They Hit Him—For Kicks

(Warning:  This post includes a video some readers might find disturbing.)

When I wrote for a newspaper, I often talked with police officers and their bosses. I had some particularly interesting conversations with one precinct commander who was very well-read and had interests one wouldn’t expect. Anyway, he was talking about someone who’d just been arrested after a fairly long manhunt. The perp paid for something with a check (remember those?) that had his name and address on it.

“We don’t like to admit it,” the commander said. “But as often as not, we catch the bad guys because they do something stupid, whether it’s while they’re committing their crimes or afterwards.”

I thought about that—and felt terrible for Scott Dwight Habermehl and his loved ones—when I read about how he was killed while riding his bicycle to work at the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico last June.

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Albuquerque police shared an image of the car used to strike Habermehl taken from a nearby church. But they couldn’t determine who was in that vehicle until early this year, when they received tips about a video of the incident on social media.

And who posted that video? One of the three boys—aged 16, 13 and 11–in the vehicle.

Police are still searching for the 16-year-old, who is believed to have been in the back seat. The 13-year-old allegedly drove while the 11-year-old rode shotgun, literally and figuratively: as they approached an intersection, he waved a handgun, ducked and laughed as his side of the vehicle hit Habermehl. 

From the conversation in the video, it’s clear that the boys intended to hit Habermehl, whom they apparently didn’t know.

Here is, perhaps, the most paradoxical segment of their conversation:

16-year-old: “Just bump him, brah.” 

13-year-old: “Like bump him?” 

Police say three boys, including an 11-year-old, were accused in connection with the fatal hit-and-run of 63-year-old bicyclist, Scott Habermehl.

16-year-old: “Yeah, just bump him. Go like…15, 20.”

So the oldest boy is telling the “middle” child—the driver—to “bump” Habermehl, but not to go too fast. It will be interesting, to say the least, to see how he is charged when he’s caught, given that the 13-year old has been charged with murder. Police are working with the district attorney’s office and the Children, Youth and Families Department to determine charges for the 11-year-old.

Social media didn’t exist when I had that conversation with a precinct commander. But if it did, and he’d known about the boys’ video, he would’ve cited it as a prime example of what he meant.

Oh, and he probably would’ve said that not only did those boys take Scott Dwight Habermehl’s life, they effectively halted their own—and disrupted, or possibly derailed those of his family.