A carjacking in Los Angeles on Thursday resulted in a police chase that left the car owner dead.
The victim died during a police pursuit of the murder suspect who stole his car.
The car owner, 63-year-old Larry Walker, was tangled in his vehicle’s seatbelt as he tried to get out of the car when the intruder grabbed the wheel, and he was dragged for almost two miles before the car collided with police cars and flipped over. Police found his lifeless body a few houses down from the crash site and pronounced him dead at the scene.
The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) had obtained an arrest warrant for the murder suspect, identified as Joshua Reneau, 31, for a previous murder committed in July, and were pursuing him.
According to the LAPD, police officers were surveilling Reneau’s house in the Hyde Park neighborhood of South Los Angeles. At around 5 pm, the officers saw him enter a vehicle’s back seat. The police tried to pull the vehicle over, but it sped off, which triggered a police chase.
The car Reneau was in crashed near an intersection in South Los Angeles, and he quickly hopped out and forcibly took another nearby vehicle.
Unfortunately, the vehicle’s owner, Walker, became tangled in his seat belt and was dragged by Reneau as he drove off. The victim died after being dragged under his car.
Reneau continued to lead police on the chase, and after a short while, the vehicle crashed and rolled over near an intersection in Inglewood. He refused to surrender to the police, resulting in an intense SWAT standoff.
After about two hours, police officers eventually placed him and the other occupants from the first car into custody.
Police took Reneau to the hospital to treat his injuries resulting from the police chase; however, he will be charged with murder immediately after the hospital releases him.
The police identified the first car’s driver as 34-year-old Jamal Sutherland and charged him with felony without bail. The other passenger, Neosha Reneau, 33, was charged with a misdemeanor and was released on $1,000 bail.
LAPD officers were surveilling Joshua Reneau’s house in connection with a murder that occurred in July in the San Fernando Valley. The police already had two other murder suspects in custody.
On July 29, police responded to a jewelry robbery with deadly weapons in Reseda, where they found two victims with gunshot wounds and shell casings at the crime scene. Detectives determined that the casings were from different guns and concluded that multiple people were involved in the shooting.
The victims were taken to the hospital and survived the ordeal. Not long after they found the two people who were shot, police responded to another location, where they found one of the suspects with serious gunshot wounds. The suspect had been dumped by his companions at the second scene.
The suspect, identified as Earl Hunter, later succumbed to his wounds, and three others, Joshua Reneau, Miracole Brown, and Derek Hall, were arrested and charged with Hunter’s murder.
No officers were injured during the police chase or the standoff.
