In the months since Samuel Williams died after his motorbike collided with an unmarked NYPD car that swerved in front of him during a police pursuit, his family has received only one communication from the city: a bill for $3,429.23.
It arrived in a letter addressed to Williams seeking payment for the damages to the police car, 60 days after he was tossed from his motorbike on the University Heights Bridge that connects Manhattan to The Bronx. The 36-year-old dad of a 6-year-old daughter died the day after the collision.
“Our records indicate that your vehicle damaged city property on the above date,” reads the July 2023 letter, which came from the office of the city comptroller, Brad Lander. “City of New York is seeking reimbursement for these damages.”
Williams was an avid street biker who doted on his daughter with weekly shopping trips and visits to the nail salon, according to his mom and sister. His sister, Sha-Sha Prince, said getting the bill from the city so soon after his death was “horrible.”
“You kill someone in May, and two months later you send a bill for damages you caused?” Prince, 48, told THE CITY. “It felt like getting punched in the stomach not once but twice.”
Prince said the family didn’t respond to the request for payment.
A spokesperson for the comptroller’s office said the office handles claims for damages to NYPD vehicles regularly, but that in this case they weren’t notified about Williams’ death. The spokesperson said they’re withdrawing the reimbursement request.
“I’m outraged by this. It appears that the NYPD sent us a report that failed to tell us that Mr. Williams had died, or even that it was a police chase, and that we relied on their report in sending a claim form,” said Lander. “I am deeply sorry for the family’s loss and I am initiating an internal review of our processes to make sure nothing like this happens again.”
Williams is among at least a dozen people who were killed following police vehicle pursuits in the past two years, which have also injured hundreds, under an invigorated NYPD chase policy that Mayor Eric Adams said this week is intended to deter people from fleeing after they’re pulled over.
Many of the pursuits are sparked by relatively minor infractions or alleged crimes, such as traffic violations, or suspicion that a vehicle is stolen or illegal to ride on the streets of New York City.
The NYPD has refused to say what prompted the pursuit of Williams or provide even basic information about the incident despite a dozen requests from THE CITY emailed over the past year, eight of which were also addressed to Adams.
They previously told Bronx News 12, which broke the story about the fatal incident, that Williams’ bike was unregistered and that he evaded attempts to pull him over.
The incident is under investigation by the office of State Attorney General Letitia James, which on Thursday released two short clips from police body-worn cameras following a request for the footage by THE CITY.
The footage shows that two police officers who were driving unmarked vehicles in the opposite direction as Williams both turned their vehicles into his oncoming path.
Williams can be seen riding his motorbike past the first vehicle but seemingly colliding into the second vehicle — which had just veered sharply into his path — and flying into the air.
An attorney for Williams, whose family is suing the NYPD in state court over Williams’ death, said the video confirms testimony from a witness who claimed the unmarked NYPD car veered across two double lines before striking Williams head-on.
“You see the officer take his car, cut Samuel off, causing a collision. Samuel goes — he’s ejected from the bike — and you literally see him like a Superman scene fly right over the hood of the car, having no way to brace himself for an impact,” said the attorney, Jaime Santana. “There’s no question that officer’s actions, they were the proximate cause of Samuel’s death. Unequivocally.”
Santana also noted that despite Williams’ intense suffering from his injuries, he was kept propped up on the hood of a vehicle with his hands cuffed together, according to a longer video he and the family were shown by the office of the State Attorney General.
“He’s on video asking officers ‘Why? Why would you do something like that? You know, you tried to kill me. I’m a father. I have a daughter.’”
Williams’ family said they hope the state attorney general files criminal charges against Perez, and that he loses his job at the NYPD.
“I want him off the force, he can never work again, can never be a cop again,” said Williams’ mother, Joyce Fogg. “They left a child fatherless.”
Perez couldn’t be reached for comment, and the Police Benevolent Association, the union for NYPD officers, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The fatal encounter is also being investigated by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an NYPD watchdog that can recommend penalties for NYPD officers who commit misconduct.
An NYPD spokesperson who declined to share their name said by email the driver of the vehicle — Raymond Perez, who is assigned to the department’s quality of life enforcement unit known as the Community Response Team (CRT) — was not suspended following the collision. The spokesperson said the incident is still under investigation by the department’s Force Investigation Division.
Earlier this week, THE CITY published an analysis that showed crashes following police vehicle pursuits have skyrocketed in the past two years, under the leadership of Chief of Patrol John Chell and Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey.
The data shows at least seven people have died and 315 have been injured this year amid the massive jump in pursuits and crashes.
Asked about the department’s continued commitment to the aggressive policy, Adams said Monday it came in response to perceptions that fleeing from the police brought no consequences.
“We created a culture in this city where law enforcement was a mockery, and any and everything goes, and I just refuse to allow that to continue,” Adams said at his weekly press conference. “And we don’t want one life lost. But it’s not being lost because the police are saying, well, we want to go chase someone — it’s being lost because a bad person decides they’re going to flee the police and have a total disregard of the safety of the people that’s here.”
But in this case, Santana, the attorney, said the whole thing amounted to an overreaction to a traffic infraction.
“This wasn’t a situation where the cops were in hot pursuit of a felon who was fleeing. At most, he would have been stopped, detained, presumably given a summons of some sort, they would have taken the bike and it would have been over. That was it,” said Santana. “Was it worth killing someone? Of course not.”
