Almost 40 years later, Evanston native and former Illinois State Police Sgt. Doug Whitmore still vividly remembers the first fatal crash he responded to.
“It was a 16-year-old girl. She was on I-294 near Willow Road, driving a red BMW convertible with a black top. She missed her exit and decided she had to get off there, so she literally made a right on the expressway, jumped over the ramp and wound up killing herself,” Whitmore said. “I was like, ‘Man, if somebody had just told her she could go to the next exit and get off, if she’d had more information, maybe she would have done a little better.’”
Whitmore responded to hundreds of fatal crashes over his 28-year career, but he said that first one “is something that never goes away.” It was part of what motivated him to open American Defensive Driving School in 2009, two years before he retired from the state police…