Accidental Killers - Marie Claire

What happens after you unintentionally cause a death? Shame, secrecy, sorrow and a severe lack of resources mean those who take a life often feel as though they’ve lost theirs, too. By Alexandra English 

Theresa Ruf didn’t mean for it to happen. She didn’t see the man until after she hit him; even then, she saw the blood and the crumpled motorcycle first. The 42-year-old had been driving home in Illinois one evening in June 2012 when the sun blinded her at the exact moment he slowed to turn into his driveway. At the wheel of her SUV, she felt “a strange impact” and pulled over. She tried to staunch his wounds with her clothing until help arrived. Another driver rushed over and pulled her away. He started to pray — not for the man on the road, but for her: “‘God, protect her; God, give her strength,’” she recalls. “At that point, I completely lost it. [When I heard] him praying for me, I knew the man wouldn’t make it.” 

For three days, Ruf hid in a walk-in closet. It was the only way to drown out the sound of traffic, motorcycles especially. She didn’t sleep, she didn’t eat; her husband was at a loss. “I had continual night terrors and flashbacks when I would drift off, and I would wake up screaming,” she says. The details wouldn’t stop coming: she closed her eyes and saw the road, the man lying on it. “When I was awake, I was constantly crying.” Her husband took her to the emergency room, where she was admitted into a psychiatric facility. She spent six days in a suicide ward where she says no-one could explain what was happening to her. 

It’s common among accidental killers — those who were not drunk, distracted or otherwise acting negligently — to experience a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, complete with flashbacks, hallucinations, mental fog, memory loss and nightmares. They also suffer from extreme guilt, self-disgust and what’s known as moral injury: the idea that they are inherently evil and dangerous. 

Of course, there is no moral difference between the person who has the near-miss and the person who crashes. It could happen to anyone. “Most of us cannot comprehend taking someone’s life, and then, accidentally, we do it,” says Sarah Godfrey, a psychologist and co-chair of the Australian counselling service GriefLine. In her clinical practice, she has seen clients who have accidentally killed another person and says the effects are “enormous and distressing”. “Suddenly, we’re in a different category – I’m a person who has taken someone’s life. We slide into this grey area: I’m not a murderer, but I have taken a life away. It’s a strange psychological space to be sitting in: lost between those who don’t and those who intentionally do.” 

Those lost in that space are also often left to wander alone. There are self-help books for seemingly every affliction (for the sober curious and the financially unfit, to those dealing with heartbreak, or a closet that doesn’t spark joy), yet none for anyone who has accidentally killed someone. In the US, police, social workers and hospital staff receive no training on treating people involved in accidental fatalities. The story isn’t so different in Australia. A spokesperson for Beyond Blue said: “We don’t have resources or people with experience in that specific area.” 

“In my 20 years as a psychologist, I haven’t seen any niche in psychology or help lines that support those who have unintentionally caused a death,” Godfrey says. “That doesn’t mean they don’t exist somewhere, but it is an area in need of attention.” 

There’s also a lack of research. A deep dive into Google reveals very little by way of data on the number of people who have caused an accidental death or injury (referred to as CADIs). According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, between 2015 and 2019, there were more than 36,600 accidental deaths in Australia. However, data collection agencies don’t capture any information about how many of those were caused by another person. Of those 36,600, we don’t know, for instance, how many were the result of a single-car crash, unsupervised home maintenance, or children being left unattended for a regrettable split second. How many of those deaths were at the hands of someone who didn’t mean to do it, who walked away physically unharmed but forever changed? How many people caused the death of a stranger, and how many caused the death of someone they loved?

Emma and Peter Cockburn were living in a quiet country town in New South Wales with four daughters under six. The youngest, Georgina, was 15 months old. One afternoon in April 2011, Emma secured the girls inside and went to mow the back lawn, returning frequently to check on them. About 5.30pm, she caught a glimpse of Peter returning home, reversing his ute and trailer down the side of the house. “The next thing I know, Pete is running through the back gate screaming that he’d run over Georgy,” she recalls. The toddler had somehow gotten into the garage and gone inside as Pete was backing in. “We ran into the garage and did CPR and called the ambulance,” Emma remembers. “We prayed for a miracle we knew wasn’t going to happen.” While Emma and Peter were saying hreatbreaking goodbyes to their daughter, Peter suggested they make a pact: never to blame one another. “He initially tried to pin the blame entirely on himself, and I said, ‘No, there are two adults involved here,’” Emma says. “We were at fault, even though there was no intent.”

A common refrain among the people marie claire spoke to was that being told it was “just an accident” was painful to hear no matter how well-intentioned. “It was the worst thing anyone could say to me,” Ruf says. “It underplays the significance of the event; it diminishes the value of the person lost, and the grief and the survivor’s guilt that we are enduring.” Godfrey has seen this in her clients, too. “An accident is spilt milk or tripping someone,” she says. “Those small things aren’t relevant if you’ve taken a life. The magnitude of what you’ve done is so enormous that you can’t just be told, ‘Don’t blame yourself.’” 

