Rodney Wickware Strangled
On January 24, 1998, Rodney Wickware a 31 year old black Austinite, was walking near the 6900 block of North Lamar toward some fast food restaurants up the street from his apartment. He had gotten off work at 11 p.m., and according to his roommate Wickware had just enough time to grab a bite to eat before he met a date at midnight to go out. He was jaywalking across North Lamar when officers pulled him over because he looked suspicious and was allegedly walking erratically. Since that neighborhood is predominantly white, one naturally wonders whether some type of racial profiling might also have contributed to the officers' intervention into Mr. Wickware's affairs.
Though Wickware was unarmed, ultimately five officers arrived on the scene before the decision to arrest him was made. Police said Wickware stopped breathing during the fight. The autopsy indicated that Mr. Wickware's larynx had been crushed and that he died from lack of oxygen to the brain. EMS workers performed an emergency tracheotomy on Wickware when they arrived to facilitate breathing, but he never recovered. Even so, Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. Elizabeth Peacock ruled that the crushed larynx had not cause this lack of oxygen, but instead theorized that Mr. Wickware had ingested antifreeze, a highly poisonous substance, likely in order to commit suicide or in an ineffably misguided attempt to get high.
Wickware's family and roommate dispute that Wickware would have ingested anti-freeze that night for either reason. A man about to meet a date after work had too much to look forward to to contemplate death. And Wickware's associates say he had no inclinations toward the type of extremist substance abuse which would be a necessary prerequisite for drinking deadly antifreeze to get high. Mrs. Wilma Wickware, Rodney's mother from Tyler, speculates that APD officers, knowing they'd strangled her son, might have forced antifreeze down him to provide an alternative cause of death and to get themselves off the hook. Whether or not that disturbing scenario is correct, it does seem unlikely that the crushed larynx was merely coincidental to the fact that Wickware passed out in an officer's chokehold and died from lack of oxygen to the brain.
No charges were ever filed against the five officers who assaulted Mr. Wickware, no apology or admission of wrongdoing has been forthcoming and his family has never been compensated for their loss. All these officers went back onto active duty.
Compiled 4/25/00 from press reports and comments of Wilma Wickware at Carver Library in August 1998.