WALLER CO. DA: INVESTIGATION INTO BIKE CRASH ‘NOT HANDLED APPROPRIATELY’
The Waller County District Attorney’s Office criticized the Waller Police Department’s handling of the investigation into an incident where a teenage driver hit six cyclists in late September.
In a lengthy Facebook post Monday, District Attorney Elton Mathis said, “This case was not handled appropriately by the investigating agency. PERIOD.” He said the agency was encouraged by DPS to treat the scene as a crime scene and to contact the District Attorney’s Office for advice on how to proceed, but investigators “chose not to do so.”
Witnesses from the crash on September 25th on Business 290, two miles west of Waller, said the cyclists were hit after a diesel pickup truck driven by a 16-year-old male accelerated to blow smoke onto them. Several of the cyclists suffered serious injuries. The driver has not been arrested or charged.
Offices that responded to the scene included the Waller Police Department, Waller County Sheriff’s Office and DPS.
In his post, Mathis also addressed rumors of a potential connection between the driver and Waller city officials. He said he could confirm there are “some connections,” but there is not yet evidence of a city official directing police on how to handle the case.
A special prosecutor, Warren Diepraam, was assigned last month to the case.
Mathis said the case will not be swept away, adding, “This will not be a lynching and likewise it will not be a case of small county politics making problems just go away.”
Just keep slapping the kids hands and letting him off it will enable him to keep doing it. Then when he really really screws up big time and ends up really hurting or killing someone the parents and all these officials involved will be the ones saying “Oh he was such a good kid we don’t know why he would do this”.
so lets all drive through waller county on 290 at say 30 mph & block traffic then see who gets a ticket, the slow two wheel group gets free reign, double standards here & don’t spend a dime for roads, registration or have to carry liability ins
The kid was in the wrong not the people on the bicycles get with the program
Yes right, liability insurance for when they’re flung into oncoming traffic by illegally-modified vehicles driven by politically connected children attempting to roll coal. Their mangled bodies might break a hood ornament. It would be terrible, tragic even. While we’re at it, we could build weigh stations for cyclists so that they won’t tear up our lightly-trafficked business routes and create potholes. That would somehow inexplicably make even better sense than what you’re suggesting.
And the driver of the truck is allowed to smoke people out and send some to the hospital?
As it was related, the incident occurred on Business 290, which runs through Waller, not on the bypass that most travel. By a long time Texas law, bicycles are considered vehicles, and have the same rights to be on the road as do automobiles. This also applies to tractors as long as they either have flashing amber lights or the slow moving vehicle red triangle visible and they are as far towards the shoulder as possible. As far as paying for roads, I doubt that a bicycle has much effect on the durability or destruction of paved roadways, unlike automobiles and large trucks, so to tax them would not be viable. Additionally, if bicycles were to have to pay upkeep for the highways and roads, then pedestrians would also, since those who walk on the roads would be causing wear and destruction. Unless you weigh about 700 lbs and are walking on stilts, I don’t think the average person contributes much to the destruction or wear on a road by walking on it. As a person who took driver’s ed almost 40 years ago at Brenham High School, I know that Henry ‘Chuck’ Rost taught us all of the public safety laws that the DPS had in place at that time, and we were certainly tested over that knowledge regularly; my guess is with parents teaching children to drive, nobody is as worried about the laws as they were 40 or more years ago. Just look at how many adults text and drive; do you really think that they could ‘teach’ their children not to do that when the kids witness it for 15 years?
Most (if not all) of the cyclists also own cars. Their auto policy in most cases covers them while riding bikes whether they cause an accident or are hit by an uninsured motorist.
What would happen if you did drive 30mph down old 290? Nothing. It’s not illegal (no minimum speed limits) and if you took up only one of the two lanes going that direction, there would be an open lane to pass.
It’s a who you know or who you are kin to. Pitiful, this young man should be dealt with just as anyone would be. What he did is horrible.