TN - Gail Nowacki Palmgren, 44, Signal Mountain, 30 April 2011 - #13

[Yoda]

Additional minor factor that is odd- seat belt retracted- I am assuming that means 'off'. And I believe was stated the reason she was ejected from the vehicle. If you do not wear your seatbelt when driving that ANNOYING beep is continuously sounding. Most non seatbelt wearing folk leave the seatbelt buckled but behind them against the seat. So why was it off? How soon after she was on the phone did the crash occur? Do they know if she was on the phone and driving or stopped? If she was driving wouldn't the person on the phone have heard the beeping?
OR
Could she have possibly unbuckled her seatbelt in an attempt to escape the vehicle before it went over the cliff? And would the data recorder be able to tell when the seatbelt was unbuckled?
Minor detail, but might help us in trying to understand better.

 

[Emeralgem]

snipped from transcript..

MP: Well, if you go back to the first police report, the day before Easter – Good Friday. Uh, I wasn’t even at the house. This was, I mean – both those reports, I wasn’t even at the house. They were filed by Gail by herself if you actually read the reports. Umm, wanted to go to the lake house . . . I wanted to take a separate car . . . give us time to talk on that Good Friday . . . so I wasn’t even at the house when she filed the reports. We were (garbled) and she was discussing whether I should take the Jeep or not and she left and came back and went up the hill. I was not even there. So when she came back and talked to the police they just wanted to know if I was all right – they talked about a cooling off period. She went to the lake house and I followed the next day.

JM: You talk about you weren’t even there, are you talking about on the . . .

MP: I wasn’t even at the house on the 20th, Good Friday! (raises voice slightly) I was up the road a good bit, didn’t know the police were called. The police report was filed before I got back.

JM: You met with the police, right?

MP: They stopped and asked me if everything was okay. I said ‘everything’s okay.’ But, uh, Gail was driving erratic and I told her I want to get out of the car at the stop sign. And I did. And she drove back to the house and called the police.

------------------------------



BBM.. How can someone say they wanted to take two separate cars and then say they wanted to be able to have time to talk ? Mindblowing to say the least... A prosecutor would have chewed him up and spit him out with that statement..

Also, he manages to tell everyone Gail was driving eratic so he got out of the car at the stop sign, however he allows the children to remain in the car with Gail.. How can he claim his main concern is to protect his chidren? JMHO

 

[Analyze This]

Wouldn't the size and weight of other vehicle, if involved, have to be considered as well as the skill of the driver? If bumped correctly by a much larger and heavy vehicle would it take that much to have bumped her over the berm and the rest just took place by momentum? With the damage to the rear would they still be able to tell if she was bumped? Just curious..?

According to the report, they did a road test using a piece of equipment called the Vericom VC4000 Electronic Accelerometer Computer. The test performed showed that at 31mph with hard braking that it took 1.13 seconds for the vehicle to stop. The distance traveled during stopping was 44.4 feet. Given that the bluff measures 27.95 feet from the road edge to the bushes there is no way that a second vehicle could have hit the jeep from behind that close to the bluff. The other vehicle would've lost traction on impact and hit the grass the same way that the Jeep did. Both vehicles would've gone over the edge.

The event data recorder shows that the Jeep was already turning/sliding sideways 5 seconds before it landed upside down on the bluff. The overall distance that the Jeep traveled during that 5 seconds was between 142.78 feet (per the Event data recorder) and 164.62 feet (per drive wheel speeds). If you subtract the measurement for the grassy area where the rock was sitting, you are left with between 114.83 feet and 136.67 feet. (information can be found on pages 2, 3 and 38 of the accident report)

In my opinion, another vehicle did not make contact with the Jeep. However, it is entirely possible that another vehicle passed Gail in the left hand lane and got too close without hitting her. If that happened, Gail would've jerked the wheel to the right to avoid a possible impact. The same would apply for a vehicle that was traveling towards her.

I think that it is reasonable to consider that another vehicle was passing Gail and that she over corrected because that vehicle was too close. Just prior to the accident the Jeep was traveling at 16mph in a 30mph zone and was slowly accelerating. I could see an impatient driver rushing to pass Gail as soon as they hit the straightaway. That scenario does not answer why Gail was not wearing her seat belt.

