In a rural community outside Houston, a violent incident shattered lives. A teenage boy was charged with assault, but was justice served?

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The crash occurred on September 25, 2021, the first crisp day of fall after a hot Texas summer. Claudius Galo intended to ride a hundred miles or more that morning. “There was a chill in the air. It felt so good. The energy was high,” he recalls of the small group that gathered to ride with him.

Galo had moved to the Houston area from Rio de Janeiro, about 14 years prior. A calm and inquisitive engineer who works in the oil and gas industry, Galo had become unhealthy and overweight in his late thirties. He tried running but got hurt, so his doctor recommended adding swimming and cycling. Now 45, he’d lost 60 pounds and completed six Ironmans and almost a dozen half Ironmans. Tamy Valiente, 45, had come to the United States from Costa Rica nine years before. Inspired by the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii, in her twenties, she’d dreamt of becoming a competitive bike rider, but first, “I had to raise my babies,” she says. After going through a divorce, she eventually saved enough money to buy a bike frame and slowly began building her first racing bike part by part. She would often wake at 4 a.m. to train on the narrow roads close to her home back near San José, where buses crept by within inches of her handlebar. To Valiente, the U.S. felt like paradise. “The roads seemed safe. The traffic laws were actually enforced,” she says.

On the day of the crash, David Reynolds, a 45-year-old tattooed photographer with two teenage children, had ridden 11.5 miles to meet the group at Hockley Community Center, about 30 miles west of downtown Houston. Cycling was his “Zen time,” when he could zone out and let all his worries wash through him. Though he wasn’t training for an event, he had ridden for nearly 600 consecutive days. “I just like to ride,” he says. The group that rolled out that morning included three other experienced cyclists: Craig Staples, Brad Stauffer, and Keith Conrad. The six regularly met up to ride through Waller County, an agricultural and ranching community just outside the sprawling metropolis. The group would become known as the Waller 6.

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  • Neato@ttrpg.networkEnglish
    292·
    6 months ago

    Every state needs to have a rigorous and regular car inspection policy. Coal rolling (and all other exhaust modifications) need to be illegal at the federal level, or mandated to be illegal at the state level. They don’t even purport to have an effect on efficiency or performance like some other exhaust modifications. They are objectively worse in every single metric beside looks, which is subjective besides. They are an attack on the environment, other motorists, cyclists, pedestrians, and people who live in the surrounding areas.

    I’ve been behind a shit-stacker in a car and they blinded me when they chugged from a traffic light. I can’t imagine how impossible and awful being around one on a bicycle would be.

    Two Waller police officers arrived at the scene and, after taking some pictures, moved the broken bikes to the side of the road. When the cops told everyone that they could go home, Ferrell was aghast, “I was like, ‘Go home? These people need to go to jail.’” He told the cops he’d been coal rolled by the teenage driver, and it appeared the boy was attempting to coal roll the group of bike riders when he slammed into them.

    Ferrell knew what professional police work looked like. His brother was a cop in Houston for 25 years and his dad worked at the prison unit in Sugarland. “Neither one of these cops were professionals at all,” he says.

    Not to change the subject, but yeeeah that’s about standard for cops. Asking them to do their jobs is too much.

      • Phoenixz@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        Attempted Homicide, not murder

        Simplified, murder is when you extensively plan to kill someone where homicide is a spur of the moment thing. In this case it might even be argued that it’s attempted (?) manslaughter, the accidental killing of people, as homicide would still be on purpose where here it can reasonably be argued that the guy wanted to scare and intimidate them, but not kill them