The Georgia State Patrol on Monday released a report shedding new light — but also deepening some questions — on a police pursuit that ended with three men dead in a fiery wreck earlier this month.
The report details how city of South Fulton Officer Deonte Walker crashed his cruiser into a work van carrying six men while chasing a stolen Mercedes Benz on Nov. 11. But basic information is still unclear. For instance, Walker told GSP he had his lights and siren on, though the van's driver, Gilmer Gomez-Lopez, said he didn't see or hear the siren.
“(Gomez-Lopez) said he turned left on a green light and saw the police coming down Ga. 138 east,” the report says. “He stated that he assumed they were going to stop, as the light was red for eastbound traffic. He stated that he tried speeding up faster to get turned because he realized that (the officer) wasn’t going to stop.”
It isn’t clear how the chase started, but the report says an off-duty deputy called Fulton County dispatch shortly before the wreck to report seeing four “suspicious” males wearing black rubber gloves pull up to a Waffle House on Flat Shoals Road. The deputy gave the car’s tag number. The dispatcher told him the car was stolen and that the men had stolen a woman’s cell phone at the Raceway on Ga. 138. The report doesn’t say when the phone had been stolen, but another witness told GSP he thought the chase had started at the Raceway.
When the cruiser hit the van, another South Fulton officer, named Corey Blalock, who’d been trying to catch up to the pursuit, saw a ball of fire. As he approached the scene, which was in the city of Union City, Blalock realized that Walker was trapped in the crashed cruiser and helped him out to safety.
The off-duty deputy soon heard about the crash on the radio. He drove up and saw two men running around “on fire,” the report says.
It remains unclear if the pursuit was within the bounds of South Fulton's police pursuit policy. Unlike some metro Atlanta departments, South Fulton's policy allows officers to chase cars simply because they're stolen.
South Fulton Police Chief Keith Meadows told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Monday he’d worked a few weeks before the wreck to revise the policy to better clarify when it would be proper to chase a stolen car. “We want to put in criteria other than a stolen vehicle,” he said.
But the city’s legal department hasn’t completed a review of the policy, so the old one still stands.
Meadows said his department has turned the case of the chase totally over to GSP, which is now investigating the wreck. Meanwhile, South Fulton police have strong leads on what happened to the stolen Mercedes, he said.
GSP said a decision on whether charges will be filed will be made once the investigation is complete.
