***WARNING: Some people may find content in this report disturbing
INDIANAPOLIS – An Indianapolis family says they get angry driving by the crash scene where their loved one died in early October.
Police say 68-year-old Dorrell McClain was hit dozens of times by different vehicles while crossing I-74 near the Indiana Grand Casino exit.
McClain's family members are accusing Shelby County officials of failing to clean up the fatal accident, leaving haunting, gruesome reminders of his death scattered along the roadway.
News of his father's death was the first shock for, Mike McClain, according to WTTV – the second shock came the next day.
“You don’t want nobody to see something like that,” he said.
McClain, his brother and his brother’s girlfriend, Amanda Scurlock, got out of their cars and saw small pieces of Dorrell’s body still lying in and around the road.
“It’s pretty rough, you know,” McClain said. “I get about two or three hours of sleep a night because I keep seeing everything over and over again.”
The family decided they had to do something about the situation.
“It’s my dad, you know,” he said with a shake of his head. “You know, me and my brother, we just couldn’t leave him lying there like that. We had to pick it up.”
The family is frustrated, saying they feel like the officials on scene that day didn’t meet the lowest standard for collecting what they could of Dorrell’s body.
“That’s their job to do it,” McClain said. “They should’ve made sure they got everything.”
But Shelby County Coroner Robbie Stonebreaker told WTTV that he and two others worked for more than two hours in the dark to gather Dorrell’s remains. He says they did their due diligence – the best they could under the circumstances.
“We’re not trained to see that and we were able to find it, so why couldn’t they find it when they deal with that every day?” asked Scurlock.
McClain and Scurlock say they're also upset that, after they picked up some of the remains themselves and took them to the detective working the case, the coroner’s team didn’t go back out there.
“We’ve thought about going back out there, but we’re only tormenting ourselves going back out there,” said Scurlock.
Stonebreaker says the horrific scene following the crash was one of the worst he’s seen in two decades on the job.
He says over time, the scene expanded to a half-mile stretch, complicating his efforts. McClain sees that as an excuse, not an explanation.
“You figure you tell them there’s still body parts out there, they’d go clean it up, you know? It’s like they don’t care," he said.
After the WTTV report, Stonebreaker has offered to go back out and check for the family, before they cremate Dorrell.
