Thursday, August 13, 2009

Move along please, nothing happening here

HERO cop Stewart Gason prevented a terrifying pile-up when he jumped aboard a runaway lorry and stopped it after its driver suffered a stroke.
Wow, what a story! You may have read this terrific tale in your Sunday newspaper – and all this drama happening right here on the A12 near Chelmsford.
And quite rightly you turn to your reliable local weekly newspaper for more detail. Perhaps an interview with the ‘hero cop’ or even a talk with the driver if he’d recovered enough.
And we were ready to do just that until Essex Police sent out a ‘correction’. In one swift sentence – repeated here in all its police-speak glory – we moved from:
Sgt Stewart Gason alighted from the police car and ran alongside the moving lorry, jumped into the cab and managed to apply the brakes just prior to the dual carriageway.
to
Sgt Stewart Gason alighted from the police car and ran alongside the moving lorry and attracted the lorry driver’s attention by shouting at him to stop and throw his keys out. The lorry driver, though unwell, responded to this and stopped just prior to the dial carriageway.
So, what happened, we asked? Could the ‘hero cop’ explain to us how he first ‘jumped into the cab’ but then just ‘shouted at him to stop’. Sgt Gason is too shy to talk, came the official reply from the Essex Police media machine. Could you tell us anything about the driver? No.
So there we have it. An unexplained mystery. Had we got a reasonable explanation you wouldn’t even be reading this now. But we’re not prepared to let you think that we hadn’t bothered to get the full story and that we just settled for the prescription story doled out by the media managers that so many of our less-inquisitive colleagues in the media settle for.
Who knows, by next week, we may even have the full story. Watch this space…
Taken from The Essex Chronicle Says August 13

2 comments:

  1. Either way, you've still got a hero copper dashing along a runaway lorry, averting certain disaster...

    HERO COP'S
    DASH STOPS
    A12 PILE-UP

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  2. I enjoyed reading your articles. This is truly a great read for me. I have bookmarked it and I am looking forward to reading new articles an i keep a nice post

    ReplyDelete