• Give A Gift
Martin Diebel

A lot of controversy surrounds the fatal car crash of reporter Michael Hastings. There’s no accident report yet; no toxicology report, either. That might take months, as high-profile cases like this often involve a lot of lawyers. Even when there’s less controversy, a fatal car crash will involve insurance companies, legal wrangling, and in most states and some major cities (like Los Angeles), a Collision Reconstruction Unit (CRU). Think of it as CSI for car crashes: Investigators painstakingly sift through evidence to make sure that they can accurately say what happened during an accident. All of this means it could be a very long time for official findings on Hastings’s accident to be released.

But even without official reports, there’s no lack of information about his deadly wreck.

What’s known is that a camera mounted on the dash of an LAPD cruiser showed his C250 running a red light at a high rate of speed around 4:20 a.m. on the morning of June 18, 2013. Just a few minutes later, the same cruiser was called to the scene of the accident, where the C-class was engulfed in flames after apparently hitting a tree, its engine ejected from the hood of the car. Hastings was found in the driver’s seat, burned beyond recognition.

Immediately, conspiracy theorists jumped to conclusions. Because Hastings had blown the lid off General Stanley McChrystal’s insubordination and was a pioneering muckraker, Internet posts started spinning the idea that Hastings’s car had been sabotaged. C-class Benzes just don’t blow up like that, the theories went; and their engines don’t randomly pop free of their mounts and fly out from underhood.

Without some form of foul play, how could Hastings’s crash have been so violent, so deadly?

Sadly, the answers we’ve found almost entirely point to the less-exciting conclusion, that when a car hits a stationary object like a tree, a brick wall, or a telephone pole, very bad things happen. Here’s the grim how and why.

Next Up

Anatomy of a high-speed car crash, continued.
This Is A Developing Story

Related Stories

2 of 200
200 images