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.
The Six Cyclists Injured in the Crash
Chase Ferrell was a couple hours into his own ride when he first saw the group heading in the opposite direction. An Ironman finisher, Ferrell, 38, knew many of the riders in the group through the Houston-area triathlon Club, Valhalla. It didn’t surprise him to spot some of his friends. On the northern side of Waller County, a web of quiet country roads remains mostly untouched by suburbanization. That morning, Ferrell estimated that as many as 80 people from the Houston area started their rides in Hockley, just off the freeway. The City of Waller (population 2,796) sits on the eastern border of Waller County, and serves as a kind of gateway to and from Hockley.
Tension between road users has long been an issue in the City of Waller and Waller County. “The locals, they don’t like it at all. They hate it,” Ferrell says. “I just feel like the local population gets tired of having to deal with riders on some of the smaller tertiary roads.”
But the Waller 6 didn’t sense any animosity when, about 80 miles into their ride, they rolled into the town of Hempstead and past a parade celebrating the start of the weeklong Waller County Fair. The Cowgirl Cavalry led the procession on horseback, holding the lonestar Texas flag aloft. Kids in green T-shirts bearing the 4-H club’s cloverleaf logo waved at the Waller 6 from a slow-rolling flatbed trailer. The cyclists smiled and waved back. From Hempstead, the group would usually take a lower-speed-limit, two-lane road named Old Washington back to where they started. But traffic from the Waller County Fair and parade made that option less appealing. Instead, the group took U.S. Business 290, a four-lane business road that runs through the City of Waller. The group was nearly done with their ride.
Valiente went to the front and held a steady pace into the cool headwind. She’d named her current bike Molly. After a hard ride, she might talk to her, cooing, “We did a good job today.” She had been meticulously training for Ironman Texas the following month. A strong result there would help her achieve her longtime goal—qualifying for the Ironman World Championship in Kona. She felt like she’d done everything right.
Ferrell came across the Waller 6 for the second time when he turned onto U.S. Business 290 about 30 seconds behind the group. Rolling at a similar pace in a small group, he held them in sight, just ahead. As Ferrell approached a small hill outside the City of Waller, he sensed a pickup truck alongside him.
As the front of the F-250 pulled even with his bike, he sat up and moved his hands to the top of his handlebar, trying to get a look at the driver. Initially, Ferrell remembers, “I thought he was going to spit chewing tobacco at me.”
Then, Ferrell watched as the truck accelerated, spewing a mushroom cloud of diesel exhaust from its tailpipe. The noxious smoke, Ferrell says, went “directly into my face.”
A local resident named LaToya Moore driving behind Ferrell and the truck was forced to slow suddenly. The diesel smoke came in through the vents of her car. “I couldn’t see through it,” she says.
A civil suit filed later alleges that the driver had attempted to “roll coal” on Ferrell, which the driver denies. An increasingly popular phenomenon at the time of the incident, coal rolling happens when a driver of a diesel truck floods the engine with more fuel than it can efficiently process, emitting a thick black plume of exhaust across the road. The emissions systems of diesel trucks are strictly regulated under federal law. But some truck owners modify their exhaust systems with illegal aftermarket parts, or fail to fix broken exhaust systems. In the 2010s, rolling coal became a kind of defiant act, an aggressive backlash against the increasing regulation of fossil fuels. People using forms of transportation that don’t burn oil—namely, those riding bikes, walking, or driving an electric vehicle—became targets. Social media apps such as TikTok helped drive the #rollingcoal trend. Videos with captions like “POV: You roll coal on every bicycle you see,” showing the engorged tailpipe of a diesel truck expelling a bubbling smoke, accrued thousands, even millions of views.
As the F-250 accelerated away, Ferrell regained his breath and became filled with rage. He thought, “I’m going to catch this motherfucker.” He knew there was a light not too far away and started sprinting up the small hill in front of him. Ahead, Ferrell could see the truck cresting the rise, and then moving over again into the right lane as it neared the group of six riders containing Galo, Valiente, and Reynolds. A police report filed two days later describes what happened next: The driver of the F-250 “failed to control speed as he accelerated to intentionally blow black diesel smoke in the path of several bicyclists.” The driver would claim he was reaching for his phone to call his dad and “struck the bicyclists before he could react.” Ferrell watched in horror.
“They just went everywhere,” he says.
