The daughter of the late Robert Woodson said, "we've been calling and calling and you're the first person to call us." She was talking about her family's efforts to prosecute the young, chronic speeder who killed her father, a retired widower. What we thought would be a simple database project to profile the worst speeder in Nashville ended up uncovering a vehicular homicide that had fallen through the cracks. The Woodson family was waiting for the district attorney's office to prosecute Corey Jenkins, but no one there had heard of the fatal accident until our investigation.

Our four-part, week-long "Speed Demons" series began when we requested a police department database of three years of speeding and parking tickets. For a $450 computer-time charge, the police downloaded a CD-ROM with 500,000 records of very clean data. The data also included several disposition fields added by the clerk's office. Cleaning and analyzing the data took just a few days for each project.

Licensed to kill

Using Access 7.0 and a 486 computer (both have since been upgraded, thank goodness), a simple totals query named our most prolific speeder: 20-year-old Corey Jenkins. He'd had 13 tickets in three years and still had a valid license. When we took a closer look at his accident reports on file with the Department of Safety, we found out about Woodson, who had been fatally injured when Jenkins sped through a red light. Then we discovered the police department had failed to forward the case to the district attorney's office. Jenkins was indicted shortly after our story aired.

We found some other unexpected surprises in the speeding data. One field indicated whether speeding tickets had been reported to the state drivers' license office. About one-fourth of them had not. We found a long-forgotten law was allowing people to keep speeding convictions off their driving record as long as they were going less than 20 miles an hour above the speed limit on the interstate.

Access helped us find the people with the most unreported tickets. We profiled one of them, a man who would have lost his license if not for this law. Appropriately, his license plate read "ISPEED." One legislator wanted the law just the way it was, admitting it helps him keep tickets off his driving record.

To round out the "Speed Demons" series, we profiled the officer who had written the most tickets, named the locations where the most tickets are written, and looked at traffic-calming measures being tried in other cities.

Start to finish, the project took three weeks with a team of three: myself, an intern, and a photojournalist. Here's some advice to others considering a similar project: Pull paper records to back up every important ticket and accident. Find the victims. When you hit a data-analysis snag and can't find your way out, post a message to the NICAR listserv. Time after time, journalists came to my rescue. Finally, use a faster computer. Some of my queries took hours.

Tickets to hide

The parking ticket database and three-part "Meter Hogs" series was fun. Again, we looked for chronic violators. We found the worst offenders parking overtime on a meter were state employees. Worse, they had free parking a few blocks away and a shuttle bus to get there. We profiled a woman in the Department of Finance and Administration who accumulated so many thousands of dollars' worth of unpaid tickets that she declared bankruptcy. Yet she continued to park illegally just outside her office. The database gave us her tag number, so we found her car and were waiting for her when she left work one afternoon. She resigned when our story aired.

A related series also profiled people parking illegally on handicapped placards. One of our violators was the assistant to the director at the DEA. Our viewers said they especially appreciated our holding such violators accountable.

Nancy Amons can be reached at (615) 353-2284 or by email at amons@wsmv.com