He should release the records anyway. Or start looking into a post-political Plan B.
Murray knew from the start that the accident could be trouble for him, that the first thing people would think when they heard he was driving at 5:26 a.m. was that he was hammered. Because he is a canny fellow and an ambitious one, he requested a breath test on the spot and blew a zero. He held a press conference a few hours later to explain what happened. He couldn’t sleep, he said, so he hopped in the state-owned Crown Victoria to get coffee and a newspaper and to assess damage from a recent storm. He’d been wearing his seatbelt, and obeying the speed limit, when he hit some black ice and lost control of the car, he said. State troopers, one of whom slipped on ice responding to the crash, backed him up.
It was, to put it mildly, a puzzling tale. For one thing, it was dark, not optimal for damage-viewing. Surely a former mayor of Worcester could find coffee closer to home than Sterling, 18 miles away. Reporters requested the vehicle’s black box data, and Murray resisted, backed again by State Police, who said they had higher priorities.
Eventually, under pressure, Murray had troopers release the data. Turns out, he crashed not because he hit black ice, but because he probably fell asleep at the wheel and hit a stone wall at 100 miles an hour. He wasn’t wearing his seatbelt, as he’d said, though he maintains that is his honest recollection.
The man who has spent a career, including five dutiful years in the State House, laying the groundwork for a gubernatorial run is looking pretty awful right now. Not just because of his handling of the crash, but also because of another story that broke shortly before that icy morning: On Oct. 30, the Globe reported that Chelsea Housing director Michael McLaughlin had been deceiving the state about his salary, a crazy $360,000 a year. Though Murray initially downplayed their relationship, McLaughlin was a key ally and fund-raiser. And Murray reciprocated, pushing McLaughlin’s deeply underqualified son for a $60,000 a year state job. The two men were in near-constant contact.
