He was tired after working overnight and wanted to get home, so much so that he was speeding. When he saw the blue police lights behind him, Victor Harris didn’t stop. The 19-year-old panicked because his license was suspended.
“I was desperate to get away,” Harris later said. “I didn’t want to go to jail, and I was scared.”
It was before sunrise on March 20, 2001, a misty morning, and the roads were damp. With numerous police cars trailing him, Harris hit 130 mph as he fled in a Cadillac, ignoring stop signs and traffic lights with seemingly little regard for others. A deputy finally crashed into Harris’s car and ran him off the road. When the deputy reached the wreckage, he thought Harris was dead. He survived, but was left paralyzed. Harris paid a very high price for running from the law, but at least no innocent bystanders were caught in the chase.
In the past week, high-speed police chases have killed five innocent people in metro Atlanta. The chases and the potential consequences aren’t new, but the latest incidents have renewed the debate on police pursuits. Many law enforcement agencies have detailed policies on pursuing suspects, but such chases are a gamble every time they occur.
“Most people are in favor of police pursuits and getting the bad guy,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina who has studied police chases for more than 25 years. “A lot of police officers are trained to catch the bad guy. But the question is, at what cost?”
Sunday morning, Dorothy Smith Wright was driving to church with her two grandchildren when she was struck by an SUV being pursued by College Park police for more than 10 miles. Wright and her 12-year-old grandson were found dead in the wreckage, and hours later, her 6-year-old granddaughter was also found dead. The child had been ejected from the car, and authorities did not know her body was there, concealed by bushes, until family members began asking about her.
College Park police have said the SUV, a Chevrolet Suburban, had been stolen from a hotel near the Atlanta airport. But other details, such as whether the SUV was stolen during an act of violence, were not released.
At a downtown Atlanta law office Tuesday, Wright’s family asked for answers. Joi Partridge lost her 75-year-old mother and two children in the crash.
“Why did this have to happen?” Partridge said. “It’s just a big ‘why?’ My mom, my kids, up Sunday morning going to church.”
The alleged crime that sparks the case is key, a longtime Atlanta attorney and former prosecutor said.
“A forcible, violent felon needs to be chased. They’re dangerous,” Richard Hendrix said. “The public wants those people apprehended because they’re a danger to us all.”
But other lesser crimes, for example speeding or shoplifting, don’t warrant a pursuit that could put others at risk, experts said.
“Yes, we want you to capture them. But do it a safer way,” Hendrix said. “We don’t want the innocent to be killed in the process.”
The Fulton County District Attorney’s office is investigating whether College Park officers followed the department’s 17-page guidelines for chases in Sunday’s incident. Meanwhile, a separate chase that killed two bystanders last week is under review in Johns Creek.
On Thursday, Elzbieta Gurtler-Krawczynska and her husband, Krzysztof Krawczynski, both died when they were hit by a driver who was fleeing Johns Creek police. That driver, Larry Edward Thomas, 47, and his 18-year-old son, Jesse Cole Thomas, survived the crash, according to police. Both were arrested and charged with a long list of crimes, including vehicular homicide, DUI, drug trafficking and fleeing, and were being held without bond late Tuesday in the Gwinnett County jail.
The Norcross couple's deaths came one day after an Acworth man led a Georgia state trooper on a 10-mile chase southbound on I-75 in Cobb County. The chase ended when Israel Vladimir Rodriguez, who hit speeds of 98 mph, crashed into the back of another vehicle and then exchanged shots with three troopers. Rodriguez, shot multiple times, later died.
It’s still not known what led him to flee or whether investigators found anything illegal in his truck. But people who flee from officers may have many reasons for doing so: perhaps they are violent criminals trying to escape prosecution, or perhaps they did something minor, like not paying a speeding fine, Alpert and Hendrix said.
“When someone runs, there’s a myth that the person has a dead body in the truck,” Hendrix said. “That’s just a myth.”
In the case of Harris, the panicked teenager being pursued in Coweta County, it was lack of proper license that sparked the chase that would change his life forever. Harris later sued and his case advanced to the U.S. Supreme Court. But in 2007, the high court sided with former Coweta deputy Timothy Scott.
Although lower courts ruled the lawsuit could proceed, the Supreme Court gave police protection from lawsuits resulting from such high-speed chases. The justices, who relied on the deputy’s dash camera footage of the chase, ruled that by fleeing at a high rate of speed, Harris posed an imminent threat to the lives of others, including other officers involved in the chase. The case is still cited in discussions among law enforcement agencies.
Partridge said it's still too early to consider whether her family has a legal case until more questions are answered. But the person who caused the chase has not yet been caught, and she had a message for him on Tuesday.
“I just want them to know that they wiped my whole bloodline from me,” Partridge said. “They wiped my mom, and my only two kids. I can’t see them graduate, I can’t see them be married, I can’t see them have kids, I can’t be a grandmother. And it’s just overwhelming.
“I mean, I have nothing. Nothing else. It’s just a lot of lonely nights and a lot of lonely mornings.”
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