State troopers pursued a stolen utility truck the wrong way on a Tulsa highway until the eluder rounded a curve in the glare of sunrise, barreling into and instantly killing an oncoming innocent person driving to work.
In another case, Oklahoma City police chased a stolen truck they were tracking via GPS signal until the eluder T-boned a vehicle in which a pregnant mother was traveling. The mother and her unborn child were killed.
She had just dropped off her two other young children at school.
Those two deadly pursuits that devastated families weren’t outliers among the two agencies that lead Oklahoma in the number of vehicle-pursuit deaths in the seven years examined by a Tulsa World and Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism Team investigation.
Throughout these stories, leading contemporary policing experts characterize the vast majority of these chases as unnecessary or not worth the risk.
Oklahoma Highway Patrol pursuits killed 20 people, including at least 10 individuals who weren’t the eluding drivers, from 2016 to 2022. Five of those killed were innocent motorists.
Oklahoma City Police Department pursuits killed 14 people. Six of those people weren’t the eluding drivers. Four were innocent motorists, and one was an unborn child, records reviewed in the investigation show.
The two large agencies headquartered in the capital city have reacted in opposite ways that might spur to action some lawmakers at the Capitol who have studied or regularly discussed pursuit issues.
In June 2022, Oklahoma City Police announced additional and tighter policy restrictions on vehicle pursuits. Meanwhile, the Highway Patrol went the other direction, removing all policy language in March 2024 that governed troopers who engage in chases.
Oklahoma City Police policy encourages officers to try to avoid vehicle chases because of the “extreme danger” they create, reminding officers that “their basic responsibility is to protect the public.”
But the Highway Patrol erased policy language that had required troopers to “promote the safety of all persons” during chases.
Pittman
“It puts a bad taste in my mouth that we are not acknowledging that this is a thing at the highest level,” said Rep. Ajay Pittman, D-Oklahoma City.
Pittman believes the Legislature should look at creating minimum standards to govern vehicle pursuits after the World and Lee presented her with the contrasting responses from the Highway Patrol and Oklahoma City Police.
Pittman said she sees no good that can come from the Highway Patrol removing so much pursuit policy — “not a good look” — and is discouraged by the agency’s failure to lead by example. She is encouraged by the Oklahoma City Police Department’s evolution.
Pittman hosted a hearing to study high-speed chases three years ago while on the Appropriations and Budget Public Safety Subcommittee.
It was personal.
One of her friends had suffered injuries when struck by an eluding driver’s vehicle in a police pursuit. And the aforementioned pregnant woman who was killed — Star Shells — had been a classmate of hers. Both were Oklahoma City Police chases.
Pursuits have caught the attention of some other lawmakers, too.
Stan May
There have been discussions among members of the Oklahoma House Public Safety and Judiciary committees about addressing chases in the state, according to Rep. Stan May, R-Broken Arrow.
May said he supports accountability through supervisory oversight and stringent guidelines that still respect discretion in chases.
“How far the Legislature has to get involved — that's going to kind of come down to how much (law enforcement agencies) are willing to do on their own, just like anything else,” May said. “We don't create laws just because we want to create laws. We do it because people refuse to do what's right.”
The World and Lee investigation found the vast majority of the 68 fatal chases that killed 79 people from 2016 to 2022 were prompted by traffic infractions or property crimes.
About one in four deaths were innocent motorists, and about two in five deaths were people who weren’t the fleeing drivers.
The state secretary of public safety, Tricia Everest, didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article. Nor did Tim Tipton, commissioner of the Department of Public Safety, who also oversees the Highway Patrol.
Angelo Brown
Angelo Brown, an Arkansas State University criminology researcher and professor, said the pursuit problem is a unique situation in the U.S. that should be addressed in two key ways.
One is restricting high-speed pursuits to rare cases in which there has been a violent crime and the suspect is an imminent threat to the public. The other is bolstering chase training.
For example, Brown said, police in the United Kingdom dedicate 15 weeks to pursuit-related training. He said many academies in the United States schedule less than a week for it, and some have entire academies that last only 15 weeks.
“If they do this deadly tactic, there should be a lot, a lot of training to it,” Brown said. “And I just don't see that when I look at the curriculum at the academies.”
‘Too broken to breathe’
The World and Lee found that the Oklahoma Highway Patrol had the most fatal chases in the state — 16 that were identified — in the seven years examined.
The Oklahoma City Police Department was second with 12 deadly pursuits.
The next closest agencies had two fatal pursuits each: Tulsa Police Department, Lawton Police Department, Sperry Police Department and the Custer County Sheriff’s Office. Another 33 agencies lead or shared lead roles in one deadly chase apiece.
“So those numbers are alarming for someone who literally had to hear the gut-wrenching story of a wife detail how her husband was decapitated in a high-speed police chase — and he was not the perpetrator, right?” Pittman said. “That is gut-wrenching to hear, and we've had other families in our state experience situations like that.”
Melissa Bruckman’s husband, William Bruckman, was killed during a pursuit on U.S. 75 when he was hit head-on by a stolen ONG truck that was pursued by several law enforcement agencies including the Oklahoma Highway Patrol.
Pittman’s comment referred to Melissa Bruckman’s tearful testimony before the House Public Safety Committee during the interim study on high-speed chases in 2021.
Jerry Lee Newman crumpled her husband’s sedan on U.S. 75 in Tulsa after a half-hour high-speed police chase in the utility truck that Newman had stolen that morning. William Bruckman, 23, was killed instantly while on his way to work.
An apparent Highway Patrol supervisor radioed troopers to “make sure” not to follow the eluder the wrong way in highway traffic. But they had already done so for nearly two minutes while passing about 30 oncoming vehicles.
Moments after the warning, the horrific crash happened. No troopers were disciplined.
