The driver of the bike was on fire when police arrived. A woman riding with him was thrown 60 feet into bushes at the side of the road. Both were killed.

Meanwhile, the pickup truck burst into flames with six people inside the cab. A 6-month-old girl perished in the blaze. Her mother and 2-year-old brother were badly burned. They clung to life for several weeks before dying in agony. In all, two children and three adults died as a result of the wreck.

The scene was a nightmare. The first officer to arrive found the motorcycle driver on fire in the street. Near the truck, the mother of the injured children was suffering from ghastly burns and other wounds. Her face was deformed by fire. Everywhere was the type of carnage and chaos normally restricted to war zones.

The police officer was a rookie when he experienced that horror show. He remembers it now like a movie he watched many years ago. He remembers the vision of the burned and dying. He remembers the screaming, the bleeding and the image of wounded children. He can recount numerous, nasty images emblazoned in his memories like snapshots.

When his shift was over that night, he went home and wept.

A quarter-century later, the crash on Old Greene Road is only one of many bad memories. The same officer, if pressed, can easily recall other terrible scenes – wrecks, fires, mutilations. If you make your living in emergency service, the collection of bad memories is a work in progress.

October 27, 1984. Few crime scenes are as notorious as the one on Main Street in New Auburn. A 4-year-old baby shoved in an oven and burned alive. The memory of that murder is like a dirty secret in the collective conscience of the community. Most would be happy to forget it.

For the police, the firefighters and paramedics who stumbled into the grisly scene, it was a guaranteed lifetime of bad dreams. Somebody had to pull the burned child from the oven. All of them had to endure the sights and sounds and smells. A handful of emergency workers retired or quit soon after. Others required therapy to help them cope.

But the dreadfulness of a scene can’t be measured exclusively by the level of gore or the body count. True, the vision of the torn-apart dead has an impact on the psyche. But it is only an enhancement to the emotional impact of the tragedy itself.

At a recent crash scene, I witnessed a young lady clutching a dead man and howling her anguish into the night. In a split second, a man she loved was irretrievably gone.

Before her mind could grasp that irrevocable truth, there was a period of madness. It wasn’t the sight of the deceased lying at the roadside that caused a visceral reaction for me. It was the sights and sounds of the emotional torment the death had wrought.

Cops who have spent even a small amount of time on the street could recite minute-by-minute details of their most disturbing scenes. They normally don’t, but they could.

These guys are the first in at suicides. And they walk in on unattended deaths to find people who have lain dead in solitude for days, weeks or months.

But typically, it’s the death by trauma on the street that either clams the officers up or drives them to gallows humor.

For the families and friends of these victims, grief has no rival. But for the emergency workers who fly to the scene of the horror, there is a different level of intimacy. They are the ones to confront the grave images of violence in true form. They are the ones to greet these faces of death. And it becomes their job to protect and serve the dead – to stand with them and seek answers for their passing.

So, as the veteran officer was telling me about the wreck on Old Greene Road, others wandered over to share their own horror stories. Drownings, fires, falls from high places. Some of these I remembered, others were before my time. No matter. I have my own collection of memories from ghastly scenes.

And as we were discussing this, an emergency call squawked over the scanner. A serious wreck in a high-speed zone. We all scrambled to the scene. The work of bad memories was progressing.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.