One bloody expensive car smash

Ray Neal's life has never been the same since the near-fatal accident. Photo / Natalie Slade

Early morning, August. In a proud settler's cottage north of Whangarei, Ray Neal rises and creakily makes his way to put on the kettle.

Once he's warmed up you might not notice the limp or suspect that Neal is something of a bionic man. There's a rod in one leg, pins in both. More pins reside in his pelvis which was fractured in five places.

A bright outlook and a daily 4km walk help disguise that Neal, 59, almost died in a car accident 12 years ago. It's no lie that he hasn't felt this well since he can't remember when. The reason he can't remember is that the accident obliterated his memory of the preceding four years.

"I can't remember the accident, the car we were in, a boat I sailed in - nothing," says Neal, over a cuppa in his Hikurangi home.

Cars collide and lives change forever. It is an everyday occurrence. Available details are reported - who died, how many were injured, what charges may come. In 2008, the national cost of accidents totalled $4.4 billion. But seldom is time taken to search out the true cost of a single accident.

The result can be staggering. The financial cost of the two-vehicle crash that ruined the lives of Ray Neal and his wife at the time, Joy Klein, 56, is almost $2 million - $2.28 million if you include the costs later incurred by a passenger in the offending vehicle.

These costs continue to rise. Neal and Klein still receive small ACC top-ups to their wage and pension respectively - and other accident-related health costs are ongoing.

There's no accounting though for diminished lives, lost jobs, erased opportunities, busted relationships and the anguish of such things. And so $2.28 million is the sum of what can be totted up - healthcare, compensation for lost income, court cases, jail time.

Jail time? The accident threw together the blameless and law-abiding with someone who was neither.

Pre-dawn, November 14, 1998.

A Toyota Corolla moves along The Drive, stops at the red light at the intersection with Greenlane Rd. Inside are Ray and Joy Neal (as they then were), keen yachties, outdoors people. Neal's wiry frame belies his strength. He is a hardworking butcher and a national powerlifting medallist.

The couple rose in the early hours to make the 180km trip from Northland to Auckland Airport to meet Klein's son, Laurie, due home on an early flight from the United States.

The Neals are 47 (Ray) and 44 and life is good.

At the wheel of a speeding Subaru is Robert "Yogi" Stevens. Released from prison on bail a week earlier on a charge of receiving one stolen vehicle, Stevens is at the wheel of another. He is fleeing from police.

Stevens is 33 and has a list of convictions that covers eight pages and 18 years. He hasn't worked (his father - also Robert Stevens - would later say) since he quit the road construction gang that Stevens senior managed as a teenager.

He's been sentenced to jail eight times. Burglary, robbery, assault, aggravated robbery, assaulting a police officer, cultivating cannabis, drunk-in-charge, dangerous driving; Stevens had been there, done that.

The pursuit started in Queen St where the Subaru was pulled over. As police officers checked and found the vehicle was reported stolen and that Stevens was a disqualified driver, the Subaru took off.

It raced through East Auckland suburban streets, reaching 120kph and arrived on Greenlane Rd as the Neals' light turned green.

In a slo-mo moment he is unlikely to forget, Mark Lendrum, a constable in one of the pursuing police cars, saw the Neal's Toyota move into the intersection.

Point of impact was the driver's door at about the position of Neal's pelvis, which shattered instantly, as did his legs. But it was a punctured lung - caused by his splintered ribs - that put his life at risk in the ensuing desperate hours.

Neal's Auckland Hospital notes read: "He was the driver of a car that was hit fronto-laterally by a car that was travelling at high speed. He took the brunt of the impact."

The document goes on to list his injuries: "bruise to brain, bleed in brain, broken ribs, punctured lung, cut to liver, broken pelvis, broken shoulder, broken leg-lower, broken ankle, cuts".

The angle of impact caused the two cars to slap together and in the screeching chaos the Neals clashed heads, with Klein's head believed to have rebounded and smacked into the passenger door pillar. Flames erupted from both vehicles as they slid to a halt but somehow they didn't burn. Hardly a component of the Neals' car was undamaged. It's battery sheared in two, the pieces coming to rest 50m apart.

There were five people in the Subaru, making a total of seven in the accident. Only Stevens was conscious. He scrambled from the wreckage but was quickly caught by a police dog.

Meantime, Lendrum tended to Klein, who wasn't breathing. She had swallowed her tongue and bottom set of dentures. A leg was badly broken, blood poured from a hole in the side of her head. Lendrum bundled his police shirt into a swab to stem the flow.

A very different sort of life had begun for the Neals.

Neal has had a dozen operations, Klein has had five, with a knee replacement imminent. Both were assessed as having suffered a brain injury.