Claudius Galo had been drifting onto the back of the group when the roar of the truck’s engine overtook him. The front of the truck began to swallow him, and he fought to stay away from the tire’s thick knobs. Time slowed. He felt the heat of the vehicle’s grill against his body. He heard the splintering of carbon-fiber bike parts. He thought of his family—would he ever see them again?
The truck stopped abruptly and Galo flew 20 feet, landing in the oncoming lane of traffic. He lay on the road, confused. “I moved my hands, and then my feet. I thought, ‘I’m alive.’” Galo could see Valiente in the grass on the side of the road, bracing her shoulder. Reynolds lay in the fetal position unable to move his legs; hot red fluid dripped from the dented grill of the truck and pooled around him. Someone took a rifle case from the inside of the vehicle and laid it down on the road to redirect the flow of the fluid past him.
As he regained awareness, Reynolds sensed friends moaning and writhing in pain on the concrete. “I felt helpless,” he says. “I’d had the wind knocked out of me and struggled to breathe.” He heard people arguing, and someone shouted, “This was not an accident!” From beneath the looming front end of the truck, Reynolds saw the pale white face of Brad Stauffer, passing in and out of consciousness. Keith Conrad could stand, barely. He stumbled around, checking on the others. Incredibly, everyone was alive.
A medical helicopter hovered overhead. Valiente had hit her head hard against the pavement. When she came to, she saw the driver of the truck—a teenage boy with short brown hair and a round face. He was wearing the same green shirt as the 4-H kids she had exchanged waves with at the parade. Had she waved to him, too?
Ferrell had rolled up to the crash site just as the boy and a passenger were getting out of the truck. “I didn’t know if he was 15 or 16, whatever. He just looked super young and was crying, and started saying, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t mean to do that. Do you think they’re okay? Do you think they’re dead? Am I going to jail?’” The truck’s passenger, who appeared to be slightly older than the kid, told Ferrell that the vehicle belonged to the driver’s parents (a detail included in the civil suit).
One of the victims, Craig Staples, had suffered a broken collarbone in the crash. Still, he appeared angry enough to fight the driver and passenger. Ferrell stepped between them, diffusing the situation.
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.
The driver’s dad had arrived at the scene with his mom, and Ferrell remembers the two cops standing next to the family, rarely leaving their side. Ferrell and the victims felt like the Waller police were more concerned with protecting the boy than investigating the crash.
LaToya Moore had slammed on her brakes and skidded to a stop. Surveying the carnage in front of her, “bodies bleeding out,” she expected to see a psychopath exiting the truck. To her shock, she recognized a familiar face.
She’d known the boy’s family most of her life. She adored the boy’s great-grandmother, who was Moore’s fifth-grade science teacher. She had ridden the school bus with the boy’s dad. Moore, who was a graduate student at nearby Prairie View A&M, says they’d grown up on “different sides of the tracks.”
Moore says she hugged the boy’s mom, who looked distraught, “Like her son was the one laying on the ground.”
When a female state trooper arrived at the crash site, Ferrell and the victims overheard the Waller police questioning her jurisdiction. Ferrell told the trooper that the police hadn’t asked him for witness statements.
Moore, who’s Black, had been hesitant to talk to the police from Waller. “I don’t have the complexion for protection,” she says. She felt more comfortable talking with the trooper. She explained that her own teenage sons went to school with the driver, and that he is well-connected in Waller County. Multiple people in the boy’s family had held public office in the Waller area. Before leaving, the trooper took a statement from Moore, and also from Ferrell.
The crash caused by the coal-rolling teenager in Waller had made national news. A headline in the Houston Chronicle read, “Teen who ran over 6 cyclists outside Houston walks free,” and noted the Waller police failed to even ticket the driver responsible for the crash. In a 2021 article tagged “WELL-CONNECTED,” the Daily Beast noted that not only was the boy from a politically influential family, he was a star on the state’s competitive livestock-showing circuit. He had dedicated much of his youth to raising and showing lambs, and competed in championships at the State Fair of Texas. Some folks wondered if the boy’s success as a sheep shower afforded him special treatment from the Waller police.
