Innocent woman killed in police chase
3 robbery suspects arrested after crash in latest pursuit by officers that ended in death
A police chase in northwest Harris County ends in tragedy when fleeing suspects in a stolen pickup speed through a red light and collide with a car, killing the female driver.
The police chase Thursday morning in northwest Harris County was brief, spanning only four miles and involved a white pickup that was reported stolen in Houston and which was possibly involved in an aggravated assault.
It ended tragically, in an intersection near a residential neighborhood, when the pickup driver ran a red light and collided with another vehicle, killing that driver. Three people who were in the truck were taken into custody.
It was the latest significant pursuit for law enforcement in the greater Houston area. Last week a chase broadcast live on television ended with the driver crashing into another car and then being shot dead, police said, after he ignored commands to show his hands and appeared to reach for something in his car.
In Thursday’s chase, the owner of the pickup told authorities that a GPS device on the vehicle placed it in the northwestern portion of the county, where it was spotted by police, said Lt. Quincy Whitaker with the Harris County Sheriff ’s Office.
A brief chase ensued, Whitaker said, and was heading southbound on Antoine about 11:30 a.m. when the pickup driver ran a red light and collided with a passenger car heading eastbound on Fallbrook.
The pickup flipped, ending up on its side in the middle of the road in front of a bus barn that serves the Aldine Independent School District. Both vehicles were mangled in the collision, with debris from both scattered across a grassy median.
“Everything exploded like a bomb,” said a woman who witnessed the crash.
The woman, who identified herself only as Robin, said she was in her car waiting in a lane on northbound Antoine and saw a vehicle approaching in the southbound lane. She saw the pickup hit the car in the intersection.
Felt too close
“I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” she said. Police interviewed her after the collision.
The crash felt too close, she said.
“That should have been and could have been me,” she said. “I honestly thought I was dead.”
Authorities found two weapons in the stolen truck, including a pellet gun, Whitaker said. No information was available on the other weapon.
Authorities will review footage from dash cameras on the deputy’s cruiser.
The woman killed has not officially been identified. Public records on the vehicle indicate she lived in a home about a mile southwest of the crash site.
A man who answered the door at the home said the woman killed was his daughter, then gently closed the door.
Sheriff’s officials will investigate the case, which likely will include a review of their pursuit policy.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office released a copy of its 13-page pursuit policy, although it redacted key factors including restrictions and under what circumstances a pursuit would be halted. A spokesman said the redactions were for officer safety, since criminals could learn operational details of pursuits.
HPD’s eight-page vehicle pursuit order requires Houston officers to place the “highest value” on life, while accommodating the officer’s duty to arrest law violators. Officers can start or continue a chase only if they have a reasonable, good faith belief the need to apprehend the suspect “outweighs a clear risk of harm to the public,” the policy states.
For example, HPD’s policy does not allow officers to chase a car the wrong way on a freeway, pursue a fleeing suspect without activating lights and sirens, ram or bump a fleeing vehicle from the roadway, or fire at the vehicle to disable it, or use private vehicles in a blockade.
HPD requires an onduty field supervisor to command the pursuit, and the superior can decide to halt the chase if officers can identify who is in the fleeing vehicle and have probable cause to arrest them later.
A challenging situation
However, law enforcement experts agree that car chases are challenging not just for police administrators, but for officers on the streets.
Geoffrey Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina who is an expert on high-risk police activities, said police departments since the 1980s have “correctly” limited their pursuits as a way of reducing injuries to both officers and the public.
“The problem that we’ve had since the 1980s is officers see their job as catching the bad guys, and unfortunately they don’t do a very good job of calculating the risk of a collision with serious bodily injury, or death, to those involved.”
Alpert, who also trains police officers, said all police work involves an assessment of risk, everything from when to shoot at a suspect, how fast to drive to a crime scene, as well as whether to chase a fleeing suspect.
‘Heat of the moment’
“They make decisions in the heat of the moment,” Alpert said of officers. “Yes, we’re going to capture the bad guy, but balance the risk to innocent citizens like this young lady.”
Larry Karson, an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Houston-Downtown, called police pursuits a “nightmare dilemma” that often forces officers to chose between two bad options.
“The chase today is the classic dilemma that a police officer faces in initiating a chase,” Karson said.