The accident spelt the end of working life for Klein while Neal works from home 20 hours a week - a third of what he typically did before the accident - as a caregiver for the IHC, looking after one child at a time. That's as much as he can manage without succumbing to oppressive fatigue.

The accident, he says, has given him more compassion for the disabled. He knows what it is to live a limited life. Once able to powerlift 262kg, he reached a point where he needed both hands to lift a 440g tin of baked beans.

Hard work was the anchor of his life. "It took me years to get over the loss of work, of the routine," says Neal, who began work in the butchery of his hometown of Russell two days after he turned 15 and didn't stop until the accident. "They [ACC] call me a success because I want to work but what would you do all day? I would go up the ruddy wall."

As his health improved, he went into business making wooden toys in his shed and selling them from the roadside. That enterprise fell victim to its success. Trying to keep up with demand took a toll on his health and he switched to his present job.

In the early stages of his recuperation Neal received an ACC payment equivalent to 80 per cent of his previous income ($37,000). That was reduced as he was able to work again to a current top-up of his caregiver income of about $200 a week.

Klein sums up the legacy of the accident like this: "It cost us our jobs, our home and our marriage."

"We are best of friends," she says, "but it just got too hard. The way ACC looked at it, as I was Ray's wife and his injuries were worse than mine, I could look after him. But I had my own injuries to get through."

Klein's broken neck was mistaken for whiplash and not found for eight weeks. Her number 1 and 5 vertebrae were broken, as well as her collarbone, tibia and fibula. It took two dozen stitches to close a head gash. Her vision and hearing are damaged.

She is not who she was in other respects. "The biggest thing now with my kids is that I'm a totally different person. So is Ray. Your personality changes because you have a head injury."

Because she worked in a low-income job (part-time at a retirement home), she received only $80 a week income support. That wasn't enough to live on and she transferred to an invalid's benefit (about $160) topped up by an ACC permanent disability payment of $11 per week.

Since 2005 Klein has received superannuation (having qualified through her retired husband) instead of an invalid's benefit - plus the $11 ACC payment.

Before the accident she had good health. The cost of her medicine averages about $2500 a year. Hearing aids costing upwards of $6000 are needed but she may have to find that money herself as ACC doesn't accept that her head injury is responsible.

There are many peripheral costs of the accident, such as the bill Klein's son paid for his trauma counselling. At age 23, he stepped off his plane to be met by a police officer. "He arrived at the hospital as we were being wheeled out of the ambulance," recalls Klein. "From that point he had to make all the decisions, about the operations, about everything."

While her anger has subsided, Klein is frustrated that Stevens bore none of the financial cost. When reparation was raised, the sentencing judge commented: "You can't get blood out of a stone".

Neal accepts the randomness. "He [Stevens] didn't out to smash up Ray and Joy," he says. "Wrong time wrong place, we were."

He correctly predicts that the accident costs relating to Stevens will be more than his own. Stevens' prison time alone cost $1 million - more than twice the bill for Neal's health and income support.

The cost for the state to patch up those in the stolen Subaru (Leonard Archer Hall, Kahu and Suzanne Tarawa, Ben Palu and Stevens) came to about $25,000.

Hall is currently serving a 10-year jail sentence having in 2005, armed with a sawn-off assault rifle, kidnapped an elderly Chinese couple and their son in St Lukes shopping mall and fired seven shots at police.

The cost of Hall's court case and incarceration to date is $500,000.

Of the others, Kahu Tarawa was caught drink-driving in 2005 with a breath-alcohol reading of twice the legal limit. She was listed as unemployed, sentenced to 60 hours community service and disqualified for six months.

Stevens was released from jail in January. His father told the Herald last month that his son claims to have "seen the light".

In prison Stevens developed a talent for painting and there are apparently prospects to sell his work.

Falling back into drug and alcohol addiction poses the greatest risk of Stevens reoffending. The Parole Board noted Stevens was addicted to cannabis for much of his time in prison and made it a requirement of his release that he attend a residential drug rehabilitation programme, something he appears to have done.

Now living in the Bay of Plenty, Stevens didn't want to be interviewed for this story.

"At the end of the day, I have done my time," he said.

"The day of my sentence [1999] I told my victims ... I would do my full sentence to show the sincerity of my remorse. I did that. That's my debt paid."

According to the Parole Board, he didn't have a choice. The board invoked section 107 of the Parole Act, requiring Stevens to serve his full sentence.

That section is reserved for prisoners the board is satisfied would, if released early, be likely to commit a serious offence before the full term of their sentence was up.

CRASH COSTS
* $4.4 b cost of all motor vehicle accidents
* $1.29b fatalities
* $1.59b serious injuries
* $0.81b minor injuries
Source: Ministry of Transport
These figures, for 2008, take account of loss of life and life quality, loss of productivity, medical, legal and court, and property damage costs.