Willow Glen Resident

Cover Story

Photograph courtesy of Jincy Pace

Vehicular Crimes: Jincy Pace of Willow Glen is one of only seven officers working as reconstructionist experts in the San Jose Police Department. The group goes out to traffic accidents to determine what actually happened.

Unsolved Mysteries

Officer looks for answer through vehicle crimes unit

By Mayra Flores De Marcotte

A white minivan traveling at 75 mph plows into a gray four-door sedan. The car crumples upon impact, and the passenger is killed instantly. The accident occurs at 3 a.m.

Another driver witnesses the accident and calls the police, who arrive 20 minutes later. This is one of many scenarios that Willow Glen resident Jincy Pace, 34, faces when she goes to work.

Pace works for the San Jose Police Department as a vehicle crimes unit traffic investigator. Her expertise is in accident reconstruction.

She has been with the vehicular crimes unit for two years and was recently honored with the American Legion's "Police Officer of the Year" award.

Pace was taken off guard when she was allowed to read the nomination.

"I felt that that level of recognition should go to someone who actually did something really hard and had a hard time getting here," Pace says. "I didn't throw myself in front of a bullet. I did what I love."

San Jose Police Lt. John Carr nominated Pace and said her dedication to her niche in the field made her a standout candidate.

"It's a very limited talent, and she's one of the few people that was able to grasp it and do well," Carr says. "It takes a lot of training and time. She does work hard."

Pace is part of an elite group at the police department, Carr says. There are only seven officers working as reconstructionists.

Their job is to re-create the scene of fatal accidents.

"It takes a great deal of knowledge and math skills," he says. "In this particular unit, how well you could handle a T1 calculator, algebra and geometry is just as important as understanding the law."

Pace, along with fellow reconstructionists, goes to a fatal scene and measures everything, including skid marks, debris, the crush on the cars and the wounds on the victim's body. They calculate the maximum and minimum speeds and then the officers find a number they can rely on, Carr says.

The next step is to present the data to a jury, Carr says.

The data is difficult to comprehend because of its technical aspects, Carr says. Pace, however, took a data program and combined it with Power Point so the data could be explained through a series of drawings that show the vehicle's position at the scene.

Carr describes Pace's presentation as a "poor man's animation."

"You could tell people the rules of physics and explain the data collected, but they may or may not get it," he says. "But seeing the re-creation makes the data clear and easy to understand for everyone."

Pace is the first person in the unit to use this approach.

Back in Texas

Pace recalls an incident when she was age 5. The event helped shape her future career.

"My mother and I were driving with Texas plates through Louisiana when we were stopped by a state trooper," Pace says. "In those days, if you got a speeding ticket, you either had to pay on the spot or go to jail."

Her mother, Mary Pace, told the state trooper that she didn't carry that kind of cash, and she couldn't go to jail because she had her 5-year-old daughter in the car.

"So the trooper looked at me very seriously and asked me if I wanted to be his partner," Pace says. "I was so excited and said, 'Of course.' "

The state trooper then "certified" Pace on the spot and told the 5-year-old she was responsible for watching the spedodometer. Her job was to make sure the orange stick didn't pass the 55 mark. If it did, Pace had to tell her mother to slow down or else her mother would go to jail.

"After that, I knew that I wanted any job where I could tell my mom what to do," Pace says.

Pace went on to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and received her bachelor's degree in science in 1994. She was later stationed in the state of Washington. A few months after arriving in Washington, she was assigned to help run the national prison in Haiti until the Haitians could run it without U.S. assistance.

"I had traveled to England, Canada and Mexico, but this was the first time I had been in a true third-world country," Pace says. "And at the age of 22, it was a real eye-opener."

While serving in the military, there was one particular assignment that piqued her interest.

"It was called 'an officer for a day,' " she says. "I got to drive around and be a cop for the day."

It was her second exposure to the field of law enforcement, only this time she was an adult.

When she was discharged from the Army in 1996, Pace decided to move to San Jose and become a chemical engineer.

"I was a chemical engineer all of six months and hated it," she says.

She enjoyed the engineering aspect, but the job required sales and it wasn't something she liked to do.