The victims chose a national firm for legal representation, Bike Law, which published graphic images of the aftermath of the crash to Instagram. A post on the Bike Law website noted that the victims’ lawyer, Charlie Thomas, had previously represented cyclists in Waller County and was “well versed in handling the challenges that nepotism can create.” Amidst the media coverage of the crash, the Waller County District Attorney’s office became inundated with angry calls and messages, leading District Attorney Elton Mathis to directly address the situation on the office’s website. Mathis wrote that the crash was initially mishandled, and anyone upset about it should make “those complaints directly” to Waller police chief Bill Llewellyn. Mathis also confirmed that there were connections between the driver and Waller County officials, but added that he had not seen evidence of a city official “directing an officer on the scene.”
In response to Mathis, Chief Llewellyn took to Facebook. “It has been stated that our agency mishandled the initial investigation of the crash scene,” Llewellyn wrote. “That is true.” But he attributed any missteps at the crash site to a lack of knowledge and adequate training, not blatant disregard for the law. He said his officers had called the on-duty crash-site investigator at the D.A.’s office, but “failed to leave a message.” Llewellyn recommended that the district attorney’s investigators should “answer their phone when ‘on call.’” In the same post, Llewellyn also denied that the social status of the teen driver and his family in the community contributed to the apparent leniency of the Waller police at the crash site. “I have never met any of the parties involved in the crash incident,” he wrote.
In Texas, and across the U.S., the odds have long been stacked against prosecutors seeking to convict a driver for negligence after a crash. Up until the 2023 legislative session, vehicular collisions were written into Texas law as “accidents” (implying they’re simply unavoidable mistakes). The recent change in legal terminology was part of a concerted effort by road-safety advocates to hold people driving vehicles accountable for crashing those vehicles into other people—or worse, intentionally using vehicles as weapons. Still, as in Waller, law-enforcement agencies sometimes fail to gather crucial evidence at crash sites that can help prosecutors convict people who recklessly, or maliciously, operate vehicles.
As outrage over the crash in Waller mounted, District Attorney Mathis, a native of Waller County, showed a willingness to prosecute the boy responsible. In a notice on the D.A.’s website, Mathis pointed to a recent conviction his office secured. In 2017, an army veteran named Victor Tome had veered head-on into a group of people riding bikes in Waller County. The crash killed two riders. Tome, who’d been intoxicated on a mixture of drugs, received a life sentence without parole.
Mathis explained on the D.A.’s website that intentionally rolling coal met the legal standard of a physical attack. He wrote: “Rolling coal when a person is in the vicinity and when the individual rolling coal intentionally or knowingly causes that excess exhaust to contact that bystander is AT A MINIMUM an assault. They are causing their vehicle to ‘spit’ on a living, breathing, human being that is worthy of dignity and not having his or her person violated. That simple assault is easily elevated to a jail-eligible offense if bodily injury occurs, which can be caused by entry of toxic particles into mouth, nose and eyes.”
In the days following the crash, the family of the teenage boy hired one of Houston’s most sought-after defense attorneys, Rick DeToto. In his quotes to the media, DeToto used a well-worn—and often effective—excuse in cases involving vehicular violence. He described the driver as “inexperienced.” Any coal rolling that may have occurred was certainly unintentional. Who couldn’t relate?
DeToto knew prosecutors would have difficulty proving the boy intended to roll coal on the cyclists. He could also point to the fact that not everyone who drives a diesel truck capable of rolling coal plans to use the vehicle as a weapon. Some truck owners bypass emission controls on purpose to add horsepower and even increase fuel mileage. Others are simply driving trucks with broken exhaust systems.
Between 2020 and 2023, rolling coal became a core concern of the Federal government. To the Environmental Protection Agency, rolling coal explicitly violates the Clean Air Act, since expelling dark clouds of smoke often requires modifying a diesel engine’s exhaust system to defeat emission controls. In a 2020 report, the EPA estimated that more than 550,000 diesel trucks had been modified to roll coal, or roughly 15 percent of the diesel trucks sold in the past decade. In a nationwide effort to police coal rollers, the EPA and the Department of Justice began aggressively pursuing the people who profited from selling devices that modified trucks to blow big black clouds of diesel exhaust.
One of the highest-profile cases involved the hosts of the Diesel Brothers, a reality TV show based in Salt Lake City and broadcast on the Discovery Channel. In 2020, a group called the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment filed a federal suit against the show’s hosts, David “Heavy D” Sparks and David “Diesel Dave” Kiley. In that case, the plaintiffs purchased a Diesel Brothers modified truck and had the emission system tested. The results showed it emitted 36 times more pollution and 21 times more particulate matter than if it was equipped with an unmodified emissions system. The defendants in the case were fined more than $540,000. The show was later canceled.
