Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
FORT WAYNE, Ind. (AP) - Indiana State Trooper Jason Beal is the definition of a man with everything to look forward to.
Beal, who was critically injured Wednesday night by the side of Ind. 14, was looking forward to his 25th birthday on Sunday and the birth of his first child in April.
He was also looking forward to moving his 21-year-old wife, Emily Beal, and growing family to Indianapolis, closer to his hometown of Shelbyville. He was expecting a transfer in a couple of months.
Emily Beal and the rest of the couple's family gathered Thursday at Fort Wayne's Lutheran Hospital, waiting to see whether Beal, who graduated in 1998 from the State Police Academy, will survive the massive internal and head injuries that he suffered in the accident.
'Doctors are characterizing these injuries as very, very serious,' Lutheran Hospital spokesman Geoff Thomas said Thursday. 'The next 48 hours are really going to be the point where we're going to know what's going to happen.'
Beal was helping a wrecker operator pull a vehicle out of a ditch late Wednesday along Ind. 14 in southeastern Kosciusko County when a driver lost control on the icy road, striking the wrecker and Beal.
Both vehicles had been parked on the westbound side of the two-lane road with their emergency lights on. Teresa Cooper, 22, was driving east on Ind. 14 when she apparently tried to brake for the emergency vehicles. Her car slid on some ice, struck the wrecker and slammed into Beal.
Cooper has not been charged with any crime, and police say speed was not a contributing factor.
The accident was just the latest tragedy to befall the State Police Academy's class of 1998. Two other graduates from that year, Troopers Richard Gaston and Cory Elson, were killed last spring in separate incidents.
Gaston was killed in March on the Indiana Toll Road near South Bend when his cruiser was hit by a tractor-trailer during a traffic stop. Cory Elson was fatally shot during a traffic stop less than a month later.
'I think this is just bizarre, and everybody is kind of shook a little bit about it,' said trooper Kenny Davis of the Indiana State Police Alliance. 'Think about the other troopers that were a part of this class.'
Eight Indiana troopers have been killed in the line of duty in the past 10 years, four of them run over on the road.
But State Police Sgt. Dave Bursten said there's no clear way to link the incidents.
'It's not like it's the same set of circumstances, where you could say, 'Gee, it's a training problem,'' Bursten said. 'Each one of these (accidents) has had a significant enough difference that it's hard to put a handle on it,' he said.