The other possible scenario that I came up with was that Gail dropped something, likely her cell phone. She undid the seat belt to reach onto the passenger side floor with her right hand. She would've left her other hand on the steering wheel, likely pulling it slightly to the left. The Jeep drifted to the left hand side of the road. When Gail realized this, she jerked the wheel in order to steer the Jeep back onto the right hand side of the road causing the Jeep to skid out of control. I think that this scenario could explain why Gail was not wearing a seat belt and why the phone was still in the Jeep.

 

[mayqueen]

Question...why didn't the driver's side airbag deploy? Did anyone else notice that in the report? All airbags but Gail's deployed. Does anyone have any idea why?

 

[Emeralgem]

Snipped from transcript...

JM: What about the 30th?

MP: On the 30th, I came home from the conference. I came home on the 30th. Uh . . . The alarms were changed. All the different codes were changed. I didn’t know what was going on. Didn’t know where my kids were. (smiling now) She said we/I (?) had taken off with the kids before without telling me. So I didn’t know what was going on. Had no idea. Uh . . . I guess, you know, she drove by the house. . . and I didn’t know where she was going but I was trying to call her numerous times. Alarms were going off in the house, as you might imagine.

-----------------------------------------------

How can he sit there and say he came home from the conference when he never attended the conference.. Also, IIRC the day he arrived back home early was on the 29th, not the 30th..JMHO

 

[Melodie]

snipped from transcript..

MP: Well, if you go back to the first police report, the day before Easter – Good Friday. Uh, I wasn’t even at the house. This was, I mean – both those reports, I wasn’t even at the house. They were filed by Gail by herself if you actually read the reports. Umm, wanted to go to the lake house . . . I wanted to take a separate car . . . give us time to talk on that Good Friday . . . so I wasn’t even at the house when she filed the reports. We were (garbled) and she was discussing whether I should take the Jeep or not and she left and came back and went up the hill. I was not even there. So when she came back and talked to the police they just wanted to know if I was all right – they talked about a cooling off period. She went to the lake house and I followed the next day.

JM: You talk about you weren’t even there, are you talking about on the . . .

MP: I wasn’t even at the house on the 20th, Good Friday! (raises voice slightly) I was up the road a good bit, didn’t know the police were called. The police report was filed before I got back.

JM: You met with the police, right?

MP: They stopped and asked me if everything was okay. I said ‘everything’s okay.’ But, uh, Gail was driving erratic and I told her I want to get out of the car at the stop sign. And I did. And she drove back to the house and called the police.

------------------------------



BBM.. How can someone say they wanted to take two separate cars and then say they wanted to be able to have time to talk ? Mindblowing to say the least... A prosecutor would have chewed him up and spit him out with that statement..

Also, he manages to tell everyone Gail was driving eratic so he got out of the car at the stop sign, however he allows the children to remain in the car with Gail.. How can he claim his main concern is to protect his chidren? JMHO

I think this is one thing that continually bothers me about things that he and his lawyers have said. It's always something to malign her in some way. Why not say, "Well, we got into an argument and I was acting like a modsnip and being stubborn and got out of the car because I was ticked off and she overreacted and got mad and called the police..." Why not a sharing of the blame or taking responsibility for his own behavior? Why does it seem to me that his response to everything she did in the weeks before she disappeared is to suggest that she was mentally unbalanced or flat *&#@$d up or "driving erratic", etc...? I really believe that rather than hiring attorneys and a PI, his money may have been better spent if he had hired a public relations expert. JMO

 

[Emeralgem]

According to the report, they did a road test using a piece of equipment called the Vericom VC4000 Electronic Accelerometer Computer. The test performed showed that at 31mph with hard braking that it took 1.13 seconds for the vehicle to stop. The distance traveled during stopping was 44.4 feet. Given that the bluff measures 27.95 feet from the road edge to the bushes there is no way that a second vehicle could have hit the jeep from behind that close to the bluff. The other vehicle would've lost traction on impact and hit the grass the same way that the Jeep did. Both vehicles would've gone over the edge.

