It wasn't quite daybreak on the Saturday before Labor Day 2010 when Latonya Lyons pulled her decade-old Ford Taurus to the side of the Central Expressway entrance ramp at Yale Boulevard. Something was wrong with the car.
Lyons turned on her emergency flashers, checked her mirrors to make sure no cars were coming from behind and stepped out of the car, to see what the problem was and try to find help. Moments later, a black Porsche plowed into Lyons and her Taurus, killing her and upending the car, which wound up on its roof, 60 feet up the highway.
The driver of the Porsche was identified as Christopher Clary, who was no stranger to such an event. Eleven years before, he confessed to manslaughter after drunkenly plowing his car into a tree, killing his 15-year-old passenger. He got 10 years of probation in that case. In the 2010 incident, he walked away without so much as a sobriety test or ticket.
Dallas police told WFAA six months after the crash that in order to press charges, they'd need to determine how fast the Porsche had been traveling. They can easily get that data from most cars, but neither they nor any local dealership had the proper equipment. As of March 2011, they were waiting for the data from engineers at Porsche headquarters. Meanwhile, Clary went on with his life, reportedly working at a local IT staffing firm. (He describes himself on Twitter as the president and CEO, but the firm, DeNovo, makes no mention of him on its web site.)
Lyons' family, including her three young children, was dumbfounded. "He killed someone," her sister, Veronica Lyons, told WFAA six months after the accident. "He didn't even get a ticket. We know he didn't even get a ticket. That's not fair to the family."
The incident even prompted a lecture from online gossip peddler/TheDirty.com founder Nik Richie, who ruled that Clary "needs to reevaluate his life."
Still does, judging by his arrest over the weekend at the hands of Dallas police. According to police records, Clary, 33, was driving in the 8000 block of Forest Lane at about 8:30 Saturday evening when he was pulled over by a couple of officers. As they placed him under arrest for a trio of outstanding warrants -- one from Rockwall, one from Richardson, one from McKinney -- they asked if they could search his car.
Clary agreed. It didn't take the cops long to sniff out .3 grams of heroin and .1 gram of cocaine. Clary was taken to Lew Sterrett on a pair of felony drug possession charges. His passenger, a 23-year-old convicted felon named Christopher Bernard Johnson, was also arrested for possession.
Not that Clary's latest arrest will bring punishment proportionate to the damage he's caused. Possession of such small amounts of a controlled substance qualifies as a state jail felony, which carries a maximum two-year jail sentence. If convicted, he faces four years in jail, max, before he can once again hit the road.
