Two Car Bombs at the Hastings Crash? The Evidence.

OffSpectrum with James Farganne

First, in case you are unfamiliar with the crash scene, a brief orientation.

The car crashed into a palm tree on the median adjacent to 621 North Highland Avenue (west side). It was traveling due south. An aerial shot from Google Maps:  

(Click to enlarge)

The red arrow represents the car’s trajectory until it swerved eastward onto the median. The indicated palm tree is the one it struck. The red ‘A’ thumbtack is 621 North Highland.

The car struck the tree on its north-by-northwest side — that is, if you were to face the tree looking due south, the initial impact zone on the trunk would be slightly off-center to the right. That is where the bark is cleanly chewed away. In the following photo provided by Jim Stone forum member Doug, you can see that the impact damage extends around the west side of the trunk, dissipating as it goes:

Note that to the extreme right of the trunk (southwest side) you can see the end of impact damage and after that there is only charred bark. This damage pattern indicates that the car struck the tree and rotated counterclockwise if seen from above. It ended up facing just south of due east. Yet there are no skid marks on the grass or asphalt from the back tires, indicating that they were airborne during the rotation.

Here is another shot provided by Doug showing scorched grass and asphalt but no skid marks on either. Doug took it from the west side of the avenue, in front of 621 N. Highland, facing east. The swath of scorched grass tells us the car’s orientation as it burned.

So, it is established that the car struck the tree slightly to the west on its north side and rotated with rear wheels airborne to the position indicated by the scorched grass area.

How and why did that happen? I’ll call this The Rotation Question, and I will answer it below.

First, we need to look at the engine, which was thrown 130 feet to the southeast and landed near the northeast corner of Highland Ave. and Clinton Street. First, a view from the ground, grabbed from the Livelabs footage appended at the end of this article:

You can see the streetlight (left of engine), the concrete area with manhole it sits on, and the two leaning trees (right of engine) both in the following aerial shot and from Maps street view:

(Click to enlarge)

The car hit the tree on its north-by-northwest side. The engine ended up 130 feet southeast of the tree. Even assuming that no bombs were involved, the obvious question is, how did the engine clear the tree? It could never have flown through it!

I’ll call this the Magic Engine Question. Again, I’ll answer it below.

Next, I direct your attention to the debris field extending from the wreck area in a southeasterly spray pattern toward the blown-out engine.

On the east side of the avenue, facing southwest, engine down the road, off-screen, to the left:

Facing northwest, toward the wreck:

The debris field is extensive and far-reaching. I cannot consider it consistent with a mere high-speed impact, which I think would have inflicted a lot more damage to the palm tree.

Had it just been a high-speed impact, the front end ought to have been “wrapped around” the trunk of the tree. But all that debris came from somewhere, and here it is — a mostly missing front end:

The sheet of metal to the left of the tree is the Mercedes’ hood, wrapped around its south side. Here’s a due-south grab from the median:

Now think about this for a minute. Take a good, hard look, and THINK.

First, you can see the driver’s seat head-rest. Where is the burnt corpse of the driver? It isn’t there. Nor are there body parts anywhere. No corpse and no body parts means there was no driver. How is that possible? Easy. All cars since around 2005 have been outfitted with 3G connections that make it possible for them to be controlled remotely.

Here’s Jim Stone’s article on that subject.

Eyewitnesses reports corroborate this observation. There was no driver in that car.

Second, is there some quality about palm trees that makes them incredibly destructive to the front end of an impacting vehicle?

For quick reference, here is a shot of a pickup truck that hit a tree front-on after a high-speed chase:

To read the article about that incident and see video, click here.

Based on this evidence alone, I am convinced  there was a bomb in the engine compartment that destroyed the Mercedes’ front end and threw the engine. Since the cab was not destroyed, it was a directional bomb designed and placed to project the force of the explosion toward the front of the car.

Here is a view of the wreck from the east side of Highland, facing due west:

Note that the top of the cab is caved in. Again, there’s the hood, twisted around the left (south) side of the tree.

The right front wheel looks to have been blown forward and cocked at an angle almost perpendicular to the rest of the car. It didn’t appear that way before the 2:00 mark of the Loudlabs footage, but it did afterward. There were secondary explosions during the time the car sat burning, so this bit of damage may have resulted from one of those.

Next, we need to take a look at the fire.

Many have been quick to point out that a Mercedes is not a Pinto. It doesn’t just burst into flames on impact with a tree. The gas tank in this vehicle is situated at its rear anyway. I think Jim Stone was correct in his assessment of the fire. It was instantly all-engulfing and incredibly intense. Such a fire could only have been initiated by a gas tank bomb, and I am taking that as a given.

I will close the focus on the fire by noting that Jose, the Spanish-speaking witness in the Loudlabs footage, though struggling to express himself in English, clearly indicated (3:45 – 3:48) that the car was on fire before it hit the tree. That tells me the gas tank bomb went off before the car hit the tree.

Now, after spending probably dozens of hours squinting at this scene from all angles, and visualizing scenerios to find one that explains all the observations I have made thus far, I am going to tell you what I think happened.

As it passed the two closely-spaced palm trees to the north of the impact palm, the car swerved left onto the median.

At that moment, both the gas tank bomb and an engine compartment bomb simultaneously went off.

Now for some Newtonian physics — equal and opposite reactions. The gas tank bomb caused the rear end of the car to lift. At the same time, the kick-back from the bomb in the engine compartment provided a counteracting “downward-and-backward” force.

The car flew toward the tree with its rear end raised and nose lowered.

Going in slow motion now. The blast threw the hood into the tree. It threw the engine down the street. At this point, there would still have been sufficient distance between car and tree for the bomb to throw the engine past the tree and down the street. This would be the point of origin of the debris field.

The hood hit the tree and wrapped around it.

At that point, before the hood fell, the car hit the tree with two impact points: first, whatever forward-projecting metallic scraps remained of the lower chassis (base of the trunk), followed by the upper edge of the windshield (higher up the tree).

The wrapped-around hood shielded the tree from surface abrasion at the upper impact point.

The Mercedes hit the tree slightly to the left of its own center. Forward momentum made it rotate counterclockwise (viewed from above) while falling to its final position, rear wheels airborne the whole time.

As it rotated, the wrapped hood went with it and ended up curved around the tree’s south side.

It fell in a heap where you see the scorched grass.

Loudlabs arrived, and I have had a headache ever since.

And that is how I see it having happened.

Here is the Loudlabs footage:

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Addendum 1:

Here’s one question I haven’t answered to my own satisfaction, so I bring it to your attention in hopes that you might be able to offer some insight.

You’ll notice the plume of gushing water a few yards north of the crash:

A water pipe like this one, visible on Google Maps a few blocks south –

– had been installed where the water was gushing out:

I could conjecture that the bumper was rigged to trigger the bombs upon impact with the water pipe, but I don’t know. It seems possible. What do you think?

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Addendum 2:

There has been some confusion about this shot. At first glance, it doesn’t seem to match the crash scene, but actually it does.

The denser, more crowded appearance of palm trees is due to telephoto lens distortion. The sign with the arrow above the car is way down at the intersection with Clinton Street. The telephoto lense magnified it.

From this shot it is also obvious that they shifted the wreck and removed the driver’s door after they extinguished the fire. Why, I don’t know.

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Addendum 3:

In my humble opinion, anyone claiming the Mercedes was hit by a Hellfire missile is either deliberately or mistakenly full of it. For reasons that should be obvious by way of the preceding analysis.

Over and out.

http://farganne.wordpress.com/2013/06/28/two-car-bombs-at-the-hastings-crash-the-evidence/