In another case, federal investigators found that Matthew Sidney Geouge, the owner of a diesel-truck tuning company called Spartan, had sold more than 14,000 “Phalanx” tuners, which allowed Ford trucks to roll coal. Geouge attempted to evade federal agents for years, but ultimately pled guilty to violating the Clean Air Act and tax evasion. He received a year of jail time and fines totaling $2.5 million.
Though DeToto would likely provide a formidable defense, Mathis had reason to believe his office could successfully bring charges against the teenage boy who’d crashed his truck into the Waller 6. In 2015, Mathis had recruited one of the top vehicular-injury and homicide prosecutors in the country to join his staff, a man named Warren Diepraam.
Diepraam, who’s tall with tattoos ringing his muscular forearms, was born in South Africa and moved to the Houston area as a teenager. In high school, he traveled across Texas skateboarding and attending punk-rock shows—an outsider in a state still defined by its frontier mentality.
Eventually, he found his path, enrolling in the South Texas College of Law Houston and then landing a job as a prosecutor for the city’s Harris County District Attorney’s office. In 1999, a drunk driver overturned an 18-wheeler onto a prominent Houston family of five. Only the mom survived. The case fell to Diepraam, who secured felony convictions of intoxication manslaughter and a 60-year jail sentence for the driver at fault.
The case gave him a sense of purpose. As a prosecutor, Diepraam was often frustrated by the inability of law enforcement to directly curb criminal behavior—so many societal variables affected the rise or fall of crime. But with these vehicular-violence cases, he felt like he could make a meaningful difference. He could make Texas roads safer.
As his career evolved, Diepraam developed processes for prosecuting drunk and reckless drivers. One strategy arose after Harris County prosecutors lost a string of DWI cases at trial due to a lack of hard evidence. People suspected of drunk driving routinely refused Breathalyzer tests because the penalty for doing so (a suspended driver’s license) was far less severe than the potential charges for injuring or killing someone while driving inebriated. Diepraam recalls thinking, “We can use search warrants to get evidence in criminal cases. Why don’t we use search warrants to get blood?”
He worked alongside the Houston Police Department to institute a “No Refusal” policy—a process that allowed law-enforcement officers to request expedited search warrants after a person suspected of drunk driving initially refused a Breathalyzer test. Those warrants allowed police to have suspects physically restrained while their blood was drawn and tested for alcohol and drugs.
The policy outraged many defense attorneys, who argued that No Refusal violated an individual’s right to privacy. But it worked. On New Year’s Eve, he says, “Everybody Ubers because they’re fearful of being arrested.” Police departments across Texas, and then around the country, began instituting No Refusal policies.
While working in Harris County, Diepraam also created “call out” teams that would respond to crash sites where a fatality or serious injury occurred. The teams included a prosecutor from the D.A.’s office and an investigator trained in crash reconstruction. “If I can prove acts of negligence or recklessness, the case gets more severe and it has much more appeal to a jury to make them realize how bad this actually was,” Diepraam says. “It’s very easy to backtrack how a person was driving if you know what happened after the impact. It’s basically Newton’s laws of physics. Investigators can use math and geometry to figure everything out almost exactly. When things are moved, we can’t do that.”
In 2009, Diepraam left Harris County to work as a prosecutor in two other counties in the rapidly expanding municipalities beyond Houston. In these suburbanizing communities with increasing traffic issues, he helped develop vehicular-injury divisions and ultimately saw traffic fatalities drop by as much as 70 percent. However, outside the big city, Diepraam found more resistance to some of the proven procedures he instituted. The City of Waller’s Police Department was one of the most reluctant, he says. “If they had a serious case, they just did whatever they wanted to do, and they wouldn’t tell anybody about it.”
Not every cop resisted Deipraam’s efforts, though. He says some officers would reach out to him when they felt that the local police hadn’t done a good job. And so, in the days after a local teen ran over six people riding bikes on U.S. Business 290, Diepraam says he received one of those messages: Had he heard about the Waller Police Department’s handling of the crash scene? “No,” Diepraam responded. “Do tell.”
As he began investigating the case, Diepraam felt dismayed by Waller’s police work—according to Diepraam, the cops had failed to seize the phones of the teenage driver and his passenger, which may have contained incriminating videos, photos, or text messages. Without much physical evidence to go on, Diepraam hinged the case largely on the testimony of what he described as a “star witness.”
