Court Sides With Freehold Officer Who Saw Gruesome Crash

FREEHOLD, NJ — A former Freehold police officer who witnessed a horrific, fiery fatal crash in 2007 and retired three years later afterward won an appeal before the New Jersey Supreme Court, which ruled this week that he may be entitled to accidental disability benefits as a result of what he saw, according to reports.

Christopher Mount, who worked for the Freehold police force from 1996 to 2010, has been seeking the accidental disability benefits since he retired in 2010, saying what he witnessed at the scene of the crash was so horrifying he ended up with ongoing anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Mount was the first officer on the scene of a crash on Kozloski Road that killed three Freehold High School students and a woman driving a van that served disabled students. The students died at the scene, and an explosion of the car left Mount with mental images of the victims' burned skin, including the arm of one hanging out the window, as well as a permanent memory of the smell of the burned skin, according the appellate court ruling from June 2016.

The car exploded as a result of the crash, burning Mount and keeping him from attempting to remove the victims from the car, according to the testimony. The resulting trauma left him unable to continue to perform his duties as a police officer, and he retired early, the New Jersey Law Journal reported.

The appeals court had ruled Mount was not entitled to the enhanced disability benefits because while the crash scene was gruesome, the court said it was something Mount was trained for.

The Courthouse News, which reported the ruling, said the New Jersey Supreme Court disagreed, ruling the events of that situation and the helplessness Mount felt — he was not trained to fight fires — was beyond his training. It sent Mount's case back to the appellate division for that panel to consider the question of whether the trauma of that event directly caused his disability, the report said.

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