Body camera footage shows police stop preceding Newport News officer’s death
A jury watched body camera footage Wednesday that showed two Newport News police officers interacting with a man in a parked car before he suddenly drove off — leading to one officer being killed when she was trapped by the fleeing vehicle.
The incident unfolded the evening of Jan. 23, 2020, as Newport News Police Officers Nicholas Meier and Katherine “Katie” Thyne demanded Vernon E. Green get out of his car as they investigated a report that two people were smoking marijuana at the Monitor-Merrimac Overlook Park.
Jurors in Newport News Circuit Court will decide if the 41-year-old Green is guilty of second-degree murder in Thyne’s death, but also have the option of finding him guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter.
While the car’s female passenger got out of the car nearly immediately at Meier’s initial request, Green wanted more than the officers’ explanation that they were doing “a narcotics investigation.”
According to the body camera footage, Green had his hands on the steering wheel and his keys on the dashboard, as Meier had initially told him. But he refused to step out of his 2005 Mercedes sedan.
“I didn’t do anything,” Green says, pressing for why he’s being told to get out and objecting to Thyne opening his car door. “We’re just sitting here.”
“We will explain everything to you when you step out of the vehicle,” Thyne said as both officers stood next to the driver’s side door.
The back and forth continues for several moments. “I’m not resisting,” Green says several times, with both officers repeatedly telling him to “Step out of the vehicle!” in elevated tones.
“Look, man, you’re making everything worse for yourself,” Meier tells him.
Meier testified that he then grabbed Green’s arm to try to pull him out of the car door, and said Thyne was also attempting to pull the driver out. But Green pulled the other way, trying to remain in the car.
At that point, Meier said, Green grabbed his keys, started up the car and drove away.
Meier was able to step away, but Thyne ended up moving with the car. Meier said he at first thought Thyne was “running” next to the car and that she had perhaps tried to “jump into the car” as it moved forward.
He also said she “started to fall forward,” with her “feet dragging along the car.” But it was dark and happened so quickly — and the body camera footage doesn’t provide a clear view of how Thyne got caught up in the fleeing vehicle.
A police accident investigator, Cpl. Jason Moyer, testified Green’s car jumped a curb on 16th Street, then hit a tree about 50 feet down the sidewalk. Investigators say that pinned Thyne’s body inside the open car door.
Thyne’s body camera footage, also played for the jury Wednesday, shows the tree rapidly approaching on the driver’s side before the camera cuts off. The car continued on, jumping a retaining wall.
Meier’s body camera footage shows him chasing the car on foot, finding the 24-year-old Thyne face up and motionless on the street. “Thyne! Thyne! Thyne!” he screams, according to his body camera footage.
He gets on his radio and says, “Officer down,” and begins to perform first aid.
Meier was the most crucial prosecution witness in the second-degree murder trial against Green. He’s also charged with felony hit and run for fleeing the scene of the accident.
Police Officer Jason Kidder testified he was working the camera room at the police headquarters building. That room, he said, has monitors with feeds from crime hotspots around the city.
Kidder testified that on a camera from the overlook he saw the two people in the gold sedan appearing to roll up a joint inside the car and smoking it. Thyne and Meier were dispatched to check out the scene in more detail, with Meier testifying he smelled pot coming from the open sunroof.
The incident took place 15 months before Virginia lawmakers voted in April 2021 to legalize marijuana. That change also shifted smoking pot in public — such as a parked car — from a criminal misdemeanor to a civil penalty carrying a $25 fine.
Police Officer Matthew Crutcher arrived at the scene after the accident, saying he tried to talk to Thyne at the scene as she lay unconscious but still fighting to breathe. “I was telling her we’re there and trying to help her and we love her,” Crutcher said.
As medics took her to the hospital, he said, the ambulance floor pooled with blood as medics stuffed her gaping leg wound. “We ran out of gauze,” Crutcher said, saying they had to use an alternative material instead.
Dr. Wendy Gunther, a forensic pathologist with the State Medical Examiner’s Office, testified that Thyne’s pelvis was “crushed and torn and pulled apart,” which Gunter said “tore open the back of her thigh.”
“This is the killer injury,” Gunther told jurors.
The autopsy report says Thyne’s own gun likely impinged into her during the collision with the tree, causing the massive pelvis injury.
Police Officer Steven McKinley testified he found Green walking on a nearby sidestreet shortly after the incident. Green put his hands in the air as McKinley approached him with his high beam police lights, then got on the ground before McKinley cuffed him.
Cory Trowell, an inmate who spent time with Green at the Western Tidewater Regional Jail, testified that Green confided in him some time in 2021 that he took off from the scene because he knew he had a gun in the car that he couldn’t have as a convicted felon.
“He said he had already done 15 years and wasn’t going to go back to prison,” Trowell said.
But Green’s defense attorney, Tyrone Johnson, got Trowell to acknowledge that he stood to gain a reduction in his own sentence for his cooperation with prosecutors.
Thyne’s aunt, Cassie Thyne-Fenlon, 51, of Lowell, Massachusetts, is attending the trial and fought back tears after seeing the video footage. “I was in the room when she was born,” Thyne-Fenlon said. “To see her being born and then to see her last minutes alive, I don’t have words for that.”
Peter Dujardin, 757-247-4749, pdujardin@dailypress.com
