Timeline shows how dad, not police, found son's body
Jessica Wood GARY, Indiana (CNN) -- The music of T-Pain oozed from the stereo in Darius Moore's 1994 sedan as the teen and his friends, DeAndre Anderson, Brandon Smith and Dominique Green, laughed and joked about their performance that evening backing up Darius' brother's rap group at The Flava teen club.
Brandon Smith's parents are angry that police failed to find his body after he was killed in a car crash.
"We were a little tired from the club," said Moore.
None of the teens wore seat belts as they cruised past the swampy area along Chase Road, said Moore, 17, who was driving.
None of them knew that minutes later the white Chevy Caprice would careen off the road and into a ravine, injuring Moore and Anderson, 17, and killing Smith, 18, and Green, 18.
They were heading back to Moore's mother's home to drop everyone off and call it a night at about 1:30 a.m. Green sat in the front passenger seat with Smith behind him in back, Moore said, and Anderson was sitting behind the driver's seat.
Suddenly, a tire blew out, said Moore, and the car jumped a median and tore through a guardrail into the ravine. Police said it flipped about 15 times and landed on its side in an area of shoulder-high grass surrounded by woods.
Despite their injuries, Moore said he and Anderson were able to walk away from the mangled wreckage to find help. Smith and Green were missing, and police failed to find them in the dark brush surrounding the crash site.
Moore said he pleaded without success for officers to search for his missing friends. In the morning light hours later, Smith's father Arthur Smith, would cry out in agony, finding his son's body tangled across a fallen tree and Green's corpse nearby, wrapped around a tree trunk. Watch Arthur Smith show where he found his son's body »
The case has sparked two critical disputes that pit the words of the Gary police against Moore's. Were the teens drinking, as police said blood-alcohol tests indicate? Moore said they never drank any alcohol that night. Did police properly search for Smith and Green immediately after the crash? Moore said the crash site wasn't searched.
And finally, why do Moore and the club owner disagree about what time the teens left the club?
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The victims' families allege that Smith and Green's lives may have been saved if police had found them soon after the crash. They're calling on the police chief to resign.
Authorities are withholding the accident report pending an independent review by the Lake County Sheriff and an internal investigation of how officers responded to the crash. But Gary police shared a partial timeline of the events surrounding the tragic and deadly accident. See timeline and map of teens' route »
The teens' night out began at about 10 p.m. on Friday, September 14, said Moore, when the four arrived at a club for teenagers only on Gary's busy Broadway.
Tony Taylor, owner of The Flava, said with ten performing acts and about 50 teens filling the dance floor, it was one of the club's busiest nights in a long time. But there was no alcohol, Taylor said, echoing Moore's claim that there was no booze at the club.
"It's zero tolerance here," said Taylor. "We personally search everybody for both alcohol and weapons."
What Taylor does dispute is the time that Moore said he and his three friends left the club to begin their doomed journey home.
Moore said they left at 1 a.m., -- only 30 minutes before police said the crash took place. Taylor said he's sure the teens left an hour earlier -- at midnight.
"I know them all," said Taylor of the four teens. "They left there at 12 o'clock. I watched them walk out the door. I know because they always come to the club. They came there enough for me to know them -- every other week."
Moore stands by his version of events and said the teens made a single stop after leaving the club to get fuel at a gas station down the street. Then, he said, they made the 15-minute drive past neighborhood store-front churches and fast-food restaurants to the crash site on Chase Road.
Seconds before the crash, Moore drove through a crater-filled area of Chase Road known by many locals as The Rollercoaster, because of its field of moguls arching out of the black asphalt.
Moore said he drove through The Rollercoaster at about 25 mph, enough to rock any vehicle and its passengers. Then he said he accelerated to 30 or 40 mph up the overpass, rounding the top and coming over, when a tire blowout triggered a tragic series of events.
"I felt glass and me going up against the ceiling," Moore said. "I guess the car was flipping over." Police suspect speed was a factor in the crash.
The car came to rest on its side at 1:30 a.m., police said. All four of the young men were thrown from the car, according to Moore. Moore, suffering from wounds to his hip and under his armpit, said he called out to Anderson, who reported that his neck was injured. Moore said he then called out to the darkness, hoping to hear from Smith and Green. He heard nothing.
With his cell phone battery dead, Moore told Anderson he was going for help.
Eleven minutes after the crash, an unidentified driver called 911 and reported seeing a bleeding man along Chase Road wearing a white shirt. Gary police officer Jeffery Westerfield arrived at the scene three minutes after the 911 call, at 1:44 a.m., according to police.
"I told the police that I'd been in an accident and I was injured," Moore said. "I told him that I had two other friends still down there in the ravine and they could be badly hurt, and they needed help too."
Westerfield told Moore an ambulance was on the way and to sit on the curb, said Moore. "But I was hurt, and I was cold, and I asked him if I could sit in his car, and he asked me, 'Do you have a valid driver's license?' -- things that I didn't think were important at the time."
Moore said two other police cars pulled up to the scene and that he told the two officers who got out "to go look for my friends." According to police, officers were at the site for two hours -- from 1:44 a.m. to 3:45 a.m.
Police have said Moore and Anderson may have told them they had previously dropped off the other two teens before the crash.
"I never told them that I dropped them off," said Moore, "and DeAndre never told them that neither."
Police radio dispatch tapes released last week revealed that police officers discussed the possibility that Smith and Green might be at the scene.
"He says he had two other guys with him in the car," said an unidentified officer on the recording. "They might still be in the car, you might want to check." Listen to audio of the police recordings »
Moore said police "didn't look for them. They didn't see them. They didn't go down there to look to see if they were down there."
Police have responded to Moore's accusations saying the teen couldn't have known how they searched the scene because Moore departed the crash site in an ambulance shortly after officers arrived.
Without finding Green or Smith, police said they towed the Caprice and cleared the scene at 3:45 a.m.
About five hours later, Brandon Smith's father, Arthur Smith and his aunt Annette Jolly heard about the crash from survivors' families and drove to the site.
Although he still believed his missing son to be alive, the violent nature of the crash became apparent to Arthur Smith as he took a half-minute or so to carefully make his way down the ravine's steep decline.
In the new light of daybreak the wreckage was gone, but from the matted grass and scattered debris, Arthur Smith said he could tell where Moore's car had come to rest after the crash.
Promotional fliers from the previous night's CD release party littered the ground as did a car tire, a muffler and a vehicle tail light.
The true nature of what had happened to his son seemed to reveal itself to the father with each step through the brush. Arthur Smith said he saw his son's belt hanging from a tree limb, a shoe and finally, Brandon Smith's lifeless body draped over the trunk of a fallen tree.
"I found him! I found him! I found my baby!" Smith said he cried out at the time. Mere steps from his son, Smith then saw Green's body wrapped around the base of a tree, he said.
At 9:13 a.m., according to police, Jolly called 911 to report the finding of two teens' bodies five hours after police had left the crash scene -- a call that left the Smith family grief-stricken, angry and demanding answers from the police.
Although none of the teens nor any police have been charged or reprimanded in the case, Gary police have begun an internal investigation and its accident report is under independent review by the Lake County Sheriff.
"The police didn't come down here and look," Smith said later at the crash site. "And as you can see, if you took five minutes, you could have been able to see these boys. It's a shame, a damn shame." E-mail to a friend
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