State trooper dies driving wrong way on Schuylkill Expressway

The tragic circumstances sound almost like bad fiction:

A veteran state trooper - renowned for reconstructing highway crashes and nabbing drunken or negligent motorists - dies in a head-on collision while driving the wrong way on the Schuylkill Expressway in the middle of the night.

And the death of State Police Cpl. John Quigg Jr. came just eight hours before he was due Wednesday morning in Montgomery County Court on his own drunken-driving charge.

The crash seriously injured the other driver, Chantelle Harper, described by a family friend as a gifted young Rosemont College graduate bound for law school.

State police, saying the collision was under investigation, would not comment on whether alcohol or other factors might have placed Quigg, 48, in the wrong lane. Nor did they immediately know where or how fast he was going.

The accident compelled investigators to close the eastbound lanes of the Schuylkill for several hours overnight.

"The loss of Quigg has stunned all of us," said Trooper Danea Durham, spokeswoman for the state police's Belmont barracks, where Quigg worked. "I've always found him to be one of the most knowledgeable people I've known here."

His defense attorney, Timothy Woodward, said Quigg had been accepted into a first-offenders program on his December DUI charge and was "upbeat" when they last spoke on Friday.

He had been scheduled for a 9 a.m. pretrial conference on the case Wednesday in Norristown. But shortly after 1 a.m., Quigg drove his 10-year-old Honda Accord the wrong way onto the expressway from the eastbound Spring Garden exit in Philadelphia, police said.

Moving west in the eastbound lanes, Quigg's car struck a 1994 Mercury Marquis driven by Harper, 23, of South Philadelphia. Unlike Quigg, she was wearing a seat belt.

Harper was listed in good condition at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania after surgery for leg injuries. Quigg was pronounced dead shortly after his arrival at Hahnemann University Hospital.

Photographs from the scene showed severe front-end damage to both vehicles.

Harper graduated from Rosemont in 2009 with a bachelor's degree in political science, a university official said. George Black, who lives next door to Harper's parents in Philadelphia's Mantua section, said Harper had been a straight-A student in high school and had been accepted by a law school in the city.

Black said the large size of her car probably protected her. "If she was driving anything else, she'd be dead."

Woodward, as a Montgomery County detective and later as a county prosecutor, had worked with Quigg. He called him "all state police, through and through. He loved the job. He was very good at what he did."

Quigg had been pulled from his investigative duties in December and assigned to a desk job after being charged with drunken driving, reckless driving, failure to adhere to lanes, and violating the open-container law.

Those charges arose from a Dec. 21 accident on Route 422. Quigg had driven his Honda into the guard rail along the median strip.

Police found him slumped forward in the driver's seat, unresponsive and mumbling. An uncapped, almost-empty bottle of vodka was wedged between his knees. His blood alcohol content was found to be 0.30 percent - nearly four times the legal threshold for intoxication.

Since then, he had completed a 30-day rehabilitation program and was in an after-care program, Woodward said. His recent acceptance into Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition, a first-offenders program, would have left him without a criminal record after a successful period of probation.

"He was looking forward to putting this behind him and going back into accident reconstruction," Woodward said Wednesday.

During his 24 years with the state police, Quigg had moved from one barracks to another as he ascended the ranks. In time, he developed an expertise in accident reconstruction: visiting the scene; collecting witness accounts, mechanical evidence, debris, and other data; and piecing together a narrative of what had happened into a detailed report.

"It's very complex," Durham said. Quigg was often called to testify in court or to brief news reporters.

The corporal's last high-profile case involved a tractor-trailer without brakes that rear-ended a sedan on the Schuylkill in January 2009, killing a Fort Washington businessman and seriously injuring his passenger.

Working from gasoline receipts, cell-phone records, and the truck's logs, Quigg determined that the driver had guided the rig across the country and back despite knowing its brakes were faulty.

The truck owner, the driver, and a garage owner who sold inspection stickers without checking the truck were eventually sentenced to prison.

Quigg was generous and exacting: He might call reporters to critique a story about his findings, or give a fellow officer advice about taking the witness stand.

"Because he was so seasoned in testifying, and you were nervous and going to court, he would tell you how best to get your investigation across to a jury," Durham said. "His door was always open. I never had a question where he blew me off. He was always willing to help."