Police screamed in panic and desperately tried to revive a mother they ran over in the street as her distraught children watched, bodycam and dashcam footage shows.
Desire Pool, 41, was mowed down at full speed by Houston policewoman Shelby Kennedy at 9.52pm on September 19 and died on the road despite CPR efforts.
The Houston Police Department released video from five differnet angles just hours before Thanksgiving showing Pool being hit, and the immediate aftermath.
Pool and her two daughters, aged 10 and 18, and their brother Jaylen had just got off a bus and were crossing the street, without a crosswalk, and she dropped her bus pass.
As she bent down to pick it up, Kennedy’s police car, that was carrying a suspect to lockup, plowed into her at full speed as her children got out of the way.
‘Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Oh, my f**king God! You didn’t see them?’ Kennedy’s partner Officer Joshua Rosales shouted. ‘No!’ she replied.
‘Oh my f**king God, Kennedy,’ Rosales repeated in shock.
The pair got out of the car while radioing for help, and began CPR on Pool as her children watched, screaming and crying hysterically.
‘My mom! Y’all killed my mom!’ one shouted at them.
Another got down and grabbed her hand, pleading ‘Mama, do not die on me… Come on, pray, pray.’
As Rosales gave CPR, Pool’s son hysterically shouted over and over at what appeared to be a bystander to call 911.
‘What are you waiting for?’ her daughter wailed, before the cops told them help was already on its way.
Kennedy’s bodycam showed Rosales giving Pool CPR while she called for backup and told her dispatcher that CPR was in progress.
As she put gloves on before walking over to help her partner, she repeatedly told herself to ‘calm down’.
Pool’s daughter called to her brother Jaylen, 18, to ‘come here, she’s waking up’. Jaylen pleaded with her, ‘Mom, please, wake up… we need you’.
One of the kids demanded to know ‘who was driving the car?’
Rosales had to repeatedly tell Pool’s children to ‘give me some space, I’m doing what I can’, then he too realized Pool was moving.
‘Hey, breathe, breathe, breathe… can you talk?’ he asked her, before the bystander crouching nearby added ‘she’s got blood in her mouth’.
‘Let’s get her in recovery, she started moving,’ Rosales told dispatch, and was informed paramedics were en route.
Pool was officially pronounced dead once she got to hospital.
Assistant Chief James Bryant said on Wednesday that the investigation into the fatal crash was in its very early stages, and police were still reviewing evidence.
Pool’s uncle Lee Gordon said Kennedy needed to be ‘held accountable’, and a public apology from HPD wouldn’t be enough.
‘Her two children saw their mother get mowed down in the street. They’re having nightmares. We’re trying our best to get them mental health care so we can get them back to normal,’ he told ABC.
Pool’s family said they weren’t warned about when the footage was going to be made public on the department’s YouTube channel.
“I don’t know what she (Kennedy) was doing. She could’ve been looking at the little computer that she has right there, or whatever she had, or whatever she had so that her vision was obstructed to where she had to had to look somewhere else,’ Pool’s 18-year-old son Jalen Gary said.
The deadly crash was also caught by a surveillance camera at a nearby business, showing the three kids standing on the street as their mom kneeled down.
As the black and white cop car barreled past the bus stop and towards then, the kids were able to scramble out of the road, but not their mom.
Witnesses described seeing Pool appear to drop her bus card, and go back into the road to get it when she was hit by the car.
‘We got a loud crowd. They were very upset about what had just occurred and they kinda just all dispersed,’ Houston Police Commander Luis Menendez-Sierra said.
HPD insisted at the time that the officers did nothing wrong.
‘The patrol vehicle struck a pedestrian in the roadway, not in a crosswalk,’ the Houston Police Department said in a statement.
Two officers riding in a marked patrol car were taking a suspect to the local jail when the car collided with the woman.
‘Officers immediately stopped and rendered assistance to the injured female.’
The woman was taken to a local hospital where she died.
None of her children were injured.
‘A preliminary investigation indicates that speed is not believed to be a factor in the crash and that the pedestrian failed to yield right of way to a vehicle,’ HPD said.