That's when she decided to pursue her childhood dream of becoming a police officer. There was an opening at the San Jose Police Department, and she joined the force in 1998.

Career change

Like the other new recruits, Pace began her police career on patrol. She worked the beat for three years.

Soon after, Pace began looking into other areas of law enforcement.

"Most brand-new officers start doing the drug beat because drugs are easy to find," Pace says, "but I didn't like that. Eventually you get jaded and think all people are bad. You are always pulling people over because you know who has the drugs."

So when the department offered a traffic radar course, she enrolled. She learned about issuing speeding tickets and how to use the radar equipment to perform traffic stops.

"I'm still stopping people, but they aren't necessarily bad people," Pace says. "You're stopping everyone from the soccer mom to the businessmen. You get to interact with normal people and make a difference."

Pace says the traffic beat involved a strong grasp of physics, and many police officers weren't interested in it.

"It's a different type of thinking," Pace says.

It turned out to be a great niche for her.

"After taking more classes on traffic and traffic investigation, I got more and more into it," Pace says. "It all made sense to me."

Pace began doing traffic investigative work.

"It's like a puzzle you have to put together," Pace says. "You need to sit down and figure out who did what and how fast they were going."

She says police officers tend to gravitate toward a specific area in the field after a number of years.

"Some do drugs, others do auto theft," Pace says. "All I wanted to do were the traffic accidents."

Although the vehicular crimes unit's traffic investigation team deals with the occasional hit and run accident, it primarily focuses on fatal accidents.

When she goes out onto the scene to investigate, the body of the person who died at the scene can sometimes still be there. She takes photographs and goes to the autopsies.

Pace says the more difficult aspect of the job is dealing with the families.

"It's hard for them to come to terms that their loved one may have caused their own death," Pace says. But they are grateful to have some answers.

"It gives them closure," Pace says.

Detaching herself from the victims of car accidents becomes harder, however, if children are involved.

"Luckily, I haven't had to deal with a child's death," Pace notes.

The only time she came close to this situation was during a collision that involved a pregnant woman and her 31-week-old fetus. The unborn child died from impact.

"I couldn't bring myself to go to the autopsy because my own daughter was just six months old at the time," Pace says.

Carr acknowledges working in this unit is difficult because of the human aspect.

"Every day, the officers come in, bring up their computer screens and deal with someone's mortality," Carr says. "It reinforces their own mortality. Jincy has been able to keep her wit and sense of humor, and I think that's remarkable."

Carr especially likes her sense of humor.

"As a retired Marine, I questioned her going into the Army," he says, "We have a friendly office rivalry."

Carr says Pace and his wife once took all his Marine paraphernalia from his office and redecorated it with Army paraphernalia.

"When she decides to pull pranks, they are good," Carr says.

One prank that left him scratching his head was when Pace set up his desktop computer to play the West Point fight song every time he booted up.

Pace's neighbor Judi Richards knows a thing or two about her friend's sense of humor.

"Jincy is a very fun and witty person," the Willow Glen resident says. "She likes to play jokes."

Richards says her husband Scott has a thing about his lawn.

"He doesn't like people to be on the lawn, and Jincy has razzed him about it on a few occasions," Richards says. "One morning, she closed off the lawn with caution tape and hung signs warning people to stay off the lawn."

Richards says the street where they live is very narrow and doesn't have much parking, so she and her husband offered their driveway to Pace whenever she needed it or had company.

"We came home one night and found motorcycles, a barbecue and picnic tables in our driveway," Richards says. "Jincy was waiting for us and said, 'You told us we could use your driveway anytime we needed it,' with a big smile."

Jincy puts a lot of humor in things, Richards says. But she's a conscientious and detailed person. "She's very in tune to people's needs," pointing out that Pace is very receptive to her children.

"Many adults don't take the time to listen to kids," she says.

Richard's son Tyler took an interest in Pace's job, and Pace was encouraging and brought home her squad car and explained all the gadgets inside the vehicle.

"She talks to my kids about their future and helps us instill the same values in them," Richards says. "They just get to hear it from someone other than their parents."