An off-duty University City police officer was drunk when he made a U-turn into oncoming traffic and crashed into a Bridgeton officer's car, killing them both, authorities announced Thursday.
The Missouri Highway Patrol said Officer Stephen Bastean's blood alcohol content was 0.188 percent - more than twice the legal threshold for being drunk, 0.08 percent - when his SUV hit a patrol car driven by Officer Scott M. Armstrong nine days ago.
"Clearly he made a poor decision, and as a consequence, we lost two officers," said Cpl. Al Nothum of the Highway Patrol.
The head-on crash happened shortly before 3 a.m. Jan. 12 on Highway 370 in Bridgeton, just west of Interstate 270.
Bastean, 26, had been scheduled to report to work about four hours after the crash. Dr. Mary Case, the St. Louis County medical examiner, said that given Bastean's condition, he still would have been legally drunk if he had shown up for duty at 7 a.m.
Details of the investigation were released at a news conference Thursday. The Highway Patrol gave this account:
Bastean and a college buddy met about 7:30 p.m. at Teacher's bar in St. Peters. They had drinks while they played video games and pool.
Another friend called the pair and invited them to join him at Double S bar in St. Peters. They arrived there about 11 p.m. and continued drinking.
The friends said goodbye and parted ways about 1:30 a.m.
"He would have been extremely and markedly impaired so that he could not safely operate a motor vehicle," Case said.
Police say they do not know where Bastean went, or what he did, for about the next hour.
A witness reported seeing Bastean driving west in the westbound lanes of Highway 370 near the Earth City Expressway in his Chevrolet Blazer. About 2:40 a.m., Bastean pulled to the shoulder, made a U-turn and headed back east in the westbound lanes.
Bastean drove about 75 mph toward an oncoming tractor-trailer. Its driver veered to the right. That exposed Armstrong's police car, a Ford Crown Victoria, about 300 feet behind the truck. Armstrong, 31, was found to have been going 60 mph, the posted speed limit.
The vehicles hit head-on. Neither driver used the brakes before the impact, crash reconstruction experts found. Bastean's lights were on. The damage to the cars was too extensive to determine whether either man was wearing a seat belt, Nothum said.
There was no explanation for the U-turn. No evidence was found to suggest that Bastean wanted to cause a collision, the Highway Patrol said. He was not known to be despondent. He was engaged to be married and had just bought a house.
After 911 calls about a wrong-way driver, a Bridgeton police dispatcher attempted three times to call Armstrong, who was on patrol. Police believe he never heard the call.
Armstrong's family gathered with police officers and reporters to hear the results of the investigation Thursday.
"I can't express the pain and sorrow we are going through," said Karen Armstrong, Scott Armstrong's mother. "It's pain that won't go away. It's too deep and cuts so bad."
She expressed anger about the poor choices Bastean made that night. She suggested that police leaders should find ways to identify officers who shows signs of alcohol abuse and intervene.
"It's unbelievable to think of what he did. He had to go to work the next morning," Karen Armstrong said. "He took away the love of my life. For that, I will probably hate him the rest of my life."
Scott Armstrong developed an interest in law enforcement as a police Explorer in Bridgeton and worked as an officer in Washington state and Sunset Hills before joining the Bridgeton force in 2002. He was the divorced father of an 8-year-old son.
Bastean served on the University City police force for about two years. Maj. Charles Adams, the University City assistant chief, said Bastean was a quiet and friendly officer who was good at the work. Adams said the department never noticed any warning signs that Bastean may have had a problem with alcohol.
"This was a young man who made a bad choice," he said. "Hopefully we're going to learn from this incident."