Anatomy of a high-speed car crash

Why bad things happen when you leave the road.

A lot of controversy surrounds the fatal car crash of reporter Michael Hastings. There’s no accident report yet; no toxicology report, either. That might take months, as high-profile cases like this often involve a lot of lawyers. Even when there’s less controversy, a fatal car crash will involve insurance companies, legal wrangling, and in most states and some major cities (like Los Angeles), a Collision Reconstruction Unit (CRU). Think of it as CSI for car crashes: Investigators painstakingly sift through evidence to make sure that they can accurately say what happened during an accident. All of this means it could be a very long time for official findings on Hastings’ accident to be released.