If a phone rang at the scene of a fatal road crash, would you answer it...

Summer wind · 20-12-2014 07:28PM

I was going to the shop one day a couple of years ago and happened upon an accident. There was a man lying in the middle of the road and he was dead. He was thrown through the windscreen because he wasn't wearing a seatbelt. There was a girl inside the car and she couldn't move and her arm was hanging by a thread. She had it amputated in hospital later. There was an injured man in the back too.
I put a blanket I had in my car on top of the dead man because I thought it was the right thing to do. More people came and we rang the police and ambulance. The people in the accident were Chinese and I remember standing there thinking their families must have been so far away and unaware of this accident. There's no way I would have answered a phone if it had rang. I think that should be left to the police.

Canis Lupus · 20-12-2014 08:51PM

Yeah, yeah, ok now. ok. yah, bye, bye, yah, ok now, yah, alright bye now, bye bye bye bye.

suicide_circus · 20-12-2014 08:58PM

Answering the phone would almost certainly put in motion a chain of unlikely events which would culminate in a lank haired little girl crawling backwards out of my tv screen and feasting on my pancreas.

Tin Foil Hat · 20-12-2014 09:02PM

Trigger Happy wrote: »

I would answer it, provided of course that I was not in the middle of trying to save somebody. Thats the theory at least, but in practice who the fck knows how I would react.

Absolutely not. There are people trained to break news like this. Lesson One is to not do it over the phone.

Fukuyama · 20-12-2014 09:03PM

I read a book years ago by a homocide detective in the US. He mentioned that when he arrives on a crime scene it's very common for the victims phone to start buzzing in their pockets. One call every half hour turns into frantic calls every few minutes. But they can't answer because it'd disturb the scene and they need to let the tecs do their thing.

So everyone just has to continue working the crime scene while there's someone the other end of a phone trying to find their loved on.

I'm sure it's a common enough occurrence at car crashes when someone was supposed to be home from work at a certain time or was only going the shops for ten minutes but has been gone over an hour etc...