Eight detectives are assigned to the county’s Collision Reconstruction Unit full time. Standing, left to right: Det. Alex Power, Det. Barry Robinson, Det. Jeff Brown, Det. Alexa Briscoe and Det. Cpl. David Cohen. Seated, left to right: Det. Michael Polcsa, Det. Sgt. Nick Picerno and Det. Elijah “Eli” Kinser.
Robinson has lost count of how many times he’s sat down to dinner with his own daughters, now 18 and 21, and explained to them why they should never get into a car with a driver who has been drinking. “We’ve had a lot of discussions that begin, ‘Dad, I heard you go out last night. What happened?’ ” he says. “I have to tell them that it was another drunk driver who killed someone.” Last June, several teens from Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville partied at a classmate’s home. Samuel Ellis, a former quarterback on the football team, drove away from the party with a friend in
the front passenger seat of his 2006 Acura TSX. They weren’t far away when they got a cellphone call asking them to come back; Ellis returned to the party so Alexander Murk and Calvin Jia-Xing Li, both 18, could hop into the backseat. According to police reports, Ellis was speeding and worried about getting a ticket, but someone in the car said he could fool speed cameras if he drove even faster. Not long before midnight, Ellis lost control of the car, went airborne, struck two trees and ended up in the driveway of a North Potomac home. Murk and Li, neither of whom were wearing seat belts, were killed.
Ellis, now 19, pleaded guilty in April to two counts of vehicular manslaughter. He is scheduled to be sentenced in June. CRU detectives' files are full of similar cases involving underage drinking. Detective Briscoe, who recently graduated from Georgetown Law, was the lead investigator of a fatal crash in Olney in 2014. On Labor Day weekend, Austin Hall, then 17, drove away from an underage drinking party there with two teenage passengers in his 2011 Chrysler Sebring convertible. The Sebring was going 119 mph just before Hall lost control, police records show.
BethesdaMagazine.com | may/june 2016 207
FEATURES_collision reconstruction.indd 207
4/11/16 12:31 PM