Snipped for space...

Do you know the exact distance from Hampton Road - East Brow intersection to where Gail supposedly lost control of her jeep?

 

[mayqueen]

Still... so so many questions...

BBM..I'm not quite understanding the data recorder being erased.. Who erased it or is that a stooopid question on my part?
Also.. IF a tire was blown out due to someone shooting at it wouldn't there be evidence of this having occurred? Same applies to Gail possibly being shot...JMHO

Em, they said this in the presser about the missing/unavailable data:

The EDR recorded three events. We could only capture two.

The third event, we believe was the impact with the rock.

When the Jeep hit the rock, it woke the system up and it started recording.

The airbag sensor overwrote the first event because it only holds two events at a time, he says.

They are making the assumption that the first event, the one they couldn't read, was the Jeep striking the rock. But they don't know for sure, because the recorder can only hold a total of two "events".

 

[Analyze This]

Still... so so many questions...

BBM..I'm not quite understanding the data recorder being erased.. Who erased it or is that a stooopid question on my part?
Also.. IF a tire was blown out due to someone shooting at it wouldn't there be evidence of this having occurred? Same applies to Gail possibly being shot...JMHO

The data that was erased off of the recorder was done so automatically by the system itself. The event data recorder begins recording when the computer recognizes a "non-trivial crash situation". (This is information found in the accident report and also in the Jeep's owner manual.) From what I read in the physics forums, in order to define "non-trivial" you would need access to the algorithms that the EDR uses to determine what constitutes such an event. This is part of the data that the auto manufacturers won't release to law enforcement and that decision has been upheld by the Supreme Court because those algorithms are proprietary intellectual property. Basically, these algorithms are determined using the accepted tolerance levels of the various systems in a vehicle.

In this case, the non-trivial crash event was Gail's Jeep hitting the bluff upside down. Due to the other factors prior to that event, the system was beginning to record because it was preparing for an event. Once the Jeep impacted, the recorder stored the previous 5 seconds worth of data. I believe that the event that was "deleted" was the one second of data that was recorded at the beginning of the five second period before the Jeep impacted the rock. The system overwrote that earlier one second in favor of the 5 seconds preceding the much more significant event of hitting the bluff upside down. If it hadn't done that we would have data that started roughly one second sooner than what was actually stored.

If the Jeep tire had blown out, regardless of the cause, the event recorder would've captured a problem in acceptable tire pressure for that particular tire. A bullet hitting the Jeep any where would've left an obvious impact site or hole.

 

[Melodie]

Question...why didn't the driver's side airbag deploy? Did anyone else notice that in the report? All airbags but Gail's deployed. Does anyone have any idea why?

If I read the report correctly, I think that there were several airbags in the Jeep. The front two (steering wheel and dash), two side airbags and some sort of driver's side knee bolster. I believe they said all of the airbags deployed except for the driver's "side" airbag. I took that to mean the one on the side/door. I believe the one from the steering wheel definitely did deploy and it appeared to me from some of the pictures of the Jeep recovery that you could see the deployed airbag on the steering wheel. JMO

 

[Emeralgem]

The data that was erased off of the recorder was done so automatically by the system itself. The event data recorder begins recording when the computer recognizes a "non-trivial crash situation". (This is information found in the accident report and also in the Jeep's owner manual.) From what I read in the physics forums, in order to define "non-trivial" you would need access to the algorithms that the EDR uses to determine what constitutes such an event. This is part of the data that the auto manufacturers won't release to law enforcement and that decision has been upheld by the Supreme Court because those algorithms are proprietary intellectual property. Basically, these algorithms are determined using the accepted tolerance levels of the various systems in a vehicle.

In this case, the non-trivial crash event was Gail's Jeep hitting the bluff upside down. Due to the other factors prior to that event, the system was beginning to record because it was preparing for an event. Once the Jeep impacted, the recorder stored the previous 5 seconds worth of data. I believe that the event that was "deleted" was the one second of data that was recorded at the beginning of the five second period before the Jeep impacted the rock. The system overwrote that earlier one second in favor of the 5 seconds preceding the much more significant event of hitting the bluff upside down. If it hadn't done that we would have data that started roughly one second sooner than what was actually stored.

