The night before Walter Hutchins was killed, he surprised his mother with a late-night Uber ride to a family dinner that included his newborn son.
‘He was smiling and said, ‘I surprised you, didn’t I,’” Marilyn Lewis, the 31-year-old’s mother, said at a press conference on Tuesday. “That was the last time I saw my son. I hugged him and kissed him and said goodbye to him at the restaurant.”
Less than 24 hours later, the new father was inside his car outside a barbershop on Liberty Road when at least two men who later told police they were bounty hunters approached him. Details of the Feb. 23 incident are still under investigation, but according to Houston police, the men were hired by a local bail bond company to execute a warrant, and fatally shot Hutchins, a Black man.
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But while police have cited bounty hunters insisting Hutchins opened fire first, the family claims video of the incident shows plain-clothed men “ambushing” him before opening fire.
The incident has quickly drawn attention to the concept of bounty hunters—essentially paid peace officers—who have often flown under the radar, even as killer cops have faced harsh, sustained scrutiny across the country.
“They murdered my son,” Lewis said in a press conference outside of the Harris County Civil Courthouse on Wednesday, flanked by family members wearing matching powder blue t-shirts with a photo of the 31-year-old and the words “#JusticeForWalterHutchins.”
Civil-rights attorney Ben Crump—who has represented the loved ones of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery—explained that the family “wants due process for Walter Hutchins” and are demanding a full-scale investigation for what he called “an execution.”
“They want equal justice. They don’t want anything special,” Crump said about the family. “They just want the Houston Police Department to do their jobs.”
Houston Police Department Lt. R. Willkens told reporters last Wednesday night that preliminary information suggested bounty hunters were hired by a local bail bond company to track down Hutchins.
After spotting Hutchins at around 10:30 p.m., the men told police they approached and were met with gunfire from the vehicle. One of the bounty hunters fired a rifle “only a couple of times,” hitting Hutchins “across the top of the head,” Willkens said.
Walter Hutchins out to dinner with his family the night before the shooting.
Lawyers for family of Walter HutchinsThe lieutenant added that police believe Hutchins “backed up” after being shot and eventually crashed into a wall.” Nearby officers who “heard the shots… came and gave first aid …and secured the scene,” he said.
The Daily Beast was unable to independently confirm what warrants Hutchins may have been facing, if any. Willkens told reporters on Wednesday he believed “he has some credit card abuse, a couple of family violence, and I think maybe a burglary or something like that.”
The lieutenant also insisted that the two men identified themselves to Hutchins during the arrest and wore vests and badges.
But attorney Robert Hilliard, who also represents the family, told The Daily Beast surveillance video from a nearby store—posted online by J. Prince, the founder of Rap-A-Lot Records—showed otherwise. Specifically, he suggested the men did not announce themselves before they started shooting and that they were wearing normal street clothes.
To make matters worse, the attorney said, the video indicates Hutchins may have been “trying to back away from the two men” before he was shot. The Houston Police Department did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment about the video’s authenticity.
Marilyn Lewis, the mother of Walter Hutchins
Lawyers for family of Walter Hutchins“To me, it just had to stop and watch the video again. I couldn’t even get my head around the idea that someone who has no idea what is about to happen is surrounded and approached and yelling at him,” Hilliard said. “These guys were clearly staking him out. They jumped out with their guns out. My guess is that they were trigger happy.”
Christopher Powell, a private investigator with A-Mobile Bail Bonds who watched the video, told Fox26 Houston he would have handled the attempted arrest differently—including by starting off the encounter with a clear indication he was a bounty hunter.
“The area they’re in is Fifth Ward, and obviously it’s late at night, just running up on someone in plain clothes, they don’t know what’s going on. They don’t know if you’re gang-affiliated, if you’re doing a robbery, if you’re about to steal their car,” Powell added.
According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, bounty hunters in the state are essentially peace officers, meaning they cannot represent themselves as law enforcement, connect themselves to a government agency in any way, or enter private property without consent. While they do have powers to apprehend an individual they were contracted to find, they must take the alleged suspect to jail immediately after capture.
But Hilliard, who was also present at the Tuesday press conference, argued early evidence suggests that the men did not follow state procedures during the incident that left Hutchins “dead in seconds.” Police say that he was rushed to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The attorney claimed that “their bounty was contingent on them doing the arrest,” even if that meant waiting and surveilling Hutchins for hours instead of calling local authorities and having them execute the arrest themselves.
Emma Johnson, Hutchins’ aunt, said on Tuesday that “Walter did not deserve to die” at the hands of “wannabe” law enforcement officers. Crump added that the law office was also investigating the matter, and would be looking closely into the backgrounds of the bounty hunters, who have yet to be identified by police.
For Candance Johnson, Tuesday’s incident was all the more painful because it meant that her son will now grow up without a father—without the man she dated off and on for four years.
“Walter loved his son, he was ecstatic to be a father,” Johnson said while holding her and Hutchins’ son on Tuesday. “Every time I look at [my son], I see his father. It’s not OK to just take someone…that was more than what they did to him.