When she saw the truck run into the Waller 6, LaToya Moore had been on the way to a salon where she worked. She planned to use the salon’s internet to complete a paper for her graduate classes in community development. After agreeing to testify, Moore says locals who viewed the cyclists as a nuisance pressured her to side with the people in Waller County. She claimed one person even threatened her: “Better learn to shut your mouth.” Moore thought, Come shut it for me. The cyclists aren’t a nuisance, just go around them. They don’t block the whole road. We’re blessed to live in a beautiful area where people want to come ride their bikes. Plus, they spend money here.
Concerned for Moore’s safety, the District Attorney placed a patrol officer outside her home and at her work. Diepraam soon filed the charges with the D.A.’s office.
As the victims awaited the outcome, they grappled with conflicting emotions. Like many people in the Houston area and well beyond, they were outraged by the crash and wanted justice. But some also felt a measure of sympathy for the young driver and his family—contradictions that were hard to process. “At first, you think it’s completely an accident—how could it not be?” asks Valiente. “Then you find out what happened. And then you’re angry.” At the same time, she thought, “I don’t want to ruin this kid’s life. My kids are the same age.”
On November 10, 2021, the grand jury returned its decision. In a post to its website, Waller County District Attorney Mathis stated the teenage driver had been indicted on six counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. One felony charge for each victim. The teenage boy was booked into a local juvenile detention center.
Another victim, David Reynolds, said the charges felt significant following the Waller police officers’ failure to arrest or even ticket the teenage boy at the crash site. “That accountability should have been there all along.” Like many in Texas, and across the country, he was still skeptical. Charges were one thing, but would the D.A. actually have enough evidence to get a conviction? “Is the public being appeased?” he wondered.
A couple weeks later, dozens of Houston-area cycling advocates, still reeling in the aftermath of the crash, convened with Waller County officials and law-enforcement officers at an event created in response to the crash. Dubbed the Waller Bike Summit, it wasn’t the first time local leaders had met with cycling groups to discuss road safety. A previous bike summit had involved representatives of the MS 150, one of the nation’s biggest charity events, which organizes training rides in Waller County.
But this time, the issue of road safety in Waller County felt even more pressing.
For cyclists looking to log long miles, Waller County offers a beautiful landscape for bike riding. Beyond the muddy banks of the Brazos River, there’s an expansive network of country roads bordered by lush green fields and vine-strewn oaks. But this verdant landscape, 45 miles outside Houston, is increasingly endangered by ever-expanding suburbanization. At the freeway exit for the city of Waller, a half dozen different homebuilder signs advertise: Your land. Our experience. Homes from the 200s.
The so-called “Texas Miracle,” the state’s business-first mentality and decreased building regulation, has kept the American Dream alive and well in the Houston area. With its ample farmland to build upon, and ever-expanding freeways to facilitate car commutes, and relatively cheap housing, home ownership remains attainable for many. Economic opportunity, largely driven by the oil and gas industry, draws people from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds to this swampy metropolis on the Gulf Coast. In 2023, Houston ranked as the fourth-largest city and one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the U.S.
To the residents of Waller County, the groups who arrive to ride bikes every weekend represent more than a minor traffic annoyance, they’re a harbinger of the coming change. One local business owner, a woman who asked to remain anonymous due to the public outrage over the case, explained, “People come out here from the city because they like our rural way of life, our open spaces and peacefulness. But they also try to change the way we do things.” She felt outsiders should assimilate to an evolving Waller County. “Our infrastructure doesn’t support the influx of people, all the bike riders. It was built for people driving a horse and wagon 100 years ago.” Still, she didn’t harbor much sympathy for the teenage boy charged with assault, saying, “If your daddy catches you rolling coal, he needs to whoop your ass.”
For now, Waller’s rural identity remains strong. A whirring rice drier often lends the air a fragrant aroma, and three different diesel-repair shops located off the main strip help keep the residents’ heavy-duty pickups in working order. One of the town’s local landmarks is a beloved gas station chain called Buc-ee’s, where items for sale range from a line of deer feeders to a 7.3-pound bucket of bacon grease.
In the months following the crash, Waller police chief Bill Llewellyn left the department. When someone asked the new chief of police, Michael Lopez, where Llewellyn had gone, Lopez simply answered, “Up north.”
