No Surprise Here, Police and Media Find Bicyclist at Fault
The basic story ran in many outlets across Texas, as a story about an unfortunate accident where a police car struck a bicyclist at an intersection, killing them.
HOUSTON- Houston police say a bicyclist has been killed after being struck by a patrol car. Police say the accident happened before dawn Thursday in southeast Houston.
Police spokesman Kese (KEES) Smith says the officer, identified only as R. Scott, was westbound when his patrol car hit the man riding a bicycle. Smith says the officer had a green light at the intersection and tried to avoid the bicyclist, but struck the man.
The cyclist was dead at the scene. His name wasn't immediately released. Scott suffered minor injuries. The patrol car crashed across a sidewalk and into a fence. Police are trying to determine whether Scott was responding to a call at the time of the accident. Smith says the patrol car's siren and emergency lights were not on.
Kudos to KPRC 2 News who did some extra digging than the rest, and got surveillance camera footage from a corner gas station
Officers said the bicyclist ran the red light and pulled in front of the patrol car, which was westbound on Reed Road.
Police said Officer R. Scott, a three-year veteran on the force, was behind the wheel and attempted to swerve, but ended up hitting the bike. A witness behind the squad car said the officer had the green light.
Scott immediately called for EMS crews, but the rider died at the scene.
ANALYSIS: Late last year, Houston's Police Chief had issued dismissive statements regarding distracted driving by HPD after some issues about accidents came up following a high profile accident nearby where a motorcyclist hit by a distracted police driver was caught on dash cam.
"Viewing information over a computer screen, to me is no different than the slight distraction that one may have as checking your speedometer, checking your navigation system, it's the same." (see story and video here). Meanwhile, other states were introducing computers to their police cars that cut off the video when the car was travelling over 25 mph.
While it's not clear that the officer was distracted here, it appears from the camera footage that he was driving at a high rate of speed through the intersection, hit the bicyclist, then careened right off the road into the street lamp and fence.
Now, it's likely that there will be no dash cam footage since the car's lights and sirens were off, but there should be crash data recoverable from the airbag system that will determine the car's speed seconds before it crashed (into the lamppost) which will tell us whether the officer was speeding. If the officer was speeding, he would obviously have shared at least some of the fault for the accident, as a matter of law.
Another provocative question would be to figure out why he veered right, either just before or after the accident. One would have to believe he saw the bicyclist and tried to avoid it, but then one must believe the bicyclist was heading north, and almost all the way through the intersection, for otherwise the police would have been swerving into the cyclist.
Depending on the speed of the officer, the bicyclist may have thus obeyed the right of way when he crossed the road, but it takes a lot longer to cross a highway when you're starting from a stop on a bicycle. This reason alone may absolve the bicyclist of guilt if this accident scene was being investigated by his family, and not the police officer's family.
Unfortunately, as we have seen locally with the death of pedestrian Darius Vanbrook when a local corrections officer drove into him while speeding, and while Vanbrook was walking legally in the roadway, the investigating agency will be more interested in covering their officer's backside rather than getting the truth out for the deceased. Will they investigate whether speed was a factor, will they look at the officer's activity on his computer, will they do sobriety tests on the officer?
Probably not, and if they do, they likely won't publicly admit to any problems. Obviously, the policeman's a hero and the bicyclist was solely at fault in the minds of the cops and the media.
It would be interesting to know the speed limit in that intersection too. It appears to me from the video, that if it's indeed about 25-30, that cop was speeding around 40-45mph. That alone could have caused this disaster, with reaction time nullified by both parties. Sad case. Keep us posted, and hope the usual explanations and excuses don't pan out for a change.
I finally found an article concerning this incident that wasn't copied and pasted from the initial police summary, which names the victim and suggests that police cars speeding through that area has been a major problem. I copy and paste it here:
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 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 through the intersection of MLK and Reed, because of what they say 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 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 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 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."
Looking at the reality
"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."
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 he said, was not very different from other people killed on bikes.
"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.
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," his sister said. "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.
Some say police speed
"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.
Chronicle reporter John Harden contributed to this article.
