have not been DUI-related, Wachsmuth said.
At least one case, the fatal hit-and-run that claimed the life of U.S. Marine Cpl. William Kyle Ferrell on Sept. 29, 2015, remains an open investigation as of Saturday.
“He had called me at approximately 10:15 [p.m.], we talked until approximately 10:30 and when we hung up I went to bed and all was right with the world,” said Donna Ferrell, Kyle’s mother, speaking via telephone from her home in Carthage, North Carolina on Friday. “… In my mind he was as good as home, and according to what I’ve been told, it happened maybe 15 minutes later.”
Ferrell, a 21-year-old Marine stationed at Camp David, pulled over his truck to assist another motorist on northbound U.S. 15 near Auburn Road at about 10:55 p.m.
After setting up some road flares and briefly talking with the stranded motorist, Ferrell was walking back to his truck to retrieve a jacket when he was struck and killed by what state police believe was a heavy-duty pickup truck with a dual wheel axle.
While the striking vehicle appeared to stop briefly up the road, after the crash, it quickly left the scene, leaving Kyle’s family to wonder, more than a year later, why their son had to die.
“My gut feeling was that [the striking driver] might have been drunk or didn’t have a license,” Donna Ferrell said. “Maybe [they] just panicked, but nothing is going to be that bad. If you have any kind of compassion whatsoever, nothing can excuse someone for leaving my child in the road like he was nothing.”
“[Kyle] was everything to a lot of people,” she said, her voice catching with emotion.
As recently as Memorial Day, state police sought to remind residents that tips — anonymous or not — regarding Kyle’s case can still be called in to the Metro Crime Stoppers at 866-7LOCKUP (866-756-2587).
In the meantime, Donna Ferrell said she was pleased to hear that efforts were still regularly being undertaken to keep other families from having to suffer through what her family lived through after her son was killed.
“I think the more you can do to keep people safe the better,” she said of the state police’s Border to Border campaign.
Copyright 2017 The Frederick News-Post