file photo Boyd Loving
JULY 16, 2015, 7:41 PM LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, JULY 16, 2015, 11:00 PM
BY JOHN CICHOWSKI
RECORD COLUMNIST |
THE RECORD
While eyeballing cars from a shoulder on Route 17, police usually don’t get too excited by speeds that inch past the 55-mph limit. But when a jet-black Jeep shot by his cruiser at 79 mph this week, a Waldwick cop hit the gas pedal for a short chase that yielded a skittish speeder with a sense of humor.
“He told me it’s scary out here,” Sgt. Bob Woessner said moments later as he wrote a ticket. “He wondered how we do this each night.”
Sgt. Robert Woessner pulls over a speeding car on Route 17 south, close to the spot where Waldwick Officer Chris Goodell was killed after a tractor-trailer slammed into his police car one year ago.
The speeder might as well have been preaching to the choir. As he does most nights, Woessner was using radar to chase down speeders on a busy stretch of 17 where scariness reached a new threshold just one year ago today when a tractor-trailer slammed into a police cruiser carrying a colleague who was also pulling radar duty there. Patrolman Chris Goodell, 32, the sergeant’s close friend, was killed instantly.
And when they get plowed in the middle of the night with their lights out, parked on a blind shoulder next to a freeway, we’re all get sentimental and weepy, right?
I read this earlier today.
Wow.
The revenue from pulling over speeders at 2AM is just too much to resist I guess.
Like shooting fish in a barrel.
If they actually wanted to make the road safer they would sit with their lights on which would make the drivers slow down. But instead they hide in the dark to catch speeders. Pretty obvious what the real objective along 17 is.
yea make money give out tickets. it is very sad that this happen. but stay off rt 17, thats the state’s job, not local town work. we don’t pay taxes for cops to sit on rt 17. and in the dark.