If the Jeep tire had blown out, regardless of the cause, the event recorder would've captured a problem in acceptable tire pressure for that particular tire. A bullet hitting the Jeep any where would've left an obvious impact site or hole.

It will take a few for me to process that information but thanks...JMHO

 

[Analyze This]

According to the report, they did a road test using a piece of equipment called the Vericom VC4000 Electronic Accelerometer Computer. The test performed showed that at 31mph with hard braking that it took 1.13 seconds for the vehicle to stop. The distance traveled during stopping was 44.4 feet. Given that the bluff measures 27.95 feet from the road edge to the bushes there is no way that a second vehicle could have hit the jeep from behind that close to the bluff. The other vehicle would've lost traction on impact and hit the grass the same way that the Jeep did. Both vehicles would've gone over the edge.

Snipped for space...

Do you know the exact distance from Hampton Road - East Brow intersection to where Gail supposedly lost control of her jeep?

No. The report does not include that. It does give the measurement from the left hand curve just south of the bluff to the bluff area. It lists that distance as 335.30 feet from the apex of the curve to the impact area. I am assuming here that the 27.95 feet from the road to the bluff edge is being included in that measurement because they are referring to it as the impact area which appears to be consistently referred to as where the Jeep initially landed upside down.

 

[Columbo]

snipped from transcript..

MP: Well, if you go back to the first police report, the day before Easter – Good Friday. Uh, I wasn’t even at the house. This was, I mean – both those reports, I wasn’t even at the house. They were filed by Gail by herself if you actually read the reports. Umm, wanted to go to the lake house . . . I wanted to take a separate car . . . give us time to talk on that Good Friday . . . so I wasn’t even at the house when she filed the reports. We were (garbled) and she was discussing whether I should take the Jeep or not and she left and came back and went up the hill. I was not even there. So when she came back and talked to the police they just wanted to know if I was all right – they talked about a cooling off period. She went to the lake house and I followed the next day.

JM: You talk about you weren’t even there, are you talking about on the . . .

MP: I wasn’t even at the house on the 20th, Good Friday! (raises voice slightly) I was up the road a good bit, didn’t know the police were called. The police report was filed before I got back.

JM: You met with the police, right?

MP: They stopped and asked me if everything was okay. I said ‘everything’s okay.’ But, uh, Gail was driving erratic and I told her I want to get out of the car at the stop sign. And I did. And she drove back to the house and called the police.

------------------------------



BBM.. How can someone say they wanted to take two separate cars and then say they wanted to be able to have time to talk ? Mindblowing to say the least... A prosecutor would have chewed him up and spit him out with that statement..

Also, he manages to tell everyone Gail was driving eratic so he got out of the car at the stop sign, however he allows the children to remain in the car with Gail.. How can he claim his main concern is to protect his chidren? JMHO

bolded by me.

I noticed that when I was listening to the interview, too, and it makes absolutely no sense. He wanted to have time to talk...on the phone to Tammie, in the privacy of the other vehicle, IMO. How dumb does he think people are? Ridiculous!

Also, yes, if the children are of utmost importance to him, how could he leave them in a car with Gail if she's driving erratically?

I keep thinking about how he had a drinking problem before all this happened and I wonder how much drinking he's done in the past 8 months? Maybe enough to jumble all the facts in his head. I don't see how he could be drinking during the day or when he needed to be "all there" with the kids, but maybe at night?

 

[Columbo]

Snipped from transcript...

JM: What about the 30th?

MP: On the 30th, I came home from the conference. I came home on the 30th. Uh . . . The alarms were changed. All the different codes were changed. I didn’t know what was going on. Didn’t know where my kids were. (smiling now) She said we/I (?) had taken off with the kids before without telling me. So I didn’t know what was going on. Had no idea. Uh . . . I guess, you know, she drove by the house. . . and I didn’t know where she was going but I was trying to call her numerous times. Alarms were going off in the house, as you might imagine.