Melissa Bruckman recalled how the coroner placed her husband’s body in a turtleneck to cover wounds when she went to identify his remains.
She described the wonderful whirlwind when they first began dating after years of friendship. A few weeks later, they moved in together and became the “stupid, ideal, perfect Berry Hill family” with her two children.
Lilly, the daughter they later had together, was 18 months old when William died.
“How do you explain to somebody that half of your life was ripped away? That your soulmate was ripped away? That a piece of you was gone?” Bruckman told the House committee. “And now not only did you have to be the mother you were already being, but now you needed to be the father too.
“You’re too broken to breathe. You’re too broken to work. You’re too broken to move. But you have three children, so you have to.”
Pittman, who is entering her third term representing House District 99 in Oklahoma City, said she is fond of state troopers.
She grew up among troopers in the Capitol, with her mother being an elected official. And troopers helped Pittman on the roadside when she was out of gas.
But the Highway Patrol’s erasure of its pursuit policy creates a lack of accountability and is a disservice to families who have been or will be harmed by chases, she said.
“I love them. I respect them. But I also have to say right is right and wrong is wrong,” Pittman said. “And as someone who's worked on this issue and would love their partnership in it, I think this is not right.”
Pittman applauded OCPD for how it is evolving. She suggested its updated policy could be a framework from which to develop a legislative minimum criteria for all Oklahoma law enforcement agencies.
“I think that if we know it's an issue, and we're looking at the data, and it's something that we have the power to say, ‘Hey, we want this statute across the board. If you guys are not going to do it yourselves, we want to make sure it gets done,’ then absolutely, the Legislature should step in,” Pittman said.
‘Entirely unnecessary’ deadly chase
Public records paint an unsettling picture of the police pursuit that killed an innocent motorist and her unborn baby in 2021.
Oklahoma City Police Sgt. Dustin Fulton praised his own driving technique after Wacey Gerron Mikles slammed a stolen Ford F-350 pickup truck into a 2009 Chevrolet Impala, according to body-cam video.
In a state ranked 8th highest for pursuit-related deaths, traffic infractions or property crimes prompted the vast majority of chases — reasons not worth deaths or even pursuits, experts say.
Nearby, Star Shells and her unborn baby, Elijah Reeves III, lay dying or dead in the Impala. Mikles was in handcuffs.
“I did so good shuffle steering,” Fulton was heard saying on body-cam video.
Another officer congratulated him with a fist bump: “Good job bro.”
Fulton replied, “Did you like it?”
A wrongful death civil rights lawsuit against the City of Oklahoma City argues the pursuit was “entirely unnecessary” because the stolen truck’s owner could track its location on his phone and was providing real-time updates to police.
Cameron Spradling, the plaintiff’s attorney, wrote that officers needlessly pursued the fleeing suspect at high speeds over considerable distances through highly populated and trafficked areas.
“The decision to engage in this police chase constitutes a conscience-shocking deliberate indifference to the rights of other motorists, including Star Shells and her unborn child,” Spradling wrote.
The World and Lee identified at least three deadly pursuits from 2016 to 2022 in which law enforcement were electronically tracking vehicles but still decided to give chase instead of using that information to try to avoid such a high-stakes enforcement action.
The Oklahoma City Police Department’s updated policy requires officers to discontinue a chase for traffic offenses or property crimes under several conditions — specifically when GPS tracking is available. Others prohibitions to police pursuits include when police are entering active school or construction zones, approaching adverse road conditions or pedestrian traffic, when the violator’s identity is known or when the suspect’s driving behavior endangers the public.
Its officers also aren’t allowed to exceed city street speed limits by more than 15 mph or highway speed limits by more than 25 mph — unless there is “strong justification,” such as the threat of “imminent loss of life or officer distress.”
Meanwhile, the prior Highway Patrol chase policy — before the agency removed 80% of it — still didn’t put many restrictions on troopers in chases, instead leaving most decisions to the individual troopers in the heat of the moment.
The agency actually listed traffic offenses and stolen vehicles specifically as reasons to chase. Its previous policy imposed no caps on speeds.
William Bruckman, 23, died when a stolen utility truck driven by Jerry Lee Newman plowed head on into his sedan as Bruckman commuted to work on U.S. 75 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May 24, 2017. Newman was fleeing law enforcement, bringing the pursuit into the wrong direction of traffic on the highway.
Policy changes lead to fewer pursuits
The Highway Patrol in the past has acknowledged to the Tulsa World that it doesn’t track or keep aggregate data on pursuits.
The agency refused to say for this story whether that has changed.
On the other hand, Oklahoma City Police track some data on chases.
It shows that their stronger policy measures implemented in June 2022 — about 13 months after Shells and her unborn child were killed — are helping.
Oklahoma City Police averaged 334 pursuits per year in the four years prior to the new policy and 243 per year in the two years since.
And a higher percentage of its chases are being self-terminated by officers.
About 36% were discontinued prior to the new policy, rising to 45% afterward.
“I think it highlights how much better we’ve gotten over the past five years at calling off pursuits,” wrote Master Sgt. Gary Knight in an email. “As you see, some years it’s almost half of all our pursuits.”
Ron Bacy, Oklahoma City’s new police chief, declined to be interviewed for this article. Wade Gourley, who retired from the post in August, was a driving force behind revamping the department’s pursuit protocols.
Knight wrote that the onus is on Oklahoma City Police to identify and apprehend criminals as safely as possible.
“History has borne out that pursuits, although sometimes necessary, are inherently dangerous and sometimes have tragic and catastrophic outcomes,” Knight wrote. “Our stringent policies and procedures regarding pursuits are best viewed as safeguards to protect the involved officers, the fleeing suspects and the public at large.”