| he man who fled the police Friday night and crashed his SUV, killing himself and another driver, was sought by officers because his vehicle was not registered, police said yesterday. Rodney Gladle, 25, hit the gas when Laconia police tried to pull over his SUV near the Laconia-Belmont town line, according to the police. Two Laconia police cars pursued Gladle through Belmont on Route 3. The officers were advised to disengage by their supervisor, according to Laconia police chief Tom Oetinger. Both cars turned off their sirens and slowed down, but one officer left his car's lights on, Oetinger said. An eyewitness confirmed Oetinger's account. Gladle, of Laconia, crashed his SUV head-on into a pickup truck driven by David Gonyer, 28, just before the Mosquito Bridge, which connects Belmont and Sanbornton. Gladle and Gonyer, also of Laconia, were both killed. Their vehicles were so mangled that their bodies had to be extracted, according to Belmont Police Chief Vincent Baiocchetti. A passenger in Gonyer's truck, Jay Sengscucng, was sent to the Lakes Region General Hospital, the police said. As of yesterday morning, Sengscucng was not listed as being at the hospital. At the time of the crash, Gladle's SUV was around a bend and out of the police officers' line of vision, Oetinger said. "The distance between where they disengaged and where the accident occurred was relatively short," Oetinger said. "It wasn't even in miles. If you looked at the distance between the town line and the distance of the actual accident, it was a little more than a mile and a half. This incident occurred in minutes." Neither chief would say how fast Gladle's SUV was going, only that his speed exceeded the 35 mph speed limit. Gladle's SUV spun around and traveled about 75 yards down Route 3 before stopping, according to witness John Olmstead. He saw the accident happen when he was closing down the Lakeview Bed and Breakfast about 10 p.m. Both vehicles were totaled, with chunks strewn on the road, neighbors said. The crash is being investigated by three units: Laconia police are conducting an internal investigation into whether department rules were followed in the incident, Oetinger said. Belmont police are performing an accident investigation, which will focus on the people involved, Baiocchetti said. They will pass their results to the Belknap County Accident Reconstruction Team, which will figure out the physics of the crash itself. Of the three Laconia officers who were involved in the pursuit, only one is currently at work, Oetinger said. One has gone on a previously planned vacation, and the other, who was in the front vehicle, has taken a few days off. Oetinger emphasized he is not being penalized. "We will talk to him to evaluate his fitness for duty," he said. "Incidents like this, where there are deaths involved, are very difficult for officers. We want to make sure his mental health is cared for." Laconia has an eight-page policy on vehicular pursuits. It stipulates that the officer involved must conclude that the immediate danger to the public posed by letting the suspect go outweighs the danger posed by the pursuit itself. It requires that the suspect must be wanted for a felony or another offense that requires immediate arrest and that the suspect must pose a danger to human life. In Gladle's case, officers tried to pull him over because his car was not registered, Oetinger said - he thinks that its temporary registration had expired. But it's unclear whether the officer's attempt to pull over Gladle, which went on for less than two miles, is considered a full vehicular pursuit. The Laconia policy defines vehicular pursuit as an attempt by an officer in an emergency vehicle to "apprehend fleeing suspects"and says that a pursuit is "deemed active by the activation of emergency lights and sirens." The policy doesn't make clear where a traffic stop ends and a chase begins. Baiocchetti, Belmont's chief, was adamant that it was neither a chase nor a pursuit. In explaining why one of Belmont's officers, who had been nearby on a traffic stop, joined the two Laconia cars, Baiocchetti said: "He followed to make sure there were no issues. He didn't know about the pursuit itself, because there wasn't one. He just followed them in case there were any problems." Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina who's studied police chases for 20 years, said that about 40 percent of all chases end in a crash. He said it's not always exactly clear when a chase begins - for example, a woman may wait to pull over until she reaches a lighted area, just to be safe. But to him, an attempted stop automatically becomes a chase when the suspect accelerates to get away, as police said Gladle did. Chases are so dangerous that they should be reserved for suspected violent felons, Alpert argues. He said that there are two common misconceptions about police chases. "There are two myths in pursuits: One is there's a dead body in the trunk," he said, describing why police might aggressively pursue someone first suspected of a minor violation. "The other is if we don't chase, everybody's going to flee." New Hampshire requires that departments have a policy on vehicular pursuits, but the state doesn't lay down any guidelines beyond that, according to Assistant Commissioner of Safety Earl Sweeney. What makes sense in the open spaces of the North Country may not make sense in the state's cities, Sweeney said. "There are some departments that say, 'We won't chase for a minor traffic violation,' but the downside to that is could lead to more high-speed driving," he said. "The other thing is, you never know why they're running. Are they running because they just ran a stop sign or is there a kidnapping victim in the car?" Sweeney monitors police chases as chairman of the Highway Safety Committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. "One of our big goals and objectives is to try and either reduce or eliminate police chases altogether," Sweeney said. He hopes that one day technology will end the need for police chases. One device being tested would shut off a car's electronic fuel pump; another would interrupt its electronic transmission. There are still kinks to be worked out. "When they first started testing them, they did things like blow out people's TVs in the neighborhood,"he said. "I would say in the next 10 years there will be something." For now, Concord has one of the state's most restrictive policies on vehicular pursuits, Sweeney said. It's eight pages long, said Concord police Maj. Robert Barry, and full of clauses and subclauses, but it essentially only allows police to pursue the violent and potentially violent. According to Concord police Maj. Robert Barry, the city chased three suspects in 2005. None of those incidents ended with an accident, he said. Every year, the city's officers have a classroom session in which they're told about the pursuit policy, Barry said. ------ End of article | 
