Parents of teen killed in car chase file suit against NOPD
23rd March 2020 · 0 Comments
By Meghan Holmes
Contributing Writer
Parents of a 16-year-old boy killed during a high-speed chase with the New Orleans Police Department have filed suit against the department and the city of New Orleans, alleging that the city failed to properly oversee its officers, who engaged in an illegal vehicle pursuit that violated a 2012 federal consent decree with the Department of Justice.
The incident occurred on March 21, 2019, when two boys, Byron Wilson Jr, and another aged 14, were driving on Toledano Street in the Broadmoor neighborhood. According to the complaint filed on behalf of Wilson’s parents, Byron Wilson Sr. and Latoya Carney, defendants Alex Mikkelsen, Jonathan Broom, Jeffrey Harrington and Alex Florian – all officers of the NOPD driving two marked squad cars – began to follow the two boys, believing them to be driving a stolen vehicle.
The officers activated their lights and signaled for the boys to pull over. They didn’t, and instead accelerated. The officers then initiated pursuit, with Mikkelsen, Broom, Harrington, and Florian’s two vehicles nearing 80-miles-per-hour on a street marked with a 35-mile-per-hour limit. Two other officers, defendants William Hery and Colby Stewart followed in pursuit in a third marked squad car, driving in excess of 50 mph.
All of the officers disabled their in-car cameras when the pursuit began, and all but Officer Broom disabled their body cameras, with Officer Broom disabling his camera shortly after turning it on, according to the complaint. “The officers turning off their cameras illustrates they knew they were doing something wrong,” said Dave Lanser, an attorney for the plaintiffs.
The officer’s high-speed pursuit ended at Unity 1 Beauty Supply and Hair Salon at the corner of Washington Avenue and South White Street, when the two teenagers crashed into the building, their vehicle almost immediately engulfed in flames. A three-alarm fire began to spread throughout the beauty shop, and eight people with serious injuries were pulled from the building. One salon patron, 54-year-old Schwann Hebert, succumbed to her injuries and died at the hospital.
After the incident, Sergeant David Barnes with the NOPD’s Public Integrity Bureau Force Investigation Team investigated the high-speed chase and found that the officer’s violated the department’s vehicle pursuit policy. Ultimately, the department fired the four officers in the first two police vehicles involved in the chase, and suspended the other two in the third police vehicle.
When the NOPD announced their findings in the investigation, they revealed that the officers had been involved in three separate pursuits prior to the March 19 crash, and had not been disciplined or received any training. A random sample reported to The Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate showed NOPD officers engaged in 22 vehicle pursuits between January 1 and September 15, 2017, despite policy against it having been in place since 2015.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that police vehicle pursuits resulted in more than 6,000 fatal crashes and more than 7,000 deaths from 1996 to 2015, and that nearly a third of those victims were bystanders or occupants of vehicles not involved in the pursuit. Crashes resulting from chases are common in the New Orleans area, with The Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate reporting that 43 percent of high speed chases initiated by the Louisiana State Police ended with a vehicle accident.
Because of these statistics, NOPD initiated a policy in 2015 only allowing officers to engage in vehicle pursuits when they have a reasonable suspicion a crime of violence has been committed. Officers must also gain supervisory approval before initiating a pursuit. On the night of the Broadmoor crash, officers did not gain approval before they began chasing the teenagers, and they admitted they did not suspect them of a violent crime.
“Three people died because of officers’ tunnel vision to pursue a property offense,” said Allyson Billeaud, an attorney for the plaintiffs. “What will it take for public safety concerns to be enforced on the front end, instead of after a tragedy? Only two months before this incident, the NOPD and the City of New Orleans were also put on notice that NOPD’s supervision practices regarding body-worn camera and in-car camera evaluations were still failing to meet the standards set forth by the federal consent decree.”
Byron Wilson, the 16 year old killed in the crash, wanted to become a detective. In the complaint, his mother describes him as a “sweet, quiet, boy” who enjoyed spending time with his three siblings and his girlfriend in Palmetto. He graduated from William Fischer Charter School in 2017 where he played basketball and was a drummer in the marching band. He was a student at New Orleans Military & Maritime Academy (NOMMA) at the time of his death and intended to go to college following graduation, spending his summers working through the city’s JOB1 program, which he intended to continue in the summer of 2019 had he survived.
“The decision to pursue this car was done with total disregard for the life or safety of the public and needlessly resulted in three deaths,” Lanser said. “It is inexcusable that the NOPD did not take actions sooner that could have prevented this tragedy.”
A spokeswoman from the mayor’s office said that the city cannot comment on pending litigation.
This article originally published in the March 23, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
