Murder Trial Begins in ‘Windshield’ Death

A former nurse’s aide pleaded guilty to a lesser count Monday before going to trial on a murder charge, accused of hitting a homeless man with her car and leaving him stuck in the windshield as she drove home.

Chante Jawan Mallard, 27, faces life in prison if convicted of first-degree murder.

She pleaded guilty to a charge of evidence tampering before attorneys began their opening statements on the murder charge.

Prosecutor Christy Jack portrayed Mallard as a selfish woman who allowed 37-year-old Gregory Biggs to die an inhumane death because she was more interested in helping herself than her victim.

Reading from a police report, Jack said Mallard smoked pot, took ecstasy and drank heavily with a friend shortly before she drove home in the early hours of Oct. 26, 2001.

Biggs was apparently walking on the shoulder of the road. Mallard told officers that her car hit him with such force that his head and shoulders jammed into the windshield and his legs were bent over the roof, his pants tearing almost completely off his body.

Mallard stopped briefly to try and get Biggs off her car, but when she couldn’t, she drove about a mile to her home, Jack said.

When she got her house, Mallard called one of her friends to pick her up, Jack said. The friend complied while Biggs died in Mallard’s garage, Jack said.

“She finally did make a call, but the help wasn’t for him, the help was for her,” Jack said.

She and her friend went to find Mallard’s ex-boyfriend to figure out what to do next. When they couldn’t find him, they went back to the home. Jack said Mallard showed the friend into the garage, where Biggs had died, still lodged and bleeding in the jagged windshield.

The friend told Mallard to call 911, Jack said.

“Chante refused, because she didn’t want her parents to know what she’d done and didn’t want to go to jail,” she said.

Defense attorney Jeff Kearney said Mallard was not thinking clearly because she was in a drug-induced haze. He said she doesn’t dispute what happened, but it was an accident, not murder.

He said after Mallard pulled into her garage and lowered the door, she sat in the car and cried, repeatedly apologizing to Biggs.

“She was hysterical, terrorized and confused,” he said.

When Mallard’s friend arrived at her home, “she was blabbing, ‘Lord, I’m sorry, what do I do?” Kearney said.

Biggs, a former bricklayer who had been living in a homeless shelter, was found dead the next day, his body dumped in a park.

Kearney said Clete Jackson, one of two men who pleaded guilty to helping dump Biggs’ body, orchestrated moving Biggs to the park.

Jackson received at a 10-year sentence for tampering with evidence. His cousin, Herbert Tyrone Cleveland, received nine years. As part of plea agreements, they were to testify at Mallard’s trial.

Police initially said Biggs lived for several days in Mallard’s garage, slowly bleeding to death from his multiple fractures and cuts.

But Tarrant County Medical Examiner Nizam Peerwani later said Biggs, whose left leg was nearly amputated, probably lived only a few hours after he was hit. He could have survived if he had received medical attention, Peerwani said.

When Biggs’ body was found in the park, authorities had no leads until four months later, when a tipster said Mallard talked about the incident at a party.

The day after interviewing the tipster in February 2002, detectives went to Mallard’s house with a search warrant, and they said she confessed.

Police found the car in the garage, the seats missing and the windshield and rear glass broken. Officers said they found dark stains on the passenger-side floorboard and burned car seats in her back yard.

During the opening statements, Mallard sat quietly as her family and Biggs’ mother and son sat in the courtroom crowded with about 50 spectators.