Bicyclist arrested in car damage

After an extensive search, Houston police recently arrested a bicyclist who had been accused of damaging a vehicle while on a group bike ride last month.

Michael Len Johnson, 42, was charged on suspicion of felony criminal mischief in connection with a June 15 incident in which he allegedly struck a 2014 Mercedes Benz with a bike lock during a social group bike ride.

According to the charging document, the Mercedes was owned by Houston lawyer Hershel Cashin. Cashin told police he had been heading home from work around 8:20 p.m. when he came across a large group of cyclists who were occupying both lanes of traffic on North MacGregor Way.

Cashin told police the bicyclists were preventing motorists from proceeding, so he honked his horn and “made his way through the group.” That’s when the bicyclists began surrounding his vehicle and attacking, Cashin told authorities.

The attorney later would tell investigators he got out of his vehicle to confront the bicyclists, but the confrontation ended there. He said he then drove away from the location and called police after leaving the scene of the altercation.

The confrontation was recorded and uploaded to YouTube the next day, and upon viewing the footage a television news outlet labeled the group of cyclists as a “mob.” Cashin was quoted on the news saying he “didn’t want to hit the cyclists.”

The video also showed one bicyclist throwing a large object through Cashin’s back windshield, which may have been a brick.

According to the charging document, Johnson was found by police after he made a post on a Facebook biking group’s page on June 18, in which he allegedly claimed to have been the person to break Cashin’s rear window.

“What the media is portraying as an angry mob is us standing our ground. We are not the aggressors here, we are the protectors. This concept seems to be easy for many to understand when presented in the context of a terrified driver drawing a weapon but, for whatever reason, there seems to be a disconnect when the same logic is applied to cyclists who find themselves on the defensive,” Johnson purportedly wrote.

“I broke the windshield, and I stand behind my actions. I don’t ‘bring weapons’ with me. I carry a bike lock … I didn’t attack a vehicle out of anger. I disabled a vehicle that was being used indiscriminately as a weapon against any member of the group who was in the driver’s way. The windshield was broken because, in my mind, if you can’t see you can’t drive,” the post continued.

Neither Cashin nor Johnson’s representative, Daniel Krause, responded to a request for comment.