State Trooper Pulls Over Hearse in Car Pool Lane, Driver Points to Corpse: 'He Doesn't Count?'
High-occupancy-vehicle lanes can prove quite the temptation for lone commuters stuck on clogged interstate corridors. The problem is that such lanes are intended for, you know, cars with more than one person in them.
KIRO shared photos of the lengths to which some motorists went to circumvent such restrictions. The snaps showed life-sized dolls, cardboard cutouts, and even Halloween skeletons all propped up as though they were passengers.
But a case out of Nevada featured one driver coming up with a slightly more natural — yet equally odd — reason for driving in the HOV lane. See, according to the Daily Mail, the vehicle in question was a hearse.
You can probably see where this one is going, right? Well, Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Travis Smaka didn’t.
See, the vehicle didn’t look like your standard hearse. Instead, it was a Chevy minivan.
Smaka’s confusion was obvious. In bodycam footage released by the Nevada Highway Patrol, he began walking toward the vehicle.
“Hi, Trooper Smaka, Nevada Highway Patrol,” he said by way of introduction. The driver answered with a polite “yes, sir,” and handed over his license.
Today we stopped a local funereal home hearse in the HOV lane. The driver had the dearly departed in the back, he thought the deceased could be counted as two people. I guess we should clarify this, living, breathing people count for the HOV lane. The driver was given a warning pic.twitter.com/OQms0ktl8t
— NHP Southern Command (@NHPSouthernComm) July 1, 2019
“You got your registration and proof of insurance as well?” As the driver rummaged around for the information, he dropped the proverbial bomb that Smaka must not have expected.
“I have a deceased in the back,” the driver explained. Smaka asked, “So, you’re with a funeral home?”
The driver replied that he was. The trooper reviewed the information and found that everything was in order.
He warned the driver that he needed to be careful when it came to driving by himself in the HOV lane. “We’re working the HOV lanes pretty heavy today,” he explained.
That was when the driver asked a question that seemed half tongue-in-cheek, half sincere: “He doesn’t count?”
Smaka laughed, a nervous chuckle. “He’s not with us anymore!” the trooper exclaimed.
Smaka explained to CNN that the laughter was from getting a response that he didn’t expect. He had never had someone try to use a corpse to get out of a traffic violation.
“It just threw me off,” he said. “That was [one] of the more interesting responses I’ve gotten.”
Smaka then emphasized that the HOV lane was for vehicles with more than one living, breathing occupant. Life-sized dolls, animals and the deceased simply didn’t qualify.
NHP Southern Command confirmed that in a tweet: “You must have a living, breathing human occupying the seats in the vehicle to be in compliance with HOV lane rules.”
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