The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has effected a search warrant to recover data from the “black box” Tiger Wood’s wrecked SUV, according to USA TODAY.
The Sheriff’s Deputy John Schloegl disclosed on Tuesday that the warrant was pulled to determine if the accident occurred naturally or otherwise, ruling out suspicions that the 45-year-old will be charged with a crime.
“We are trying to determine if a crime was committed,” he told USA Today … “If somebody is involved in a traffic collision, we have got to reconstruct the traffic collision if there was any reckless driving if somebody was on their cell phone or something like that.”
“We determine if there was a crime. If there was no crime, we close out the case, and it was a regular traffic collision,” he said.
Recall that the famed golfer crashed his SUV – a Genesis GV80, on February 23 near Rolling Hills Estates in Los Angeles County.
Schloegl’s comment reaffirms Sheriff Alex Villanueva’s previous statement which cleared Woods of possible criminal charges — and suggested the worst thing that could happen is Woods gets hit with an infraction if investigators determined he was driving while distracted, TMZ reports.
“We do not contemplate any charges whatsoever in this crash,” Villanueva said last week … “This remains an accident. An accident is not a crime,” he stated.
In 2017, Woods was found asleep at the wheel in Florida and had numerous medications in his system including the sleep aid Ambien, Vicodin, Xanax, Dilaudid and THC, according to the toxicology report that came out later.
In January, he announced he had recently undergone the latest of several surgical procedures on his back.
Schloegl added that “we can’t just assume that somebody’s history makes them guilty,” noting that first responders observed Woods to be alert with no evidence of impairment after he crashed his vehicle, a Genesis GV80, while headed north near Rolling Hills Estates in Los Angeles County.
Woods remains in the Los Angeles hospital after undergoing major surgery to repair multiple fractures in his right leg due to the serious injury suffered in the crash.
