Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman was shaking as she told Henrietta Mason that the state trooper who chased her son, Tyrone Mason, before Mason fatally crashed his vehicle on Capital Boulevard last October, and then conspired with his supervisor to lie about it, wouldn’t face criminal charges.
That’s according to the nationally known civil rights attorney Bakari Sellers, who is one of a team of lawyers representing Tyrone Mason’s family in a federal lawsuit against the trooper, Garrett Macario, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina last week.
At a press conference Thursday, Henrietta Mason, Sellers, and several other lawyers, activists, and elected officials—including Rev. Gregory Drumwright, prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump, and state Sen. Natalie Murdock—spoke out against Freeman’s decision. Sellers and Henrietta Mason met with Freeman in her office shortly before Freeman issued a report last Wednesday outlining her reasons for declining to charge the troopers and criticizing the Raleigh Police Department’s handling of the investigation of the crash.
Recordings from Macario’s dash and body-worn camera and those from responding Raleigh police officers were provided last week to a coalition of media outlets, including the INDY, who successfully petitioned for their release. They show Macario and Morrison deciding to lie about chasing Mason, and then Macario repeatedly lying to responding Raleigh PD officers.
The Mason family’s legal team said at the press conference that they planned to add a notice of claim against the Raleigh PD for its failure to thoroughly investigate the crash to the lawsuit.
“We had no idea how negligent the Raleigh Police Department had been [before Freeman issued the report],” Sellers told reporters. He added that Raleigh’s new police chief, Rico Boyce, had reached out to Mason and her lawyers to have a conversation but “that was not something we felt to be appropriate at the time.”
Raleigh police initially told Henrietta Mason that her son died in a single-car accident with no witnesses, she says, despite Macario telling officers he wasn’t chasing Mason, then, minutes later, allegedly telling another officer and a police captain that he had in fact attempted to pull Mason over for speeding (no audio recordings of those later conversations exist, Freeman said in her report).
Sellers said the purpose of the rally was to call for the immediate firings of Macario and Morrison as well as a Raleigh PD investigator who they say didn’t take Henrietta Mason’s concerns about the crash seriously.
Henrietta Mason, in an emotional address to reporters, spoke about the aftermath of her son’s fatal wreck. She said someone who witnessed the crash reached out to her and told her they had heard the chase and Mason’s car collide with a concrete barrier supporting a bridge.
“When my son hit that bridge, he said it sounded like a house blowing up,” Mason said. She said the witness told her that after the boom of the crash, the lights and sirens from the trooper pursuing Mason switched off.
In her report, Freeman concluded that Macario and Morrison lied about the chase because they did not want to have to manage the crash scene and do the crash reconstruction investigation. “That’s RPD’s problem,” Morrison can be heard saying repeatedly on the phone to Macario in the state highway patrol’s recordings.
“For them to sit here and say, ‘Oh, we [didn’t] want to be involved in a [crash scene] investigation, sir, you’re involved in a whole crime,” Henrietta Mason said of Macario. “You chased my baby down and then you turned your back and went home to your family.”
Dawn Blagrove, the executive director of the nonprofit Emancipate NC, which works to dismantle structural racism and mass incarceration across the state, said that in not pursuing charges against the troopers, Freeman “swept a miscarriage of justice under the rug” and took the power that voters gave her “to defend the indefensible.”
“Tyrone Mason, maybe, could be alive,” Blagrove said. “Maybe he could be here to tell you his story, and we’ll never know, because the trooper that ran him and chased him into a bridge did nothing to render aid in those crucial seconds after the accident.”
Send an email to Raleigh editor Jane Porter at [email protected].