Early this morning, about 1:30 a.m., a 23-year-old Old East Dallas man found himself driving along an unfamiliar stretch of Singleton Boulevard in West Dallas. He pulled his 2009 Hyundai Sonata off the road near Bernal Drive to get his bearings using GPS.
When he stopped, he noticed two men walking toward his car, waving their arms to get his attention. The spot he had parked in was poorly lit, but he pushed his concerns to the back of his mind. "I'm black and they're black, so I don't have to worry," he assured himself, according to police.
The two men seemed not to share this sense of racial harmony. They pulled him out of the Hyundai and clocked him in the back of the head with something hard, he couldn't tell what. He fell to the ground as the two men punched and kicked. They eventually hopped in his car, which still had the keys dangling from the ignition, and drove off.
The 23-year-old wasn't badly injured, just some bruises and road rash on his knees and ass where he'd been thrown to the ground. He was lucky he wasn't hurt worse. Luckier still, he was able to flag down a Dallas police car that happened to be coming down Singleton right after the attackers drove off in his car.
It didn't take much longer for officers to come across a 2009 Hyundai whose driver and passenger matched the description they'd just been given. They flipped on their lights and sirens for a traffic stop, but the driver stepped on the gas. (It's unclear from the report whether the victim went along for the ride.)
The officer held back as the Hyundai headed down Singleton, keeping it in sight as it headed east for several blocks, sped through a red light at Westmoreland, then crashed into a telephone pole and dentist's office.
Driver and passenger both leaped from the vehicle and jumped the fence into a public housing complex at Singleton and Kingbridge Street. While one officer stayed close on their heels, another entered the opposite end of the complex. When the attackers saw him, they gave up and laid on the ground.
Officers took the men to separate squad cars for questioning. Turns out that one of them was just 16, a teenager. The other was identified as 20-year-old Demetrius Lamar Himphill. He'd recently been given seven years' deferred adjudication on a trio of burglary charges and decided not to heed his Miranda warning. "I knew I fucked up," he told police. "I'm going to get my life right after this. I know I'm going back to prison."