A Night as a Young Reporter I Won’t Forget

New Year’s Eve into New Year’s morning is usually a jackpot for police calls — drunks, fights, bad decisions in bulk. But that year? Before dawn, things were weirdly quiet.

I was a rookie newspaper reporter, riding along with a sheriff’s deputy — back when reporters could do that — and we were passing the time talking about how slow the night had been. Cold, clear, and dead quiet.

Until it wasn’t. The dispatcher broke in on our conversation with some urgency: a vehicle had hit an animal — near us.

With sirens wailing and lights flashing, we tore off toward the scene, already imagining the worst. You don’t usually get minor accidents when vehicles tangle with animals.

As we pulled up at the crash site, a guy in a destroyed tux is waving us down frantically trying to explain what has happened. Honestly, he could have saved his breath. One look at the car and the story was clear.

A full-size bull had been hit from the back, skidded along the car hood, entered the front windshield and died with his head and horns sticking out said windshield and his back half wedged squarely between the dashboard and the woman riding shotgun in the front seat.

Meanwhile, in the backseat, a couple of partygoers were groaning and attempting to clear their mouths of bull and crash debris, while the woman up front was gagging and frantically trying to pry herself away from the unfortunate end of the animal she’d been mashed against.

One by one, they spilled out of the car — coughing, spitting, and wiping ‘stuff’ out of their eyes and ears. The popular blonde beehive hairdos, both women sported, were now brownish in color plastered to their heads like carved helmets. Between the broken glass, the bull, and the bull’s final “contribution,” nobody was looking too fancy anymore.

Pretty soon, the scene lit up like a carnival. More police cruisers pulled up, radios crackling, officers giving each other that wide-eyed “Is this real?” look. Some were directing traffic. Some were taking statements. Some were just desperately trying not to gag. And the ones who could? They were laughing — not even bothering to hide it.

The real hero of the night? The deputy I was riding with had enough clout (or enough sense) to dodge the task of giving the passengers a ride home. Which meant we avoided the smell, the cleanup, and the explanations — and we finished the shift with the windows down, gulping cold air and still laughing.

The officers who transported the four victims to their homes regaled us with how they held the water hoses and sprayed the passengers as they undressed in their front yards to avoid tracking fresh cow patties into their houses. Explaining all this to the babysitters who stood gawking at this New Year’s Day celebration created another wonderful side story to this bull’s eye incident.

For the four surviving victims, it wasn’t exactly a glamorous start to the new year.

For me it was a front-row seat to one of the greatest “you won’t believe this” stories of my career.

Little 

Voice