Nice to see that somebody is following up on last week’s trooper slashing. He’d never been violent, according to the McDowell News:
Court records show that the man shot to death after attacking a trooper Friday had never before been convicted of a violent crime. However, he did have a history with drugs and alcohol.
Shortly before 1:30 p.m. Friday, Trooper Andy Waycaster, 24, of the N.C. Highway Patrol stopped a car on Sugar Hill Road. The driver, 22-year-old Daniel Boyd Cole Jr. of Marion, was speeding and not wearing a seat belt, according to Highway Patrol officials.Waycaster smelled alcohol on Cole and learned that he had a restriction on his license that made it unlawful for him to have a blood-alcohol level of .04 or higher.
Patrol Sgt. Pat Staggs stated in an earlier interview that Cole had evidently had his license revoked for a prior impaired driving offense and later had it reinstated. A judge or N.C. Department of Motor Vehicles officials placed the restriction on his license.
Waycaster was transporting Cole to the McDowell County Sheriff’s Office for a Breathalyzer, when Cole pulled out a box cutter and began slashing the trooper’s head, face, neck, arm and upper torso.
The two exited the vehicle along the Interstate 40 overpass on Sugar Hill Road. That’s where Waycaster shot and fatally wounded the suspect.
A check of Cole’s criminal record revealed that he was convicted of felony possession of marijuana in May 2002, for which he received a suspended sentence and two years on supervised probation. He earned stints on unsupervised probation for a July 2003 conviction of possession of a malt beverage or unfortified wine by an underage person and a June 2006 conviction of driving while impaired.
A McDowell News reporter spoke to a couple of Cole’s friends Sunday. Both Stephanie Taylor and Halley Bradshaw of Marion admitted that Cole had been in some trouble in the past but said he was generally a good person.
Bradshaw said she had been to parties with Cole and had seen him drink.
But he was never mean or violent, she added
8 Comments
If someone passed their hand with a box cutter or otherwise between me and the dashboard of a moving car, I can think of about 200 ways to stop such an attack.
Sorry, I don’t buy the story so far. It stinks.
I am not saying the trooper was wrong, we don’t know enough to say that.. in fact, we don’t know much at all.
I am willing to bet there was no box cutter. I could believe the wounds described (if indeed they have been described properly) would most likely have been made with a loose handcuff. Especially since I was, many years ago, the victim of just such an attack, but not as severe.
Bill’s questions/points are valid.
Did any of the media find out if the detainee was handcuffed? I don’t believe that a handcuffed man, inside a patrol car, would be likely to cause this much damage to a well-trained officer.
The last report I read said that it was unknown whether or not the detainee had been handcuffed. Did anybody see different information?
This reminds me of a case a few years ago in which a BCS deputy was serving papers at the home of a mentally/emotionally damaged man. The deputy was shot and killed. I remember that a lot of folks asked if the deputy had been wearing a protective vest. Straight answers were not forthcoming.
If I had a sibling, friend, spouse etc. in law enforcement, I would push even harder for answers.
Either 1) this guy was not doing his job right or 2) we’re being misled about what really happened or 3) the patrolman was doing his job as trained, and the training is at fault.
Which is it?
Bill, it’s not too hard to figure out
A box cutter is not meant for stabbing, it’s meant for poking into a box and draging across it – not for stabbing. If you want to hurt someone with it, you reach across them then drag it towards you. If he got slashed from his ear to his mouth, it may have been that the guy was trying to slash his throat. Sounds like he reached across the trooper’s face, started cutting on the left side, then dragged the box cutter towards him.
I still want to know how someone gets slashed on the left side of their body from a passenger in a front seat.
And have they found this box cutter? Last I heard they had not.
It’s true, the local media doesn’t work on the weekends! Good forbid the public needs to know something on a Saturday!
They did a story on it saturday (I caught the tail end of it before switching over to the rapidly going back downhill again SNL) when he got out.
It wasn’t that in depth, but I would imagine details weren’t released until monday anyway.
the news broke friday, and i hadn’t seen any follow-up until monday, when i posted this article.
Who hasn’t been following up?
News 13 did a bunch of this yesterday.
Is the citizen-times not covering it? is that what you meant?