Hit-and-Run Tale Fuels Outrage

HOUSTON —  Under pressure from a scandalized community, a Fort Worth judge ordered a nursing home aide back to jail Friday, charged with letting a homeless man bleed to death slowly in her garage.

Chante Mallard, 25, told police she ran over Gregory Glenn Biggs, then hid the dying vagrant in her garage and ignored his moans for two days because she was afraid she’d go to jail. The news that Mallard was released on $10,000 bond Thursday provoked a flurry of furious telephone calls to prosecutors from people outraged over Mallard’s alleged indifference.

In response, Judge James Wilson on Friday bumped Mallard’s bond up to $250,000. If she comes up with the money, Mallard will be placed under house arrest and tracked by an electronic monitor. She has been charged with murder.

“It is no secret that the community is outraged by the offense of the defendant, and I’d remind the court this is a murder charge,” said Richard Alpert, a Tarrant County assistant district attorney.

Fort Worth police say Mallard got drunk and took Ecstasy in late October, then hopped into her car and drove home. She slammed into Biggs and kept on driving, with the 37-year-old man’s torso wedged through the windshield, until she reached her garage.

“She then went inside, had sex with her boyfriend and . . . went out to the garage and the man wasn’t dead yet, but he was dying,” said an affidavit released this week. “The man was asking them to help him, but they just walked back inside.”

Loose Lips Over Drinks Led to Arrest

It took Biggs days to bleed to death, police say. In the meantime, Mallard went into the garage several times to check on Biggs, but she ignored the dying man’s pleas for help, the affidavit said.

More arrests could follow, police said. On Friday, investigators were scrambling to figure out how many others knew about the death and who dumped Biggs’ body in woodsy Cobbs Park.

“We’re just trying to determine who else was involved,” police spokesman Duane Paul said Friday.

Mallard was arrested Wednesday after telling her story to girlfriends over cocktails in February. When her friends asked why she wasn’t cruising around in her gold Chevrolet anymore, Mallard giggled. “I hit this white man,” she said, according to the affidavit.

“It’s the most horrific thing I’ve ever heard of in my life,” said Don Shisler, president of Union Gospel Mission, a Fort Worth homeless shelter where Biggs frequently slept. “It really saddens me that Greg had all these problems, living on and off the streets. And then this. Who has the worst problem here, you know?”

A former Fort Worth school bus driver and bricklayer, Biggs had fallen on hard times in recent years and slumped into homelessness. Still, he kept his clothes clean and his hair neat, and plucked bouquets of flowers for shelter workers.

If she hadn’t held forth to her friends, Mallard might never have heard another word about Biggs. As soon as she got her hands on her income tax refund, she told her friends, she’d burn her old car and start fresh with a new vehicle. Then nobody could link her to the homeless man whose bones were buried in a pauper’s grave in Dallas.

Late-Night Drive Home Turned Deadly

“If she hadn’t talked about it, I think she would have gotten by with it,” said John Suggs, director of Presbyterian Night Shelter in Fort Worth.

“No one would be looking for him,” Suggs said. “No one would have connected it all together.”

But one of Mallard’s friends called police, and detectives paid a visit to the garage in Fort Worth. Inside, they discovered the dented, gutted car with bloodstained floor. In the backyard, they found the seats. One had been burned. When questioned, Mallard told police her story.

It was a few hours before dawn on Oct. 26, she said, when she headed home from a night of drinking at Joe’s Bamboo Club.

As she pulled around a long curve, a man emerged from the darkness, and Mallard slammed into him. His body plunged through the windshield, and his legs were over the hood. A panicked Mallard veered home, with the man lodged in the windshield, pulled into the garage and shut the door.

She sprawled on the kitchen floor and wept, Mallard told police.

“Chante stated she would go back out and tell the man she was sorry, but she advised that the man was just moaning,” the affidavit says.

Finally, Mallard told police, she couldn’t bring herself to enter the garage. She called a friend, who hauled the body from the property, and never told Mallard the full story of its disposal.

Suspect Gave Different Account to Her Friends

But that isn’t the version Mallard gave her friends, according to the affidavit. The nurse’s aide told her friends that she waited until Biggs died, then enlisted her boyfriend and his brother to haul the body to the fringes of a park in south Fort Worth.

“Shantae [sic] did state that when they dumped him in the park, his legs were all broken and twisted up,” the affidavit says.

When a pair of elderly men stumbled across Biggs’ body, police were suspicious. Biggs was bundled in a suit jacket and sweatshirt, and his pants dangled from one ankle. His blood had settled into the front of his body, as if he’d been lying on his face for hours before dying.

Detectives were sure he’d been killed elsewhere and dumped at the park--but there were no other clues.

“They knew something wasn’t right,” police spokesman Paul said.

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Times researcher Lianne Hart contributed to this report.