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Michael Ainsworth / DMN
A sheriff's deputy escorts Chante Mallard into the courtroom on the first day of her murder trial at the 371st District Court at the Tarrant County Justice Center.Posted on 06/23/2003 2:51:13 PM PDT by MeekOneGOP
Mallard pleads not guilty to murder
06/23/2003
FORT WORTH, Texas - A former nurse's aide smoked pot, took ecstasy and drank heavily in the hours before she hit a homeless man and drove home while he was lodged in her windshield, prosecutors and defense attorneys told jurors as her murder trial began Monday.
Chante Jawan Mallard, 27, faces life in prison if convicted. She pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, tampering with evidence, before attorneys began their opening statements on the murder charge.
Although she had taken drugs, Mallard could have stopped at a nearby fire or police station or called an ambulance after she hit Gregory Biggs on a highway in the early hours of Oct. 26, 2001, prosecutor Christy Jack said.
Michael Ainsworth / DMN A sheriff's deputy escorts Chante Mallard into the courtroom on the first day of her murder trial at the 371st District Court at the Tarrant County Justice Center. |
"All of a sudden -- bam -- he was just there," Mallard said in a statement to police, which Jack read to jurors.
Mallard did stop briefly to try and get Biggs off her car, but when she couldn't, she drove about a mile to her home, Jack said. Mallard then called one of her friends to pick her up, Jack said.
She and her friend then went to find Mallard's ex-boyfriend to figure out what to do next. When they couldn't find him, they went back to the house, where Mallard took the friend into the garage, Jack said. By that time, Biggs was dead, still lodged and bleeding in the jagged windshield.
The friend told Mallard to call 911, Jack said.
"Chante refused because she didn't want her parents to know what she'd done and didn't want to go to jail," Jack said.
Defense attorney Jeff Kearney said Mallard was in a drug-induced haze and had been hit in the face with flying glass when the car hit Biggs. He said she doesn't dispute what happened, but it was an accident, not murder.
She was just one exit from her home, so she kept driving with "a body entirely in her car, the head in the floorboard, legs going in directions that no one thought humanely possible. You can't imagine," Kearney said.
He said after Mallard pulled into her garage and lowered the door, she sat in the car and cried, repeatedly apologizing to Biggs, who was moaning.
When the friend arrived at the house, Mallard was hysterical and "was blabbing, 'Lord, I'm sorry. What do I do? Lord, I'm sorry. It was an accident. What do it do?"' Kearney said.
Biggs, 37, a former bricklayer who had been living in a homeless shelter, was found dead the next day, his body dumped in a park.
When pictures of Biggs' twisted, bruised and bloody body were shown Monday on a large screen in the courtroom, Mallard looked down, and some jurors grimaced or looked away. Biggs' relatives were not in the room when the photos were displayed.
Mallard's attorney said Clete Jackson, one of two men who pleaded guilty to helping dump Biggs' body, orchestrated moving Biggs to Cobb Park.
Jackson received a 10-year sentence for tampering with evidence. His cousin, Herbert Tyrone Cleveland, received nine years. As part of plea agreements, they were to testify at Mallard's trial.
Police initially said Biggs lived for several days in Mallard's garage, slowly bleeding to death from his multiple fractures and cuts.
But Tarrant County Medical Examiner Nizam Peerwani later said Biggs, whose left leg was nearly amputated, probably lived only a few hours after he was hit. He could have survived if he had received medical attention, Peerwani said.
When Biggs' body was found in the park, authorities had no leads until four months later, when a tipster said Mallard talked about the incident at a party.
The day after interviewing the tipster in February 2002, police went to Mallard's house with a search warrant.
Detective Don Owings told jurors Monday that after serving the search warrant, he saw the car in the garage with the seats missing and the windshield and rear glass broken. Officers have said they found dark stains on the passenger-side floorboard and burned car seats in her back yard.
Owings testified that 14 officers accompanied him to Mallard’s home. She was not ill-treated, he said, and she understood her rights as she was interrogated.
“She was upset. She had cried some,” he said. “But she allowed me to take the statement.”
This was not a capital murder, which usually occurs during the course of another specific felony, or requires multiple victims.
The crime of murder in Texas is the same whether it's a premeditated assassination, or a sudden urge to knock someone's head off.
SOMEONE in a hospital forcibly removed the rings off my paralyzed grandmother's fingers one night. Since she was unable to speak, she wasn't able to do anything about it but cry for several days. I suppose I should be happy she was only robbed while lying there helpless, and not raped...
Later, while she was in a rehab facility, we brought in her favorite neck pillow from home, and someone stole that too.
You bet your ass any hospital employee caught stealing on the outside should be fired! They're not fit for the job.
In an affidavit, Maranda Daniel told police that she had been out with Ms. Mallard and several other women in mid-February when Ms. Mallard "giggled" as she explained how she had hit a man with her car.
Ms. Daniel also told police that Ms. Mallard "was messed up" on the drug "ecstasy" when she hit the man. The affidavit also quoted Ms. Daniel as saying Ms. Mallard told her that after she parked her car in her garage, she went inside her house and had sex with a boyfriend, leaving the injured man entangled in her windshield.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/642574/posts
I don't believe that was *her* statement. If I recall correctly, that tidbit came from the girlfriend who turned Chante in after she shot her mouth off at a party.
So the sex may have been an "embellishment" on the part of one or the other. The boyfriend will testify, though, and I am SURE that question will come up...
Talkin' so loud, I can't hear a word you say. This isn't some hapless, misguided young lady. This is a thoroughly depraved creature, devoid of conscience. She'd fit right in at one of Attila the Hun's encampments but not in a society I have to live in.
I've been thinking about that. What are the odds that she could drive 7 miles by a hospital, police station, firehouse and thru her neighborhood without one person passing and seeing him?
You are right. They left the part out about her snickering at the party about I killed this white guy . . .
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