Death in an Instant: Officer Recalls How Partner Could Have Been Saved

They were friends for about nine years, and partners for as long as that, on the midnight-to-dawn shift in one of the toughest divisions that an LAPD officer can draw.

And in their black-and-white patrol car, it was always the same: Peter Weinhold drove, and Mark Woods, 39, a 16-year veteran, kept the books. And both conscientiously wore their seat belts, as the law and the LAPD require. The Halloween night shift promised to be more of the same.

Woods’ car had broken down, so Weinhold picked him up at Woods’ Baldwin Park house, right off the 210 freeway, where Woods lived with his wife and 4-year-old daughter. They drove toward another morning watch shift at 77th Division.

Except that this time, Weinhold, 42, once a Corvette race-car driver, had put on his seat belt when he settled into his ’84 Jeep Cherokee. Woods, that one night, did not.

And one night was all it took.

As they were gathering speed on the freeway, Weinhold swears that he saw Wood reaching to put on his seat belt. But then, “We saw the headlights facing our way”--a traffic accident on the center divider, a car spun the wrong way.

“The last thing I remember him saying is, ‘We’d better pull over and call.’ ” They had done it endless times. But this time, “We never got there. The instant he said that, it was like I hit a cement wall. The car took off in midair.”

Witnesses said a loose bumper, dropped onto the road by the car that had caused the initial accident, wedged in the Jeep’s undercarriage and sent it hurtling backwards.

“It’s so fast, there’s nothing that can describe it. . . . Fwoomp, like a slingshot,” Weinhold recalled. “When it hit the guardrail, that’s when I saw Mark flying out the back. It’s just like he disappeared--nothing to hold him in. He just got ejected right out the back.”

When the Jeep stopped moving, it was “teetering” over a guard rail on the edge of the freeway above Francisquito Avenue. Weinhold, still belted in, was cut up but alive--and “looking down at Mark, lying in the street 30 feet below me,” dying.

By the time Weinhold clambered down the embankment, someone had already gotten to the dying man; “Someone had stolen his gun, right out of his holster.”

Weinhold has not yet returned to work, and the accident plays itself over and over in his mind.

“That two blocks it took to get to the freeway--he usually puts (the belt) on. I would think he was going to put it on. He just didn’t get that far.

“Mark and I had been in a lot of pursuits,” said Weinhold, who will reach 20 years’ service next month. “We’ve been involved in shootings, we’ve been involved in car crashes on the job--and this is the way it happens. The passenger car, that’s the place you’re gonna get it.”

Woods was many cuts above the average officer, say the people at Parker Center, earning nine commendations in the last four years--one each month in the last quarter of 1982, including one for arresting five armed robbers single-handed.

If Woods protected people in life, Weinhold thinks maybe his story can do the same, now that he is dead.

‘Got to Stay With the Car’

“I’ve talked to people who say, ‘Well, I don’t want to get caught in the car, I want to be able to get out,’ ” he said, reciting some of the street excuses. As a race driver “I’ve been in several crashes--never even felt it. I’m totally convinced you’ve got to stay with the car.”

The accident will change the way Weinhold enforces the seat-belt law, not its letter, but its spirit.

“I know I am going to abide by it, and I’m going to enforce it when I get back to work. If I stop someone and cite them, I’m going to explain. . . . I might even relate my own situation.

“I lost a good friend . . . a lot of years, a lot of years,” he mused. “If he would have had that belt on, he would have been in that car with me.”