Missing Person, David Allan Broderick, “Dave”, Canadian

A bit hard to imagine anyone could successfully navigate a scooter from Taipei to Taidong or wherever and back and subsequently smack it into a stone wall in a parking lot and disappear.

1 Like

That was before. they changed the law, put insurance in place, and it has not happened that widespread since.

One more time:

  1. Media is unreliable: they are on a time constraint, checking facts and being accurate is optional

  2. Small town cops… enough said, they simply do not have the means or training to deal with this complicated issue

Go to the bigger cats. Talk to Foreign Affairs Police. Canadian Office. Once you get the paperwork, come here and move Heaven and Earth. But you need to know where to dig.

1 Like

Purely speculation, but the police might if they saw a bike on the side of the road. Would explain why they called the owner to find out what was going on.

I mean scooters are everywhere, it’s not like the police are calling people up to ask what their scooter is doing in any particular place. But stumbling on a bike by the side of the road, which looks like it’s been in an accident, keys in the ignition and no rider in sight, that would be concerning.

I mostly agree…but I would still start with trying to find out if the local precinct has a report on record. If they have the name and number of the person who reported the scooter there, that would be the best source of information for at least the scene of the accident. The accident is the only physical evidence we have so that’s where I would start.

The scooter is a Kymco GP.

It does appear that the front wheel and forks are completely buckled inwards - no one could have wheeled that scooter anywhere.

kymco%20gp

49b4a298c40cd2dd3a9cb846d6c3ed88bb3a117b_2_690x388

3 Likes

I agree. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the accident happened on the main road. I doubt that the scooter was found propped up against the wall though. Whoever moved it and propped it up would likely remove the keys from the ignition.

true. and a normal spouse would be like, thanks officer, I’ll be down there by tomorrow to settle things, like pay for scooter to be towed/picked up, maybe check CCTV footage, maybe act overly concerned and call everyone who is a friend or related to the spouse. But, she could have done that. Pieces still need to be tied together.

1 Like

There a kind of an open area in the background. There’s probably a small parking lot nearby.
In fact I can see it on Google maps but don’t know how to post it.

You can see the entire location pretty clearly in this image:

and this one:

2 Likes

It does look like he could have just driven straight at the wall. It’s not particularly close to the main highway now right ?

There’s a helmet sitting on the wall near the stone monument:
image

This is from a news report filmed on the same day at same location.

I wonder if he hit the low stone that these two are sitting on. It would be easy to miss in the dark and would explain the front wheel damage and minimal damage to the front of the bike.

3 Likes

Yeah smacking that wall does look easy.

This is the normal thing to do among Taiwanese if they see a bike parked out on the street with keys in ignition / on the seat. Seen it done a few times. Common courtesy.

4 Likes

In the video, there’s a man in jeans taking multiple pictures of the scooter from all angles. I wonder who he was?

Also, is that the same place as in the drone footage at 8:40? If so, access looks to be well blocked off to all vehicles, even two-wheelers, with people entering only on foot. And in that case, how could the scooter have got there? There’s certainly no sign of any other vehicle of any kind in either the video or the drone footage.

Whoever was responsible for handling this case and making decisions about the search should be able to answer a lot of the questions that are up in the air. It should be possible to find that out and obtain those answers from him or them, even if it needs intervention from the Foreign Affairs Police or Canada’s representative office in order to do so.

The road is a tourist attraction n park. No vehicles allowed.

lol at that news report…

That news report is such a great example of the BS in Taiwan news reporting. It actually claims that the drop on the other side of that wall is 800 meters. EIGHT HUNDRED METERS!!! That’s almost 3000 feet. HAHAHAHAHA!!!

I doubt that drop (which you can see clearly in the drone footage posted above) is over 100 meters. Looks a couple hundred feet to me.

1 Like

The road is a tourist attraction with no vehicles allowed. True. However, only 98% of people follow the rules.
Here’s what it looks like if you exit the tunnel heading north. 50 meters later, you’ll see parking on the right, and if you want to squeeze through on the right by the taxi (hit your mouse a few times), you’ll see the google car made it about half way to the marker stone.

2 Likes

A couple more things:

The key words (關鍵字) at the foot of the ETtoday report include 崇德派出所 (Chongde Police Station), so presumably that’s the station which handled the investigation and holds the case file for it (unless it was considered important enough to be passed up to the main station in Hualien City).

That police station’s address is 花蓮縣秀林鄉崇德村82號 (82 Chongde Village, Xiulin Township, Hualien County 972).

Also, it would help if the timeline of events could be more closely determined. The ETtoday report says it was 清晨 on the 16th when he set out from Taitung. 清晨 means “early morning”, which is not very precise, except that it’s later than 凌晨 (the small hours, before dawn).

As I confirmed with some digging around online, Taiwanese generally consider 凌晨 to mean from midnight to dawn, and 清晨 to mean at dawn and the first couple of hours of daytime.

So if we assume that he set out at some time between 6 and 8 am, and rode at a decent speed without any long stops along the way, then he would have reached the vicinity of Qingshui Cliff some time between late morning and midday (so not riding on the Suhua Highway in the dark). It’s a distance of about 200 km, and should be doable in about 4 hours at a comfortable speed.

The report says that the scooter was found by the police patrol on the 16th, but doesn’t mention at what time. That would surely be recorded in the case file, and would narrow the window of time between whatever caused that to happen to his scooter and the police finding the scooter with no sign of its owner’s whereabouts.

The ETtoday report also mentions that coast guard personnel (岸巡人員) reported having spotted him at Qingshui in the daytime (白天) on the 16th. Presumably they saw him from a passing patrol boat. Since it can be assumed that the reporter was told this by the police, the details ought to be filled out in the case file. How did the coast guards know it was him? How closely did they look at him, and what did they see? What was it that made them take particular notice of him? And most significantly, where exactly was he? Was he up on the road, near the scooter? Further along the road? Was he climbing down to the seashore, or already down there? This is all very important information.

Lastly, we know that the weather was fine in both Taitung and Hualien that day. The weather boxes in the bottom left corner of the news video tell us that both places were sunny on the 17th, with temperatures of 22-29C. A newsline at the foot of the video said that the 秋老虎 (“autumn tiger”, i.e. summery weather in the autumn, equivalent to an Indian summer) was forecast to last until the weekend, so we can assume that the weather was pretty much the same on the 16th.

11 Likes