The Bike Summit was organized by Clark Martinson, who owned a shop called Bike Waller at the time. Situated in an old grain silo with corrugated-steel walls, Bike Waller sold restored and vintage bikes, and served as a clubhouse for cyclists who drove from the city to ride in Waller County. Martinson bought the building from a man named Sidney Johnson, who the Houston Chronicle had identified as an FBI informant, helping to expose widespread corruption by government officials in Waller County between 2005 and 2010.
A culture of good ol’ boy politics had plagued the area for generations. In addition to the rolling-coal crash, Diepraam was currently prosecuting the mayor of another town in Waller County for blatant misuse of public funds. The Waller County District Attorney’s office hadn’t been spared, either. In 2021, a longtime investigator was indicted for alleged heroin possession and laundering $200,000 in drug money.
At Martinson’s shop, a dozen or so folks had gathered to ride to the Summit, about five miles away in the town of Prairie View. As the cyclists approached the crash site in a neat two-by-two formation, Martinson waved them toward the side of the road. They stood there in a gravelly pullout, looking across the flat, four-lane road. It wasn’t hard to imagine the smoking tailpipe of the truck and the stunned victims with their mangled bodies and bicycles strewn across the pavement.
The Bike Summit was taking place at the Waller County Community Center on the campus of Prairie View A&M, a historically Black college founded in 1876 on land that was once a plantation. Approaching the Community Center, the group turned onto a parkway renamed after Prairie View A&M alumna Sandra Bland.
In 2015, Bland was pulled over on the road by a white state trooper for allegedly failing to signal. The traffic stop escalated as the trooper ordered Bland out of her car and eventually arrested her on the charge of assaulting an officer. Three days later, Bland died by suicide inside the Waller County jail. During the investigation of the traffic stop, the state trooper was indicted for perjury, but the case was dropped and the trooper agreed never to work in law enforcement again. The absence of accountability following Bland’s death galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement and led to still-unanswered calls for statewide police reform. Diepraam reviewed Bland’s autopsy report. It was one of his first investigations for Waller County as a newly hired assistant district attorney.
It was against this backdrop—decades of political cronyism and corruption, a history of racism and racial tensions, and now a well-connected teenager accused of using his parents’ truck to terrorize and injure people riding bikes—that Waller County Judge Trey Duhan and Sheriff Troy Guidry stood in front of a room of cycling advocates. Duhan had a cold. His face was flushed and voice slightly hoarse as he introduced Guidry, who wore the pressed canvas shirt, jeans, boots, and silver star of a Texas lawman.
The Summit began awkwardly. Guidry, well-meaning but not overly careful with his words, said he didn’t have any problem with the small group rides that frequent Waller County, “Just a little mob rolling around.” Duhan, a polished politician whose role is more administrative than judicial, steered the meeting back on track. Later, Guidry suggested, as a safety measure, that cyclists “Talk to Dodge about making their side mirrors shorter.” He quickly followed, “No, I’m just kidding.”
Guidry said that he went to high school with one of the riders who’d been killed by Tome in 2017, and stated emphatically that aggression toward cyclists in Waller County wouldn’t be tolerated. He urged riders to use sport cameras to provide his department with footage of reckless drivers. “I promise you, they will be prosecuted,” he said. He felt community outreach could help ease tensions and suggested that cycling groups donate to organizations like the Future Farmers of America. “If you come together, buy a kid a pen of rabbits, man, it will go a long way,” he said. In the crowd of Texas bike riders—many of whom own pickup trucks like the one driven in the crash—a number of heads nodded in approval.
Duhan compared Waller County’s efforts to plan for population growth to “drinking from the fire hose.” In 2019, Waller County commissioned a transportation study in which bicycle–motor vehicle conflicts and bicycle safety were cited as primary community concerns. The study’s short-term recommendations included increasing the number of paved shoulders, installing bike lanes, and designing a county-wide bike network.
He envisioned a future Waller County that maintained the area’s rural beauty and effectively accommodated all road users. “We are not really fans of urban sprawl,” he said.
More than a year passed with no news about the crash or charges against the driver. Then, in the winter of 2022, the Waller County District Attorney quietly closed the case without a public announcement. Because the defendant had been handled as a juvenile, the court proceedings and final verdict were sealed. Had the case been dropped? Was there a settlement?
The boy would soon graduate from Waller High School, walking across a stage in front of a large crowd. The victims wondered what level of remorse he felt in the wake of the crash, and whether he might go on to impart some measure of good on the world?
