Originally published at: Coal-rolling Texas teen who injured 6 cyclists finally charged with 6 felonies | Boing Boing
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About damned time.
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If the cops knew the kid was the Mayor’s son (for example) they likely wouldn’t need to be told by city officials that booking him on felony charges might be bad for their careers.
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The officers on the scene might not know that the perpetrator is related to local officials, but dispatch or the shift commander or sergeants almost certainly would. Queue perfunctory wrist slapping.
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This kinda thing just happened in the JT National Park, that’s a federal offense that will bring some time breaking big rocks into little rocks for a few years. Probably not as funny as he thought is was when the handcuffs went on his wrists. F’ing dick.
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They would if he told them.
Probably pretty wealthy too; no working-class teen would have the disposable income to buy a big late-model truck and modify it to blast black smoke just for the lulz.
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Wow, this is where Texas is at, huh? Being so “liberal” you’d dare use a bicycle rather than drive a behemoth gas-guzzler is punishable by attempted murder, which the law then ignores?
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I dunno. Patrolmen are dumb and authoritarian. Playing the “Do you know who my (let’s say) dad is?” card can backfire unless one of the slightly smarter jackboots is in the loop.
I am not trying to imply that the perp is not a spoiled, privileged PoS, just saying that the first cops on the scene might not have been bright enough to know about the family ties.
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Ehhh… I don’t know about that. I went to high school in a very rural agricultural area. There were more than a few Powerstroke 250’s in the school parking lot.
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"There has been some online and community speculation that the incident was handled in the manner it was because of connections between the motorist and Waller city officials.
Wait, are they implying that there’s some good ol’ boy corruption in a Texas town that led to the authorities treating him with kid gloves? Next you’ll be telling me that the perpetrator is a white male.
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The cops say they called but no one answered and that counts as having contacted the DA’s office. Everyone else seems to think “informing” someone requires that the other person is actually informed
These were local cops in Waller (population 2500). Of course they would know the local “city official” in question
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I really hope this kid gets serious time. I’m generally not a fan of harsh sentences for minors, but nearly killing six people just for shits and giggles…this is not the kind of person I want on the streets. He should never be able to operate a motor vehicle bigger than an e-bike.
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“When police arrived at the scene of the collision, they spoke to the teen but didn’t ticket him or arrest him.”
This seems to be a theme with Texas “Law Enforcement”.
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FFS! What a total shit-stain this kid is. I hope that he wakes the fuck up, and stops being a sphincter.
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He didn’t mean to run them over, he meant to poison them. It was all just a misunderstanding.
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Wait … But… Doesn’t that imply their families were rich enough to buy them?
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Anecdote is not data, but teenage me was actually in the car when a city manager’s kid got pulled over for speeding in the small town where daddy worked. The officer who made the stop had absolutely no idea until dispatch clued him in. The city manager was literally the police chief’s boss (i.e. the cop’s boss’s boss), had a really uncommon last name, and this dipstick still didn’t notice. Cops can be both dumb as rocks and corrupt as fuck.
/end digression on stupidity of average LEO with my apologies
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Or the nice salesman at the dealership really does finance anyone who is willing to sign the sum of their future earnings away.
Every time I stay at a motel where most of the residents seem to be long term tenants, they all drive big trucks worth way more than my car. The rural truck to poverty pipeline.
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Be that as it may, what you’d want to say if the street cops had no idea who the kid was is something like “We have yet to see any evidence that these connections influenced how the officer on the scene chose to handle the incident.”
Saying there’s no evidence of a “city official directing the officer on the scene” is really specific wording that leaves open the possibility that:
- The cops DID know who he was and treated him accordingly
- A city official directed the dispatcher, who directed the officer on the scene
- A city official informed the officer on scene that the suspect was their child, and that he was a good boy with a bright future, but didn’t specifically direct them to take any action.
And so on. To me, the specificity suggests that they want to issue a blanket denial but not get caught in a lie, so they said something that’s literally true without actually saying “his family had nothing to do with how he was treated.”
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I had never heard of “rolling coal”. That the field reporter used the term without describing what it is suggests a disturbing commonness.
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