Cause has been determined but public may never know.
Tiger Woods car crash: Police determine cause but details will remain undisclosed over privacy concerns
The evidence behind why Tiger Woods ran his SUV over a median and crashed it into a ditch in the Los Angeles area at the end of February has been unearthed, but the public may never know about it.
According to the Associated Press on Wednesday, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department officials have downloaded and parsed through the black box from Woods' mangled car, but they are not releasing the information -- at least not right now.
The Los Angeles County sheriff says detectives have determined what caused Tiger Woods to crash his SUV last month in Southern California but would not release details Wednesday, citing unspecified privacy concerns for the golf star.
Woods crashed his car early on the morning of Feb. 23 and was immediately rushed to a Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, where he was treated for serious but not life-threatening injuries to his lower body. Tiger had no memory of the events neither at the scene of the crash nor later on when he was taken to the hospital, according to an affidavit for a search warrant
obtained by USA Today.
All along, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has maintained that the entire incident was an accident. Early on, they called it, "purely an accident,"
although later they backtracked on that statement. Regardless, now they have arrived at an official answer that may never be disclosed.
"We have reached out to Tiger Woods and his personnel," sheriff Alex Villanueva
said on a live social media event Wednesday, according to the AP. "There's some privacy issues on releasing information on the investigation, so we're going to ask them if they waive the privacy and then we will be able to do a full release on all the information regarding the accident."
The odds of Woods' team doing that seem quite low. He is famously private, and his team never releases more information than absolutely necessary. It would be stunning if they approved the release of this information.
It was determined at the scene of the crash that Woods was not impaired, and so Woods' blood was not requested from the hospital by the sheriff's department.
As USA Today noted at the beginning of March, there would need to be probable cause of a felony to obtain medical data. Getting the black box was a much lower bar (only probable cause of a misdemeanor was needed) and a much more routine part of any investigation.
"The investigators in the accident, or in the collision, they did a search warrant to seize in essence the black box of the vehicle,"
Villanueva said on March 3. "And that's all it is. And they're going to go through it and see if they can find out what was the performance of the vehicle, what was happening at the time of impact. And with that, they'll have more information they can attribute the cause of the accident. And that's all it is, and we'll leave it at that, OK?