In the civil case, Bike Law claimed that the boy’s parents “knew or should have known that their F-250 was being used by their son to ‘roll coal.’” The suit seeks more than $1,000,000 in damages.
Eventually, the boy’s criminal defense attorney, Rick DeToto, agreed to an interview for this story. DeToto and Diepraam had worked at the Harris County District Attorney’s office in Houston and spoke well of each other. DeToto had previously represented teenagers accused of horrific crimes: a girl charged with stabbing another kid to death in a gang fight, and a boy arrested for killing his own sleeping parents. DeToto found the work incredibly rewarding.
“It sounds corny,” he explained. “But just letting them know, ‘This is difficult, but there’s another side to this. If you do what I tell you and you do the right thing, we’ll get you to the other side.’”
At his office in downtown Houston, DeToto sat behind a broad wooden desk. He wore a dark suit, his beard neatly trimmed. A poster for the original 1932 movie Scarface decorated his office, and a semiautomatic gun with a curved clip leaned against the wall behind him. A crystal decanter of Johnny Walker occupied a side table. He thumbed through a thick stack of paper printouts.
“In my job, people are accused of things, but it’s a snapshot of their life,” DeToto said. “You have to look at everything before and everything after.” He explained that the packet had been prepared for Diepraam. On the top sheet were two pictures of the teenager who’d run over the six cyclists in Waller. In one image, the boy was young, maybe seven years old, wearing a collared shirt and sweater and smiling at the camera. In the other image, he appeared to be about the same age as when he ran into the Waller 6.
“I have probably 150 pages here of excellent report cards, excellent conduct. There’s probably 50 character letters here from people in the community who have nothing but great things to say about him, photographs of him at his livestock shows, and all kind of accomplishments and awards over the years to try to show Warren and the district attorney’s office that he’s a really good kid, and he is an exceptional kid.”
DeToto wouldn’t say how the case had ultimately been decided. But he offered a glimpse of how he might have defended the boy. “I don’t think they ever could prove it was intentional,” DeToto said, getting into the legal semantics of recklessness versus the desire to do harm. “I’m not defending rolling coal on anybody. But that’s probably not going to be a Class A assault where you could go to jail. It’s going to be a Class C. It’s just like a ticket. Is it offensive? Yes. But it’s a different level than intentionally hitting a group of bikers.”
DeToto felt strongly about a child’s ability to redeem themself later in life. He believed that Diepraam looked at the packet of character evidence his law firm provided and realized that the driver was “a good kid from a good family,” and that the Waller County District Attorney’s office decided to “take that into consideration.”
It seemed plausible that, because the boy was handled as a juvenile, even if he’d pled guilty to any charges, he might have gotten off with a probationary sentence that wouldn’t end up on his permanent record.
In the years following the crash, the Waller 6 often met in person and messaged in a group text. For many, their mangled bodies required surgery to repair broken spines and crushed hands that would never work the same way. Some suffered traumatic brain injuries from the force of their heads hitting the pavement. Through their shared trauma, their various successes and setbacks in recovery, they’d become close. They would gather at Locatelli’s, an Italian restaurant with spacious wooden tables, and order large pizzas to share.
Their minds still struggled to make sense of the abuse that their bodies had suffered. Talking helped. One person’s recollection of the crash might help fill the gaps in someone else’s memory. Some of the victims had returned to riding. Others couldn’t.
More than two years after the crash, the sound of a revving engine sends Claudius Galo into a physical and emotional panic. His heart races. His body freezes. The fear makes him nauseous. Reflecting on the case’s absence of resolution, he looks down into his hands, “Without real consequences, I don’t know how this culture will change. In what state are we handing the world to future generations?”
David Reynolds suffers similar panic attacks. “Sometimes I’m fine riding. Other days, I’ll hear a noise and need to get off my bike right then. I can’t control it all the time.” Without riding, he became depressed. He gained 40 pounds. “Moving on can be hard,” he says. “But you don’t want this attack to define your life.”
Tamy Valiente doesn’t ride anymore. She doesn’t talk to her bike. She’s given up on her dream of completing an Ironman in Kona. It’s not that she doesn’t want to ride. She can’t.
“And you know,” she says, “I really loved riding my bike.”
Ian Dille is a freelance writer and producer based in Austin, Texas. He tells stories about bikes, and other things, too.
