KAYSVILLE, Utah — Kalawai Delos Santos wasn’t sure what he was doing the first time.
He was a first-year officer at the Kaysville Police Department. He heard the call over the radio saying a car was traveling down the interstate in the wrong lane toward his city.
“I had no training,” Delos Santos said, “No idea as far as how to even go about intercepting this car.”
Where did he get the idea to collide with an oncoming car?
“On social media,” Delos Santos said. “I follow quite a bit of different police pages.”
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He felt more confident the second time. “That one felt more just like muscle memory to me,” Delos Santos said.
Delos Santos, the son of a police officer, drove his city-issued Dodge Durango in both collisions. On an evening this September, the vehicle was sitting in a lot belonging to the city’s public works department.
The Durango’s front end was bashed in. An airbag dangled from the steering wheel.
“I basically treated this as like a shooting situation,” Delos Santos said of steering into wrong-way drivers. “I knew innocent lives are at risk,” he added.
The two crashes show how wrong-way driving happens in Utah. It also shows the dangers to the errant drivers and the police responding to them.
In the early hours of April 15, 2022, a Ford Focus was driving north in the southbound lanes of Interstate 15.
An alert came over the radio alerting police to the wrong-way driver. A state trooper tried to intercept. “And then,” Delos Santo said, “I heard him say, ‘I missed.’ And it was just radio silence.”
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“So, I took the initiative.”
It was risky. A year earlier, Tampa police officer Jesse Madsen and the wrong-way driver he was trying to stop both died after the officer steered into him on aFlorida freeway.
Delos Santos said he “came around the bend and actually saw those headlights. It became very real for me.”
Delos Santos hit the oncoming car on its left, front side. Both he and the driver suffered only minor injuries. The Kaysville Dodge Durango had only minor damage.
Not long after, the Utah Highway Patrol developed training on wrong-way drivers and shared it, including with Kaysville and Delos Santos. The training still isn’t standard across Utah. It’s up to each chief or sheriff whether his or her department receives it.
And, for safety reasons, the training does not allow anyone to practice steering into an oncoming vehicle.
Then, on Feb. 9 of this year, there was another report of a wrong-way driver on I-15 heading for Kaysville.
This occasion, Delos Santos didn’t have time to get in front of the wrong-way driver. Video shows him driving down the on-ramp, cutting across the shoulder and steering headfirst into the Tesla’s rear quarter panel.
“I need medical,” Delos Santos said into his radio after the crash. “I need medical bad!”
He lost feeling in his legs on impact. Sensation came back within minutes. Delos Santos soon returned to work. The Durango did not. The other driver didn’t suffer serious injuries.
While the 2022 driver Delos Santos hit pleaded guilty to driving under the influence, the second driver, an Idaho resident, tested negative for drugs and alcohol. He pleaded guilty to two other misdemeanors, including reckless endangerment.
At a sentencing hearing Thursday at the state courthouse in Farmington, the driver’s defense attorney, Brady Stuart, blamed his client’s Tesla “that had self-driving capabilities.”
“The vehicle turned down the wrong way,” Stuart explained, adding that his client “was feeling drowsy. He put his car on self-driving mode.”
Deputy Davis County Attorney Richard Larsen called the driver’s conduct “terrifying.” “This is an individual who was essentially a bullet in a car traveling for 4 miles,” Larsen told the judge.
In part because the driver had prior felony convictions, the judge sentenced him to 30 days in the Davis County jail followed by 30 days of wearing an ankle monitor and two years of probation.
Delos Santos says he did not assume both drivers were drunk.
So, what if the oncoming vehicles had been dump trucks? “I just would accept my fate at that point,” Delos Santos replied.
Like other peace officers who have steered into wrong-way drivers, Delos Santos has been commended. Earlier this year, Kaysville gave him the key to the city.
The mayor and City Council retroactively declared Feb. 9, the day of his most-recent collision, Kalawai Delos Santos Day.
“I don't plan on doing this a third time,” Delos Santos said, “but everyone here at this department and Highway Patrol knows I would again.”
