Pantsless man dies in police custody after Whataburger rampage, Texas cops say
Houston police say a man in his 40s was naked from the waist down when he walked into a Whataburger on the southwest side of town and started terrorizing employees and the Thanksgiving night crowd.
Then, hours later, after being detained by police, he was dead, Assistant Chief Larry Satterwhite said in a news conference late on Thanksgiving night. Police were called to the Whataburger on Bissonnet Street just after 7 p.m., according to KTRK.
“They finally got him in custody — in a way that they could move him toward the patrol car,” Satterwhite said. “At that point the male collapsed. Transported him to Southwest Memorial Hospital, where sadly he expired. We don’t know what the cause of death was.”
When the man, wearing just a T-shirt, walked into the Whataburger, he began pouring out jugs of tea and throwing chairs and trashcans, the Houston Chronicle reported. Then he stood up on the counter, scaring employees enough to evacuate the building and call police.
As the employees tried to get out the door behind them, Satterwhite said, the man tackled the restaurant manager, a woman, and began assaulting her. Other employees pulled the pantsless offender off the manager, and police found those who remained at the scene in the parking lot.
Satterwhite said the man appeared to be “in crisis” as police chased him and wrestled his arms around his back. He was going to be arrested on suspicion of assault, Satterwhite said. But the man stopped breathing and moving right after he was handcuffed, according to KTRK.
“They rolled him over to do CPR on him. I saw the firefighter doing CPR to the point where he put his hands up in the air, and they just loaded him onto the gurney and took him away,” Ruben Cortade, a witness, told the station.
It was only after the man went limp that police noticed “a laceration or possibly a puncture wound” on his side, “approximately two inches in length,” Satterwhite said.
The manager who was assaulted suffered just a scraped knee, according to KPRC. Before the alleged Whataburger rampage, the suspect knocked over a trashcan at the Shell station next door to the Whataburger, the Chronicle reported.
An official cause of death has not been released.
This story was originally published November 23, 2018 at 7:16 AM with the headline "Pantsless man dies in police custody after Whataburger rampage, Texas cops say."
