Ambulance refitted for new duties

CELINA -The Mercer County Sheriff's Office has repurposed an aging hospital ambulance into a sleekly painted, black-and-yellow crime-scene and crash-reconstruction vehicle.

"Bigger counties definitely have it. I think counties our size, some do, some don't. We just had a great opportunity to get this with Mercer Health," sheriff Jeff Grey said about the newest addition to his office's fleet of vehicles.  

Mercer Health was looking to unload one of its ambulances, Grey said. When officials learned Grey's office was interested, they offered to sell it at a substantially discounted price - $3,000. Grey said it could have been sold for as much as $10,000.

After a new paint job by Chapman's Body Shop in Celina and other accessories and equipment, the vehicle likely will wind up costing between $10,000 and $11,000.

But Gray and detective Chad Fortkamp believe those will be dollars wisely spent by the sheriff's office. The vehicle will be equipped with a laptop computer, printer and numerous investigative tools, among them equipment to capture DNA, fingerprints and footprints.

"Before we had it in multiple vehicles, different closets, the garage - everything was just so scattered out you had to kind of hope you got everything that you needed before you left the office otherwise you had to send somebody back," Fortkamp said.

That preparedness should help expedite crash reconstruction.

"Consolidating in one location, our response time should be quicker to get out there and start processing," he said. "For the public, then the roads aren't closed as long. We can get out there and get it processed and not be waiting forever."

It's especially important to get state and U.S. routes open as soon as possible because they bear heavy commercial traffic, Grey added.

Getting to a scene fully primed also will help officers preserve crucial evidence.

"It's still weather related. We may have marks on the road that by the time we get called and get out there it might have started pouring down rain, so sometimes quickness is key so we don't lose some of that key evidence that we would want to put into our reports," Fortkamp said.  

A crash reconstruction is ordered in serious incidents.

"We always consider it on a fatality," Grey said. "We consider it on a serious injury crash that we think may become a fatality, and we would call them out if there's a lot of damage and it looks like a complicated scene, sometimes multiple vehicles, that kind of stuff."

Tools, both investigative and conventional, will be stored inside the former ambulance.

"You wouldn't think I'd need a hammer and sockets and all that kind of stuff on a crash scene, but I may need those to follow up on investigating," Fortkamp said. Sometimes, after securing a search warrant, Fortkamp uses ratchets and hammers to remove from a vehicle the black box, which contains driving data.

Also, Fortkamp said sometimes he may need shovels and rakes, pointing to the unsolved case in which human bones were discovered by a person walking in a wooded area near U.S. 127 and Coldwater Creek Road on Jan. 3, 2016.

The vehicle has 190,000 miles, but Fortkamp noted those are mostly highway miles. The diesel vehicle, which may be deployed only a handful of times each year, depending upon the number of serious accidents and crimes, should be good to go for a long time, he said.

"If the hospital … thought this vehicle was capable of going to Cleveland and Columbus with patients in it that needed care, it's certainly going to be good enough for us," Grey said, pointing out it will rarely leave the county unless officials in neighboring counties need help.