Given that, the Lykos administration has decided that it would be wiser in many cases not to file any charges until the investigations are complete. Evans says that while under some "exceptional circumstances" drivers in negligent homicide cases would be charged on the scene, in most cases, the DA's office intends henceforth to wait for the investigation to be complete.
Evans says she wants to put together a committee of prosecutors with technical knowledge of crashes — "the people from the VAT teams who have made the [accident] call-outs" — along with senior prosecutors, "people who have seen these types of cases and other types of cases and understand the trial issues involved in them."
Courtesy of Sharon Smith
Steve Morrison was killed instantly when Rosa Villegas-Vatres's Nissan Frontier ran a red light and plowed into his Saturn at the corner of Westpark and Hillcroft.
Chris Curry
Sharon Smith, Steve Morrison's sister, said that a Houston policeman told her it was unlikely that the driver of the car that killed her brother would even get a traffic ticket.
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In most cases, no arrest would be made until this committee had examined each incident from every legal and forensic angle. "There is so much gray area involved with [potential negligent homicide cases], frankly I don't think that there is anything wrong with going back to what [we] used to do, which is to get a bunch of people together and say, 'What do you think?'"
After all, she says, "You can have perfectly sane, perfectly rational people see these types of cases from very different perspectives, so I think a decision informed by folks of different perspectives is a smart idea."
Under this new system, it could very well have happened that Villegas-Vatres would never have been charged with anything other than traffic tickets. "The review group made a determination that it wasn't appropriate to move forward with a charge of criminally negligent homicide," says Evans. "Given that, then no, we wouldn't have charged her out at the scene. That doesn't necessarily mean that a mistake was made in this case on the front end, because you make a decision with the best information that you have available."
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In January of 2008, 75-year-old La Porte man Nate Garrison was killed when he was hit by a car driven by Sima Bhakta, who ran a red light. Annette Vogel, Garrison's daughter, believes that Bhakta may also have been distracted by her cell phone, which showed that a call had come in one minute before the wreck. Bhakta was initially charged with criminally negligent homicide, but the case was dropped in the same review that disposed of the Morrison case.
Channel 2 did a report on the case, which aired at the same time Frank Morrison was trying to get some answers from the Harris County DA's office. In the report, Garrison's daughter complained of brusque treatment from Assistant DA Joni Vollman. "When I questioned her," Vogel told Channel 2's Robert Arnold, "she was very abrupt with me, said, 'This case does not rise to the level of a crime. We're dismissing it and I'm not going to argue the facts with you.'"
Meanwhile, towards the end of October or the beginning of November, after Mayr had told him that his bosses had ordered the Morrison case dropped, Morrison still had questions. Mayr had directed those inquiries up the chain of command.
"So I called up there and I wanted to go right to the top," Morrison remembers. He asked to speak to District Attorney Patricia Lykos. He was directed instead to Vollman, so he left her his name and number. He says he let a week or ten days go by with no word from Vollman. He remembers trying again on November 10. No luck. He tried again about a week later, and still had no luck.
Then his sister sent him a link to the December 2 Channel 2 report, and both the startling similarity of the facts of Garrison's death and Vollman's demeanor enraged him. He interpreted Vollman's words — "this case does not rise to the level of a crime" as meaning "We don't care that your dad is dead.'" And then, he says, she had the gall not to return his phone calls. Morrison fired off a letter to the Houston Chronicle, asking Vollman why she had not returned any of his three phone calls regarding his dead brother. The Chronicle didn't print the letter, nor did it respond in any other way.
Morrison's next move finally bore fruit. One afternoon, he simultaneously faxed the letter he wrote to the Chronicle to Vollman and both of her higher-ups in the DA's office — Jim Leitner and Lykos. "Lo and behold, the next morning I got a very apologetic call from Joni Vollman," he says. "She said she'd been out a lot. I said for five or six weeks?"
Vollman laid out the state's lack of a case again. She told Morrison that had Villegas-Vatres been weaving in and out of traffic or been drunk or drugged, that would have been one thing. But she hadn't, so now their best course was to try to see to it that Villegas-Vatres was ticketed for running the red light, driving without a license and driving without insurance.
Vollman told Morrison that the two of them could work together to find R.D. Davidson, the HPD officer who had worked the accident. But even that cold comfort has not been forthcoming: Morrison and Smith have each tried to track him down, and they both said that every number they have called has drawn responses like "I don't know who that is" and "We don't have anybody here by that name."
