Probe begins after bicyclist hit and killed by police car
Terry Lee Chatman, like a lot of people in the urban areas of south Houston, used a bicycle to get around.
The 48-year-old was well-known at liquor stores and gas stations in Sunnyside where ice-cold 40-oz bottles of beer are sold in brown paper sacks, so friends and family were not surprised to hear he was pedaling down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard about 4 a.m. Thursday.
But they were angry to learn he was killed by a police officer who they contend was going too fast through the intersection of MLK and Reed. They say there is a pattern of police speeding through the area.
“What was the police officer doing speeding at 4 a.m.?” asked his sister Trenia Wilson. “They don’t do that in River Oaks, only in the ghetto.” The family did not know where Chatman was heading at that hour.
Kese Smith, a spokesman for the Houston Police Department, said HPD Officer R. Scott was traveling westbound on Reed when he collided with a man riding a bicycle.
It was unclear if Scott was on a call for service at the time of the crash, but according to Smith, his siren and emergency lights were not on.
The officer, Smith said, had a green light at the intersection of the two roadways. He tried to avoid the bicyclist but hit him. The incident remains under investigation
Chatman was pronounced dead at the scene. The officer, who has been on the force three years, had bruises and minor injuries after the crash, Smith said.
Near the intersection, Pastor Byron Jones owns a restaurant and Christian bookstore that have exterior cameras, one of which captured part of the wreck.
The video footage does not show whether the light was green but, Jones said, it shows the officer is blameless because the street lights at the intersection are off.
“It was so dark,” he said. “(Chatman) just came out of the dark, and
“It was so dark. (Tracy Lee Chatman) just came out of the dark, and the officer did not see him, I guarantee you that.” Byron Jones, local pastor and business owner near intersection
the officer did not see him, I guarantee you that.”
The scene is obscured by the canopy covering the gas pumps of the gas station next door, but the police car can be seen traveling through the dark intersection as brake lights flash and the car veers to the right.
The patrol unit came to rest on a chain-link fence of an auto shop’s parking lot.
The video shows two men in the parking lot who hear the wreck then rush to the scene. Jones said he has known Chatman for years and believes he was just riding the street not paying attention to the traffic signals.
“He’s been addicted to drugs for years and been in and out of prison,” the pastor said. Outside of Jones’ bookstore, at least two other men rode by on mountain bikes. One was riding with a bottle in a brown paper sack.
According to a database of fatal accidents obtained from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Harris County had 28 fatal wrecks involving a cyclist from 2011 to 2013.
Michael Payne, executive director of BikeHouston, said Chatman is part of an under-represented group of bicycle owners who do not consider themselves “cyclists.”
“The reality is the bicycle is an important tool in their life,” Payne said. “Quite frankly it’s a group that is not very visible, both politically and physically because they don’t spend money on lights or reflective clothing so they suffer disproportionately when it comes to collisions and fatalities.”
Looking at the reality
He compared Chatman’s death to bicyclist Chelsea Norman, who was killed in a hit-and-run in 2013 pedaling home in the dark after leaving her job at Whole Foods. Norman’s story captured the city’s attention but was not very different from other people killed on bikes, he said.
“Any loss of life is a tragedy, and we’re working hard to reduce collisions and fatalities,” Payne said. He noted that more than a quarter of the city’s population live under the poverty level.
Few blocks from home
Chatman was killed a few blocks from the home where he lived with his mother. Growing up, he went to Sterling High School and was a co-captain of the baseball team, according to his family.
He started getting in trouble with the law as a teen and had been arrested more than a dozen times.
Friends said he was a scrapper who often found himself in fights. He would puff up his chest, they said, and declare, “I’m the (expletive) King of South Park.”
He was most recently behind bars last year when he pleaded guilty to cocaine possession in exchange for six months in jail.
“He was an addict, but he was an addict who had a family who loved him and we’re going to miss him,” said Wilson, his sister. “He didn’t deserve for this to happen to him.”
Inside their yellow clapboard house, his family spent Thursday trying to make sense of what happened.
“At 4 o’clock in the morning, we can’t say what he was doing,” Wilson said. “Anybody who knows Terry knows he was just being Terry.”
In front of a liquor store, a few blocks from where Chatman was killed, a friend railed against police speeding through Sunnyside by holding up a white poster board for passing traffic that read: “Police are brutal in this community. Not a gun but a car.”
The man refused to give his name, saying he feared retribution. But, he said, he wanted to raise awareness about police cars speeding to and from a nearby police station on Mykawa.
As he spoke, several men walking to the liquor store asked him about Chatman. Two men rode up on a bicycles to commiserate. “We all knew him,” one man said.