NFL player says he was harassed in traffic stop
Ex-UH star files complaint with DA’s office
New England Patriots player Elandon Roberts has lodged a complaint with the Fort Bend County district attorney over a March traffic stop in which a rookie deputy sheriff followed him to his Richmond home, referred to him as a “big black male” to radio dispatchers and called for backup, a lawyer for the NFL player said Friday.
The University of Houston standout from Port Arthur was driving home from his parents’ house when the deputy began following him — allegedly for speeding — on Pitts Road outside of the Richmond city limits, said Roberts’ lawyer, Jennine Hovell Cox.
Dashcam footage of the 16minute traffic stop begins with the deputy tailing the two-time Super Bowl winner for about a mile without flipping on his emergency lights, then doing so after the two drove into the athlete’s subdivision. Video of the contentious stop shows Roberts, 25, pulling into his driveway and Deputy Adam Watkins using his vehicle to block him in. Roberts then steps out of his black 2018 Porsche with his hands up and
says, “This is my house.”
“Get back in the car right now,” the deputy repeatedly tells him. “Shut the door, put the hands on the steering wheel and roll down the window. Do it now.”
It would be another eight minutes before the deputy would tell Roberts why he was pulled over, according to the dashcam footage provided Thursday night by the player’s lawyer.
On Friday, Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy Nehls said at a news conference that he had spoken with Roberts and his attorney and apologized for the incident. Nehls said Watkins should not have taken so long during the traffic stop and should not have ordered Roberts’ wife back inside their home when she saw the police lights and came outside.
“The way he interacted with his wife, I didn’t appreciate the tone,” Nehls said.
Nehls said the deputy was reprimanded over how he handled the traffic stop, but he defended the deputy’s decision to pull over Roberts, contending that the football star was traveling more than 20 mph over the posted speed limit.
The sheriff also did not find fault with the deputy’s reference to Roberts’ size and race, saying he was merely providing a physical description. Watkins is white.
Roberts was unavailable for further comment Friday, his attorney said, and was expected to attend a youth camp and heart walk Saturday at Port Arthur Memorial High School. In a statement provided to USA Today, he said, “Unfortunately, these types of things are happening all too often to African Americans.”
The incident comes amid a national debate over police shootings of unarmed African American drivers, which helped sparked the Black Lives Matter movement and prompted NFL players such as Colin Kaepernick to kneel in protest during the national anthem.
Four years ago, the Texas Department of Public Safety fired a white trooper for lying about a traffic stop involving a 28-yearold black woman, Sandra Bland, that had escalated into a heated exchange. Bland was arrested, and three days later hanged herself in the Waller County jail. The trooper was charged with misdemeanor perjury, but the charge was dropped after he agreed not to work again in law enforcement.
In 2008, the son of Major League Baseball player Bobby Tolan was shot and wounded by a Bellaire police officer outside his Harris County home. The incident sparked allegations of racial profiling in a since-settled civil suit against the police department.
‘The big black male’
Roberts has enjoyed a “fairytale existence” since entering the league, the Houston Chronicle reported this year, going from being snubbed at the NFL scouting combine a few years ago to securing a spot on one of the NFL’s elite teams. The 5-foot-11inch, 235-pound Roberts made 11 starts at middle linebacker last season and earned a reputation as the hardest hitter on the Patriots’ roster. When New England defeated the Los Angeles Rams to win Super Bowl LIII, Roberts earned his second Super Bowl ring in three seasons, flashing the UH sign for a photographer.
The traffic stop occurred March 10, a little more than a month after that celebration.
The flashing lights and commotion just before 10 p.m. were enough to draw Roberts’ thenfiancée to the couple’s porch as he got back into the car, about two minutes into the video.
Watkins threatened to arrest her if she didn’t go inside.
“Go back in the house for your own safety,” Watkins says in the video.
“For my safety, from my husband?” she quizzes the deputy, before going back inside and turning on the exterior lights. She next steps into the open garage while holding what appeared to be a cellphone to capture the incident unfolding in her driveway. That footage was not immediately available.
Audio from eight minutes into the dashcam footage can then be heard of the deputy requesting backup because Roberts was not being cooperative.
