The Los Angeles County sheriff says Tiger Woods did not receive special treatment after his February car crash.
“For anybody suggesting he somehow received any different treatment than anybody else, he did not,” Sheriff Alex Villanueva said, according to USA Today.
But the sheriff said his department needs to hire more Drug Recognition Experts (DRE), a lesson learned as authorities investigated Woods’ crash.
“I can tell you this: We do need more drug-recognition experts within the department. We need to hire more, but then again, that costs money. We need to train more. We’re going to be training with the resources we have to increase our pool of available DRE experts,” he said.
“And that’s something that obviously, lessons learned from every incident and how can we can apply what we learned to future events and to make ourselves more, a better organization and more effective? And those are one of the things we’re going to be doing,” he added.
After the crash, law enforcement officials quickly declared it an accident. But in an earlier report in USA Today, some experts questioned that declaration.
“In the early stages of their investigation into why Tiger Woods crashed his car on Feb. 23, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officials made critical decisions that were favorable to Woods and effectively gave him the benefit of the doubt, according to forensic experts,” USA Today reported on Monday.
For instance, Villanueva announced that his deputies “did not see any evidence of impairment.”
“The deputy at the scene assessed the condition of Tiger Woods and there was no evidence of any impairment whatsoever,” Villanueva said. “He was lucid, no odor of alcohol, no evidence of any medication, narcotics or anything like that would bring that into question. So that was not a concern at the time.”
The day after the accident, Villanueva said the crash was “purely an accident.”
“But the available evidence in the case indicates Woods was inattentive or asleep when his vehicle went straight into a median instead of staying with his lane as it curved right, multiple forensic experts told USA TODAY Sports,” the paper wrote.
The paper cited Charles Schack, a former New Hampshire state police trooper who is now president of Crash Experts, which analyzes car crashes. “I would have thought that you would have him evaluated by a DRE to see whether or not there are some physical clues beyond the operation that would point to impairment. To an untrained person, sometimes the effects are a bit more subtle, and require a bit more in-depth examination to bring out the evidence of impairment,” he said,
Woods on Wednesday shared an update on his recovery progress. “Happy to report that I am back home and continuing my recovery,” he wrote on Twitter. “I am so grateful for the outpouring of support and encouragement that I have received over the past few weeks.”
“Thank you to the incredible surgeons, doctors, nurses and staff at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. You have all taken such great care of me and I cannot thank you enough.”
“I will be recovering at home and working on getting stronger every day,” Woods wrote.