AT ABOUT 2:30 on a damp, piercing morning early that same February a 24-year-old taxicab driver named Billy Junior Dolan was cruising southbound on Telephone Road without a fare. He glanced in his rearview mirror and quickly snapped alert. He saw a van pursued by a police car, its red and white lights blazing, closing on him fast. He cut his wheels sharply maneuvering his taxi in front of the fleeing van, thinking he could cut it off. When the van, unintimidated, almost ran into him, Dolan swerved again, this time out of its path. But for several miles he continued to stay beside it at speeds close to 80 miles an hour, hoping he could help block its escape.
Suddenly at Hall Road, not far from Clear Creek, the boundary between Harris and Brazoria counties, the van attempted to turn, stalled, skidded, and spun to a stop. A police cruiser slammed to a halt just short of the van, its headlights illuminating the bronze customized Dodge Deluxe “so I could see everything,” Dolan says. A second police car screeched to a stop behind the first. Almost instantly, Dolan says, a Houston policeman sprang from the first cruiser just as the young, long-haired driver of the van began to emerge from the vehicle with, according to Dolan, both hands in the air “so I could see space between his fingers.” The officer pulled the youth out and he and a second policeman threw him down on the pavement. The first officer, Dolan says, crouched with a knee on the youth’s chest; a few seconds later, Dolan heard “a kind of ‘puff’ sound, a muffled gunshot like when you shoot a watermelon, and I saw the kid twitch – he just killed that kid.”
Quickly, Dolan gunned his motor and sped south down Telephone Road, afraid, he says, of what the policemen might do to him. He told his dispatcher that “it was cold-blooded murder”; later that day he repeated his story for a homicide detective, who took his statement. “The police told me I lied about everything,” Dolan says, “but I know what I saw.”
Randy Webster, the victim, was seventeen years old and had dropped out of high school in Shreveport during his senior year. He had had minor brushes with the law in Shreveport for things like stealing hubcaps, but had recently enlisted in the Navy. He had gone to Houston a few days before his induction.
Webster had stolen a van at Al Stokes Dodge on the Gulf Freeway, driven through a glass-and-aluminum bay door, and led police on a high-speed chase towards downtown, back under the freeway and outbound again, off onto the Reveille exit and through a police roadblock, and onto Telephone Road. According to the Houston Post account, the police version of the event was that officer D. H. Mays approached the van on foot as the driver emerged with a pistol in his hand. Mays fired once. Two other officers witnessed the shooting; one said the victim was in a standing position when the fatal shot was fired. Another press account quoted police as saying that four empty wrappers for the sedative Quaalude were found on Webster’s body.
During the frantic chase, in which the two lead police cars were nearly wrecked, Mays radioed the police dispatcher that he had sighted a rifle inside the van; it was never found and apparently didn’t exist. A witness near the end of the chase says that shots were being fired at the van. Although Houston Police Department policy doesn’t permit officers to shoot at fleeing vehicles, officers privately concede that it happens all the time.
The Webster shooting is another case where the police said the victim had a gun and a witness thought he didn’t. (One witness gave a corroborating account; another a conflicting one.) And once again, there are facts that fail to verify the police account and, in fact, cast heavy doubts on it. Despite the drug wrappers, the toxicology report revealed no drugs or alcohol in Webster’s blood. The autopsy report indicated that the fatal bullet entered the back of his head, and its path was downward. There was also a half-inch elliptical gunshot wound in the palm of his right hand, which is consistent, since only one shot was fired, with Webster raising his hand to his head in self-defense; this was the hand he supposedly pointed the gun at the police with. The gun found at the scene was unloaded. The only other thing known about it was that it had been shipped to Globe Discount Stores in Houston in 1964.
Webster’s father wrote Assistant Houston Police Chief B. K. Johnson that “my beliefs are that the gun and the
packages were planted on my son after his death.” He also requested that the three officers submit to a polygraph test; Johnson refused to ask them to do so. A grand jury heard testimony from the three police officers and from Dolan, then returned a no-bill; they later heard other witnesses but didn’t change their decision.
The two police witnesses who backed up Mays’ account of the Webster shooting had themselves previously been accused of using excessive force less than a month before. On January 15, according to a $100,000 damage suit filed by Robert and Alice Gleason, N. W. Holloway and his partner J. T. Olin were among several other cops who stormed into their Pasadena trailer home at about 5 a.m. The suit charges that Mrs. Gleason was dragged into the freezing cold barefoot and wearing only light pajamas. Her husband, the suit charges, was awakened when his bed was kicked by “a ring of armed men with beards, guns, and big lights,” who later ransacked their home, then forced him to open the office of his used car business, which they also searched.
. . . . . .
http://www.texasmonthly.com/mag/issues/1977-09-01/polic...
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Mr. Webster was killed by the Dallas Po-Po. EOM