-----------------------------------------------

How can he sit there and say he came home from the conference when he never attended the conference.. Also, IIRC the day he arrived back home early was on the 29th, not the 30th..JMHO

He's really re-writing history, isn't he, and erasing all his misbehavior?

Re the dates: seems like a normal person would have dates this important emblazoned in their brain.

 

[mayqueen]

If I read the report correctly, I think that there were several airbags in the Jeep. The front two (steering wheel and dash), two side airbags and some sort of driver's side knee bolster. I believe they said all of the airbags deployed except for the driver's "side" airbag. I took that to mean the one on the side/door. I believe the one from the steering wheel definitely did deploy and it appeared to me from some of the pictures of the Jeep recovery that you could see the deployed airbag on the steering wheel. JMO

Ah, OK, thank you. That makes sense. As I mentioned earlier, I have an older car, and I was thinking like one airbag for each side of the car - one for passenger, one for driver. :blushing: I took "driver's 'side'" to mean the whole driver's side of the Jeep, if that makes any sense!

 

[Analyze This]

I was reading the report last night, and I don't understand the fact that her car was in Drive, Neutral, then Park. But I thought they said the Jeep was moving at 24 mph? Does anyone understand this? How can the car be moving but be in park unless it is stopped?

Page 41:

The gearshift positlon was recorded as "Drive" until 0.3 seconds
before the MRE, then a "Neutral" position was recorded at 0.2 before
the MRE when a "park" position was noted at 0.1 before the MRE.

This confused me quite a bit, but I think that something hit the gear shift and forced it to change positions. The MRE is the impact the Jeep made when it landed upside down. The above events were recorded as the Jeep was falling. So, as the Jeep flipped in the air and was coming down the tires were spinning in the air. The recorded drive wheel speed (tire rotation) when the Jeep went over the bluff was 24mph. The Jeep was heavier than the contents of the Jeep, so it fell faster than the items inside. Something in the Jeep hit the gear shift as it was falling forcing the shift to change positions.

 

[Melodie]

Ah, OK, thank you. That makes sense. As I mentioned earlier, I have an older car, and I was thinking like one airbag for each side of the car - one for passenger, one for driver. :blushing: I took "driver's 'side'" to mean the whole driver's side of the Jeep, if that makes any sense!

Hehehe...no problem. I have a car that's over the hill, too. It only has one airbag on the steering wheel. That's it. I also worry after this many years, if it would even work. I may need to research that... :waitasec:

 

[Melodie]

This confused me quite a bit, but I think that something hit the gear shift and forced it to change positions. The MRE is the impact the Jeep made when it landed upside down. The above events were recorded as the Jeep was falling. So, as the Jeep flipped in the air and was coming down the tires were spinning in the air. The recorded drive wheel speed (tire rotation) when the Jeep went over the bluff was 24mph. The Jeep was heavier than the contents of the Jeep, so it fell faster than the items inside. Something in the Jeep hit the gear shift as it was falling forcing the shift to change positions.

This Jeep was automatic transmission, correct? Or no?

 

[Emeralgem]

IMHO.. HCSO and LE stated three times in that news conference .....
We couldn't realistically animate this crash, because of the lack of evidence

So..IMHO...They really don't know what happened..

IMHO..It's truly a tragedy Gail is no longer alive and will never see her children grow up or physically be a part of their lives but I don't believe it was just a tragic accident...JMHO

 

[hollyblue]

The reason they didn't inquire was probably because LE wouldn't have expected Gail to be on that road. Why John Madewell didn't ask questions about that is truly a lost opportunity. Did she have a friend on that road? Did the kids have a friend? Was she cutting through to another street? What was she doing there?

I would have asked MP why he thought Gail was up there - even he explained it by calling her crazy again, at least he would be on the record about it.

This has been driving me batty. Maybe she didn't know the W Rd was closed...or could her PI have been from Walden or lived in the area of E Brow Rd? Could her new address have been a PO Box in Walden....if they have a PO?