Woman pleads not guilty for car windshield death

A TEXAS woman pleaded not guilty yesterday to murdering a homeless man by striking him with her car on her way home and leaving him to die lodged in the windshield after parking in her garage.

A former nurse, Chante Jawan Mallard, 27, faces life in prison if convicted of first-degree murder.

She pleaded guilty to a lesser charge yesterday before she went on trial on the murder charge. She pleaded guilty to a charge of evidence tampering before attorneys began their opening statements on the murder charge.

The grisly death shocked the nation when details of the accident came to light in February 2002.

On October 27, 2001, the body of Gregory Biggs, a 37-year-old former bricklayer who had been living in a homeless shelter, was found dumped in a park. Police had no leads in the case until four months later, when a tipster said Mallard talked about the incident at a party. Police said Mallard confessed to police that her car had hit Biggs with such force that his head and shoulders jammed into the windshield and his legs were bent over the roof, his pants tearing almost completely off his body.

Instead of stopping, police said, Mallard drove a mile down a divided six-lane highway, the man still lodged and bleeding in the jagged windshield, then continued through town to her small house in a working-class neighbourhood. She pulled into her garage, lowered the door, then sat in the car and cried, repeatedly apologising to the man who was moaning, she later told detectives.

“Chante kept going in and out of the garage telling the man she was sorry,” the police report states. “She does not know how long it took the man to die; she quit going out into the garage.”

Mike Heiskell, Mallard’s attorney, said last year that his client “was simply a frightened, emotionally distraught young woman who had an accident, panicked and made a wrong choice.”

Police found the car in the garage and burned car seats in her back yard.

Two of Mallard’s friends, Clete Deneal Jackson and Herbert Tyrone Cleveland, pleaded guilty to dumping the body to help Mallard. Jackson received a 10-year sentence for tampering with evidence; Cleveland, nine years. Tarrant County Medical Examiner Nizam Peerwani later said Biggs, probably lived only a few hours after he was hit. He could have survived if he had received medical attention.