Rangers investigate in-custody death of man after DWI arrest in North Texas, police say
The Texas Rangers are investigating the death of a man in Denton Police Department custody after he apparently experienced a medical episode last week, the police department said in a news release Friday.
Shortly before noon on Nov. 30, officers were dispatched to a reckless driving call in the 4100 block of Vintage Boulevard, Denton police said. The caller reported that a man, who was driving a vehicle with flat tires, had hit poles and a median at a construction site.
Officers found and spoke with the driver, who told them that he was traveling from Bowie and believed he was currently in Lewisville, police said. The man told police that he had consumed alcohol while in Bowie, according to the release.
Officers tried to conduct standardized field sobriety tests, but the driver couldn’t follow a stimulus or maintain his balance to complete the tests, police said.
Officers arrested the man on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. While they were completing paperwork for a warrant to draw his blood, the man became unresponsive in the back of the patrol vehicle, police said. Officers called for medics, who took him to a local hospital for treatment.
On Thursday of this week, the Denton Police Department was notified that the man had been pronounced dead. The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office has identified him as 46-year-old Andrew Louden, and his cause of death has not yet been determined.
Louden died at the hospital, but it’s being investigated as an in-custody death because he was under arrest at the time.