“I haven’t even begun the traffic stop,” the deputy radios in. “The big black male got out of the car. I told him to get back in. He wouldn’t comply. I had to yell at him pretty hard.”
The footage continues with Watkins saying Roberts was now complying but that he wanted the woman detained for refusing to stay inside. About a minute passes before the backup deputies arrive, and Watkins steps to the driver-side door to explain that Roberts was traveling 59 mph in a 35 mph-zone.
The deputy tells Roberts he will be cited for speeding and for failing to provide proof of insurance. The citations were dismissed the next day, authorities said.
Abridged footage
Hovell-Cox, Roberts’ lawyer, contended that the deputy mishandled the traffic stop and treated the athlete in a “demeaning, derogatory manner” for commenting on his size and race. She said Roberts was not aware of the deputy’s remark until after the dashcam video was released to the attorney in June.
“He was taken aback,” HovellCox said.
“He is a professional football player,” Hovell-Cox said. “Typically they are large in stature, but that does not mean they’re going to cause harm. That’s the crux of this issue.”
Nehls complained that an abridged version of the dashcam footage that was first shared online by USA Today was misleading. The two-term Republican sheriff, who on Wednesday announced that he would not be seeking re-election in 2020, said that despite the deputy’s missteps during the traffic stop, race was not a factor.
The sheriff contended that he and Roberts came to that conclusion during a March 20 meeting with the player’s lawyer convened to discuss the traffic stop.
“There have been travesties,” Nehls said. “There have been traffic stops and interactions between white and black that have caused some of the most horrible civil unrest in this country.”
But while the impact of highprofile mistreatment of unarmed black men by law enforcement has been felt nationwide, Nehls said that his jurisdiction has avoided similar episodes.
According to the sheriff, Watkins was unaware that the motorist he had pulled over was a professional athlete and hometown hero from Port Arthur.
Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Capt. Steve Holtz said his deputy was a recent academy graduate who had been on patrol for only three months at the time of the traffic stop. And he was nervous because of the athlete’s initial reaction to step out of the vehicle.
“He said he had never had a person get out immediately upon stopping,” Holtz said. “That got him kind of nervous.”
Holtz reviewed the footage with Watkins earlier this year and gave him a verbal reprimand based on three factors: the length of the traffic stop, his deputy’s contentious back-and-forth with Roberts’ wife and the decision to call for backup.
“Would I have called for backup here? No, I would not have,” Holtz continued, citing his three decades of law enforcement experience. “In about five minutes, I would have left Mr. Roberts there with his citation.”
He also said Watkins should not have yelled at Roberts’ wife when she refused to go back inside the couple’s home.
“I think the wife had a certain right to be out there,” he continued.
Holtz said it was Watkins’ idea to swap the citations for verbal warnings.
“He just thought that it was the better thing to do, to be the better man and say ‘Hey, I could have done better that day,’ ” Holtz recalled.
As of Friday, Watkins remained on patrol duties, he said.
‘No ordinary traffic stop’
Roberts was notified in a phone call hours after the traffic stop that the citations would be dropped, Hovell-Cox said, adding that the official apologized during the call.
The move did not dissuade Roberts from pressing his claim that he was mistreated with the sheriff and then with the county’s new district attorney, Brian Middleton. The DA could not be reached for comment Friday evening.
“This was no ordinary traffic stop,” Hovell-Cox said. “He felt like he was being harassed because he was an African American male in his own driveway. It was totally not necessary.”
Hovell-Cox said that Roberts filed a handwritten missive with the sheriff during their meeting, but that a copy of that complaint had not made its way to the Internal Affairs Division by the time she called to follow up on April 25. An administrative assistant in Internal Affairs wrote in a May 20 email to Chief Deputy David Marcaurele that Roberts’ complaint “never left the Sheriff ’s desk,” according to communications that Hovell-Cox obtained through a public records request.
Marcaurele replied to the email less than a half-hour later, declaring that the complaint was to “be closed as NOT SUSTAINED.”
The same emails show that Watkins was ordered to “go through refresher training on traffic stop procedures.” One training happened on March 27, a day after he was remanded for issuing a wrong traffic citation to a separate driver, and another on June 13, police records show.