Also common is a fixation on punishment. Wendy Liu, a Sydney-based grief counsellor who has worked with the coroner, has met people in the immediate aftermath of accidentally causing a death. She says accidental killers feel an intense urge to do penance, which can often make things worse. “I met a father who had accidentally caused the death of someone else’s child, and he went on to leave his family – including his child – because he believed that was the ultimate self-punishment: denying himself something he loved so much,” she says. There’s also often the debilitating fear of karmic retribution; if we take something from another person, something of equal or greater value will be taken from us.

Ruf, too, stumbled over the penance block. “I emailed the State Attorney and told him that although I didn’t do anything illegal, I wanted to be put away. That was the only thing I could imagine would bring satisfaction to the man’s family,” she says. She wasn’t far off the mark. Despite her being initially cleared of any wrongdoing, the family filed a wrongful death lawsuit, and six months later Ruf was charged with reckless homicide. After eight years of rescheduled court dates and countless other delays, she accepted the lesser charge of reckless driving. She was fined, sentenced to two weeks in jail, community service and two years’ probation.

In June 1977, 22-year-old Maryann Gray had just dropped out of Miami University, Ohio, to live in a dilapidated Victorian mansion in Cincinnati with a bunch of other kids. She had spent the day painting her new bedroom an optimistic yellow, and was driving back to her old apartment when she saw something flash in front of her and felt a sickening bump. “A little boy just ran into the road, and I tried to swerve and go around him, but I couldn’t, and I hit him,” she recalls. After police cleared her of any wrongdoing, they left her to find her own way home. “I spent weeks in a state of acute stress where I just couldn’t stop thinking and had a lot of intrusive imagery,” she says. “It took over everything; I could barely function.” Two years later, she moved to California and didn’t speak about the accident again for close to 25 years. In 2003, she heard about an incident in which a driver was copping public hatred for an accident, and was moved to talk about her experience on the radio. “People started coming out of the woodwork, telling me they or someone they knew had done something,” she says. “I had never talked to anybody else who had unintentionally killed someone – it was such a powerful experience.” 

As much for her healing as for others’, Gray decided to start an online support group and resource hub called Accidental Impacts. She’s done nothing to publicise it, but – having no competitors – it comes up as one of the first results on Google and gets about 100 hits a day. People go there to post stories of car crashes, guns going off, children being forgotten for a fatal instant. Often, people share their experience for the first time, with some posting a few days after the accident, others several decades. The support group was so desperately needed that now Gray is president of the Accidental Impacts corporation and hosts monthly fellowship meetings. She also wants to start a mentorship program. 

Ruf and the Cockburns have all visited Gray’s site. “When I was hiding in that walk-in closet, I found Accidental Impacts, and I found comfort in people’s stories,” says Ruf, who struggled to find appropriate and adequate support in the aftermath of her accident. Adds Emma Cockburn: “There’s nothing in Australia that I know of like Maryann Gray’s website that is for someone who’s caused the death unintentionally “I don’t know if anyone else is doing the same here, but I do know that support is needed.” 

(In response to this story, Godfrey and the GriefLine board started a private, moderated online forum for CADIs, where “we can help people and give them advice”, she says. Visit griefline.org.au/forums.) 

The Cockburns are doing their best to fill the gaps where professional services fall short by establishing the Georgina Josephine Foundation. They visit playgroups and learner-driver sessions to increase awareness of low-speed vehicle runover accidents. They also send out information packages with their contact details to local police stations whenever they hear of an accident in the media. “We want to give them the chance to talk to Peter or me because we found it helpful to talk to other people who had been through it in the weeks after our accident,” Emma explains. In running the foundation, Emma says it’s also helped her grieving process. “It wasn’t necessarily to keep Georgy’s memory alive, but it’s had that effect. It’s healing to turn something negative into something positive.” 

Ruf has taken a similar approach with her private online group, Accidental Casualty Survivors, where people can sign up anonymously or with their real name to discuss their stories and treatments they’ve tried. “We’re like an odd family, in a way,” she says. 

The work to remove shame and stigma shouldn’t rest only on the shoulders of those who’ve experienced an accidental death. Godfrey says a cultural and societal shift towards acceptance is crucial. “We’re not machines, we are imperfect, we do chaotic things, and we live in a chaotic world,” she says. “When we read stories about these accidents, instead of being caught up in the drama and the horror, we need to find compassion and sympathy for both sides.” 

Ruf adds that it’s important to acknowledge and validate someone’s pain. “Tell them you realise they are hurting in unimaginable ways and that you will do everything you can to help them,” she says. “Please don’t abandon them. They will feel unworthy of life, much less of friendship, so you may have to insist on remaining by their side. No-one can or should have to go through this alone.” 

Lifeline 13 11 14; GriefLine 1300 845 745 . This article originally appeared in the June 2021 issue of marie claire.