Father doubts police’s account of son’s death
Man with BB gun killed while confronting undercover cop on task force looking for murder suspect
It was time for Richard Beary to take his wife to work but a row of police cars were blocking their Missouri City driveway.
The couple asked the officers to move, and it wasn’t until Beary got back that he realized a car belonging to his 35year-old stepson, Joshua Johnson, was inside the crime scene at a neighbor’s home on East Ritter Circle. The police were there to investigate a fatal shooting involving an undercover Harris County Sheriff’s Office deputy.
“I saw this figure of a body on the ground, wrapped in a white sheet,” Beary, 71, recalled of the April 22 shooting. “I said, ‘That’s my son.’”
Johnson lay under that sheet for at least five more hours, he said.
Police said that just before dawn that day, Johnson approached the undercover deputy as he sat in an unmarked vehicle parked under a street light. Johnson tapped on the deputy’s window around 6 a.m. with a BB gun in one hand and his phone with its light shining in the other.
Words were exchanged and the deputy asked Johnson to lower his weapon. He raised it instead, authorities said. The deputy opened fire — striking Johnson at least twice. He retreated to his vehicle, leaving a trail of blood behind him. He died of “multiple gunshot wounds,” according to the medical examiner’s office.
Assistant Chief Timothy Navarre said the BB gun looked like a more lethal weapon.
The plainclothes deputy had been working with the Gulf Coast Violent Offenders Task Force to find a capital murder suspect from Mesquite, police said. The wanted suspect — 20-year-old Jalynn Turner — was accused of gunning down a man who had been sitting in a car. Turner could not be found on that stretch of street, where a family member of his was believed
to have lived.
About three hours after the Houston shooting, Turner surrendered to North Texas authorities, Mesquite police spokesman Lt. Stephen Biggs.
No video could be found of what happened during the East Ritter Circle shooting, the second in a string of recent Houston area officer-involved deaths amid the coronavirus pandemic. The deputy was not wearing a body camera and is not required to while working undercover, said Jason Spencer, spokesman for the sheriff ’s office.
Authorities said the deputy was wearing a tactical vest with sheriff’s office lettering on it. It was not known if he identified himself to Johnson as law enforcement.
The pandemic has given hunkered down neighbors the time to look over the crime scene for themselves and think about what happened and why. A bullet hole in an out-of-the-way place makes them wonder about how it got there.
“I know everybody’s talking about what happened and of course we’ll never know because Josh is dead,” said Pat Roddy, who opened her garage door that morning to find his body on her lawn.
Johnson’s mother, Wilhelmena Beary, 62, said Johnson had a BB gun but kept it in his car. He
used it to ward off stray dogs, she said.
Johnson, a U.S. Navy veteran, was laid off recently from his carpeting job because of the pandemic-fueled recession, his parents said. He volunteered to house-sit that night for a hospitalized neighbor. A window and door had recently been left ajar leading him to believe that someone had tried breaking in.
A neighbor, Robert Pringle, believes Johnson thought the deputy was a possible intruder and that the deputy mistook him for the North Texas suspect.
“Maybe he thought he had his guy,” Pringle said.
On the morning of the shooting, Pringle heard a metallic clang at his garage door and then what he believes was the second gunshot. Except for his cars, he saw an empty street outside his front window. Johnson’s car was in the neighbor’s driveway and the door was open.
At least three black SUVs descended on the street and officers ordered Johnson to get out of the vehicle, Pringle said.
“They were saying, ‘Driver show your hands,’” Pringle said. “He could only raise one hand. He tried to do that three times but then he stopped responding.”
The officers pulled Johnson from the vehicle and tried to resuscitate him, Pringle said.
Since the shooting, Pringle has wondered how the bullet came to hit his garage. He said four cars were parked in his driveway at the time and the hole is out of
sight from where police said the deputy opened fire. He also does not recall seeing a vehicle parked under the street light when he first looked out his window.
During the initial investigation, Pringle had to direct police to the damage. Investigators used a red marker to circle where the bullet hit and where they found the bullet on the pavement, he said.
In a statement, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg called officer-involved shootings “complex matters that are investigated and sorted out based on the evidence.”
“We send Civil Rights Division prosecutors to the scene of every officer-involved shooting, and in every instance, we conduct an independent review and present all evidence to a grand jury so that the community has the ultimate say in whether criminal charges against the officer are warranted or the shooting was justified,” Ogg said.
Regardless, Beary is doubtful of how the shooting is said to have happened.
“We are Christian people,” said Beary, an Army veteran who served in Vietnam as a police officer. “We believe in forgiveness but we can’t forget.”
“Don’t cover it up because don’t think I don’t know. I was a police officer in California. I know what they do. The things that they said happened just doesn’t match up.”