SWAT Stakes Out and Kills a Suspected Pimp Outside a Carrollton Motel

The Carrollton teenager told police overnight she had been held against her will and forced into sex trafficking by her suspected pimp, 25-year-old Malcolm Hickson.

The 19-year-old woman told police Hickson was pimping her out of a motel room at the InTown Suites off Trinity Mills Road in Carrollton. Police quietly formed a perimeter around the hotel and deployed SWAT to assess “the best way to get him into custody,” says Jolene DeVito, spokesperson for Carrollton police.
 
Like hunters stalking prey, the police waited all night on Tuesday for a sign. It came when an 18-year-old Carrollton woman opened the motel door early the next morning either to place or grab something in Hickson's car. This woman wasn't being held against her will, though. "She may have been the girlfriend, the one he said he would love forever," DeVito says.

SWAT pulled her out of the way, though she was reluctant to leave. She did tell them that Hickson would be coming out to check on her. 

He did.

A tall man with dark hair and brown eyes and a neck tattoo of his wife's name emerged. Police knew Hickson well; he was wanted for assaulting his live-in girlfriend on Friday. He was no stranger to the Texas penal system, either. Hickson received a two-year sentence in prison for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in March 2014. He’d been charged with multiple counts. He pled guilty in a plea bargain agreement with Denton County District Attorney’s Office. Police also say he'd recently finished serving time on an aggravated robbery charge out of San Antonio. 

Carrollton police were in the process of executing several warrants for Hickson's arrest when the 19-year-old arrived at the police station on Tuesday night. His most recent warrant involved a charge of assault family violence. He'd been arguing with his live-in girlfriend, grabbed her and threw her to the ground, according to the Oct. 21 arrest warrant affidavit. He then straddled her and choked her using his body weight to help apply pressure before he fled the scene in a white Mercedes. The affidavit says: “[The victim] stated her lips and face started to feel numb, and she felt a tingling around her lips and eyes. [She] feared she was about to pass out. [She] stated she was not able to talk, scream or make any noise when Hickson was pressing on her neck. [She] believed she was going to die. Hickson told [her] that he was going to kill her and her family and friends." 

But police weren’t only looking for him because he choked his girlfriend. They say he’d also been harassing and making threats against his pregnant wife. In July, she reported to Carrollton police that Hickson had been threatening her over the phone, and she was scared. She’d been in a relationship with him for about five years and married to him for about a year. 

“She received a call from Hickson who told her he would hurt her and her unborn child and kill her and her unborn child if she ‘didn’t quit playing around,’” according to his second arrest warrant affidavit filed on July 13. "By playing around he meant not responding to his calls and texts.”

She’d separated from him a couple of weeks prior to Hickson making the threatening phone call.  A few months before the October assault on his live-in girlfriend, Hickson’s wife decided to meet him at Hill Park at the 2200 block of Crater Lake Court in Carrollton. They chatted for five minutes or so when he reached into her car and took her pistol from an unzipped duffel bag sitting in the passenger seat. “Bitch you ain’t getting this back,” she recalled him saying. “You better get out from around here.”

DeVito says SWAT recognized the bulge in Hickson’s waistband on Wednesday as a pistol. They told him to get his hands in the air, and he did — for a moment. Then police say he reached for his gun, and SWAT Sgt. Caleb West fired.

The bullet struck Hickson in the upper chest.  He was taken to Baylor Carrollton Medical Center and pronounced dead.
 
Carrollton police placed West on paid administrative leave, the normal procedure. The shooting will be investigated by the department, the county sheriff and a critical response team consisting of law enforcement officers from various local police departments.