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https://www.dallasnews.com/news/cri...fic-stop-ends-fatal-shooting-police-arlington
Scarfing down a cheeseburger as he steered his SUV, O'Shae Terry looked up and saw the flashing police lights behind him.
An Arlington officer had spotted Terry's expired registration. Terry, 24, pulled over. He had his friend in the car, and drugs and a gun concealed in a backpack in the far rear seat. What began as a routine traffic stop Sept. 1 spiraled after a second officer, Bau Tran, arrived and the police announced they would search the car because they smelled marijuana.
Within 12 minutes of being stopped, Terry was dead.
Tran shot Terry as he tried to drive away with Tran on the running board and his hand in the partly-rolled-up window, a body camera video shows. Tran's attorney said the officer's actions were appropriate and that he jumped on the SUV to save others on the busy road because he believed Terry might have been impaired.
Three experts who reviewed videos of the encounter said Tran's decision to shoot might have been reasonable because he was in danger. But they differed on whether the officer unnecessarily placed himself in peril in the first place.
Terry's family and Arlington's black community, which has grown increasingly distrustful of police there in recent years, remain raw, wondering why the shooting happened. They are skeptical that authorities will do anything to hold the officer — whose name wasn't released until seven weeks later — accountable.
"It appears the outcome has been predetermined despite the officer's highly questionable tactics," said Alisa Simmons, president of the Arlington NAACP.
Terry's grieving mother, Sherley Woods, said she was outraged that Tran has not only avoided punishment so far, but is also collecting a paycheck on desk duty.
"When officers do something wrong and unjust, it's only right that they be prosecuted the same way we'd be prosecuted," Woods said.
What happened
The morning of Sept. 1 started out fairly routine for Terry, a dog lover and former football player at Oscar Dean Wyatt High School in Fort Worth.
He picked up his childhood friend, Terrence Harmon, 24, in Fort Worth to see a truck for sale in Arlington. Terry made money buying, fixing and selling vehicles, Harmon said.
They stopped at a Sonic and bought two No. 3s, bacon double cheeseburgers. Then Terry steered out of the drive-in and came to a traffic light, before a police officer pulled them over in the 2400 block of California Lane, a busy street, at 1:44 p.m.
Officer Julie Herlihy, a five-year veteran, chatted with Terry for nine minutes until her backup, Officer Tran, arrived. Then Herlihy broke the news: She smelled marijuana and she'd have to search the vehicle, the videos show.
Terry acknowledged that he had a "doobie," and that he had smoked pot in the vehicle earlier.
Herlihy returned to her SUV to use her computer. Tran stood by the passenger window.
Tran, who has a wife and child and studied at the University of Memphis, has been on the force for eight years, according to his lawyer and state licensing records. Six weeks earlier, he completed a course on de-escalation mandated by the Texas Legislature to address racial disparities in law enforcement.
Tran tried to keep Terry talking.
"The way I look at it, man, it's still not legal in Texas yet," Tran said of marijuana. "Some other states, they make it legal, but we don't make the law, you know what I'm saying? So as long as y'all be cool with us, cooperate with us, you know, things gonna be cool."
Terry looked forward, arms crossed.
"We just have to do what we have to do," Tran said. "So that's basically it."
Terry looked at Tran, then the window suddenly rolled up. That was Terry's doing, Harmon said.
"Hey, hey, hey, hey!" Tran said as he put his left hand on top of the window pane, while reaching his right hand inside the SUV.
"Hey, stop!" Tran yelled, as he stepped onto the SUV's running board.
"I ain't going nowhere," Terry said, as he turned his key in the ignition. The engine started.
Tran gripped the passenger window pane with his left hand and pointed a gun with his right hand into the vehicle, which began moving. Tran pulled the trigger. Terry was shot four times, an autopsy would show.
Someone screamed.
Harmon yelled, "Stop the car, man!"
The car crossed into the opposite lane of traffic and coasted onto the sidewalk, next to a residential fence.
Hearing the gunshots as she sat inside her patrol vehicle, Herlihy muttered an expletive. The incident unfolded in seconds.
The next day, Arlington police posted photos to Facebook of what they found in a backpack in the far rear row of Terry's SUV: a Glock handgun with a 29-round extended magazine, 1.09 pounds of marijuana and 7 grams of ecstasy pills. Harmon said he didn't know why those items were in his friend's SUV.
'Pretty basic police training'
Law enforcement experts who reviewed the videos for The Dallas Morning Newslargely agreed that Tran was in danger when he pulled the trigger, so it may have been reasonable to use deadly force.
But they differed on whether Tran should have stepped on the running board and put his hand in the car in the moments before the shooting.
"I'm sure in hindsight, he would've done it differently," said Peter Moskos, a former police officer who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "It's a dumb move, but I can see how it's a natural instinct: 'Hey, he's rolling up the window and I don't want him to roll up the window.'"
Seth Stoughton, a former police officer who teaches at the University of South Carolina School of Law, said Tran should've stepped back, watched the SUV drive off, obtained an arrest warrant for the driver and had him arrested later.
Officers already got Terry's name and birth date during the traffic stop. And at that time, he wasn't believed to be a violent felon. A chase could increase the danger to the public.
"Not reaching into vehicles, not putting yourself in a situation where you could be dragged by a vehicle, is pretty basic police training — and common sense," Stoughton said. "This is like walking up to a person who's swinging a knife around and shooting them because they're swinging a knife at you."
Over the years, police trainers have increasingly advocated for letting suspects go and pursuing them after, to avoid a deadly confrontation — especially if the suspected crimes are minor, said William Terrill, a criminology professor at Arizona State University. But, he said, many officers feel conflicted about what society wants.
For instance, Dallas police instituted a policy in recent years that limits chasing nonviolent suspects. The stated goal of the policy is "protection of human life," but officers have complained that the rules have hamstrung their efforts to catch bad guys.
"A lot of officers say, 'Where does it end? Is it OK to drive around with an expired plate and use drugs? If you don't want cops to intervene and take action in those cases, then change the law,'" Terrill said. "The police are in an impossible mandate where the expectations are, in many ways, completely unrealistic."
