Clayton News Daily

By Ed Brock

With an accident on Interstate 75 sending extra traffic down Tara Boulevard, the Georgia State Patrol on Tuesday mapped out the site where a Clayton County police officer lost his life.

The site where Sgt. Michael Davis' patrol car crashed into the median near Valley Hill Road has been marked with orange paint since the accident on Oct. 18. On Tuesday the state patrol's Specialized Collision and Reconstruction Team was on the scene trying to piece together what had happened, causing traffic to slow in the southbound lanes of one of the county's busiest thoroughfares.

At around 1:30 a.m. on the day of the accident, 40-year-old Davis was in his patrol car going north on Tara Boulevard when he hit the back of a Ford F-150 pickup truck driven by 24-year-old Dave Thomas Harvey of College Park near Valley Hill Road, according to Clayton County Assistant Police Chief Jeff Turner. Davis' car flipped several times before crashing into a ditch in the median.

Davis, a 17-year veteran of the department, was rushed to Southern Regional Medical Center after being cut free of the mangled police cruiser, but he died from the wounds he suffered in crash.

He was buried Saturday at Kennedy Memorial Gardens in Ellenwood in a ceremony attended by law enforcement agents from around the metro area.

Harvey was not badly injured and so far no charges have been made.

There is no estimate on how fast Davis was going at the time of impact, said Georgia State Trooper Larry Schnall said. The SCRT will feed the information into a computer mapping system for analysis.