Chasing Danger

Bailey McKenna had worked a year of landscaping jobs and weekend shifts at a local pub to earn the money for repairs to his dirt bike, paying his mechanic in installments.

Finally, on Nov. 14, 2016, the 18-year-old high school senior from Northeast Philly’s Holmesburg section had the last of the cash in hand. He asked his older brother, Liam McKenna, for a ride in his truck so they could retrieve the red Honda. But Liam was tied up at work.

“He couldn’t wait,” Liam McKenna said. “He was so excited that he paid it off, that he went down there and got it.”

On the way home, Bailey McKenna ran into a group of teens on dirt bikes, recognized a friend in the group, and began riding with them. Then, a police car turned on its lights and sirens. The teens sped off.

Officer Joseph Wolk chased McKenna for at least five blocks up Torresdale Avenue — even though a Philadelphia police directive strictly limits pursuits, allowing them only to prevent imminent danger or to capture a suspect fleeing a violent felony.

Briefly, Wolk seemed to lose sight of McKenna after he peeled off down a side street. Then, as the officer approached an intersection, he spotted the teen coming from the opposite direction. Wolk swerved his SUV across McKenna’s path — a technique not allowed, according to a Philadelphia police directive, “under any circumstances.” They crashed, and McKenna flew off his bike and into a parked car.

The impact left the teen brain-dead. For 10 months, his parents and brother took turns sleeping by his bedside. On Sept. 24, 2017, McKenna died.

Then, in 2019, Wolk spotted another teen on a motor scooter.

The 18-year veteran of the police Highway Patrol unit again gave chase.

And, again, the outcome was disastrous.

Wolk, who remains on the job, has been in a department-leading 10 crashes that a police review board deemed preventable, and has been retrained at least six times, according to police records.

An Inquirer investigation found his record is just part of a larger police accountability crisis in Philadelphia and across Pennsylvania fueling hazardous and unnecessary chases — and disproportionately endangering kids.

The Pennsylvania State Police, which employs fewer officers than Philadelphia, accounts for about 10 times the number of pursuits. Combined, the city and state police departments represented the majority of the nearly 900 pursuits in Philadelphia and its collar counties last year. Across both departments, officers who became involved in disastrous, high-speed chases faced few consequences.

The investigation, based on an analysis of thousands of court dockets, city and state police records obtained under Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law, and interviews with current and former police officers, found:

States across the country have been reckoning with the high price of police pursuits, which are estimated to end in crashes at least 30% of the time and to kill more than 500 people per year.

In 2023, the Police Executive Research Forum, a membership group of national law enforcement leaders, called for limiting pursuits to responding to violent offenses.

Brian Higgins, a former New Jersey police chief and an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said many jurisdictions are trying to identify chase policies that balance the relative harms to public safety: “Is [the alleged crime] that serious that it’s worth [potentially] killing innocent civilians over?”

Unlike many states, Pennsylvania has no law defining reasonable cause for a pursuit. The state requires departments simply to maintain a written policy.

That leaves each of Pennsylvania’s 1,200 police departments with broad discretion in setting policies — and no oversight.

While Philadelphia’s policy forbids chases under most circumstances, the Pennsylvania State Police gives troopers much more leeway.

Both departments are undertaking significantly more chases than they were before the pandemic. A Philadelphia Police Department spokesperson blamed the COVID-era surge in violent crime for that increase, and said the department investigates every crash for policy violations.

A state police spokesperson said the department is “continuously evaluating” its policy for safety concerns. But, he added, jurisdictions across Pennsylvania rely on state troopers “to assist with suppressing violent crime, particularly in areas where local pursuit policies restrict their ability to conduct proactive enforcement.”

Since 2021, police pursuits in Pennsylvania have left at least 59 people dead and 1,500 injured; almost half of those deaths, and nearly two-thirds of the injuries, involved state police.

Drivers ages 15 to 24 are 50% more likely than older drivers to die in a car crash. But they are nearly three times more likely than older drivers to die in connection with a police chase, an Inquirer analysis of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data found.

The most common age for drivers fleeing police in Pennsylvania is 18, state data show. More than one-third of drivers in pursuits are under 25.

One reason is that young people are more impulsive than adults and less adept at evaluating risks, said Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University professor and an expert on adolescent brain development.

“They are more likely to engage in reckless acts because they are more influenced by their belief that there would be positive consequences — which, in this case, would be getting away,” he said.

Being together with peers further amplifies risky behavior, he said.

When young drivers were arrested by state police, they were twice as likely as older drivers to be accompanied by one or more passengers.

Terence Jones, a former Philadelphia police officer who runs an advocacy organization, Total Justice, said chases were a routine part of his job as an officer, and seemed like an important tool to rein in the lawlessness on city streets. He rethought the practice after realizing most of the drivers he was chasing were just kids.

“You’d be surprised how many didn’t technically commit a crime,” Jones said, “or they took their mom’s car without permission.”

In the case of 15-year-old Ryan Miller, the pursuit began after Wolk saw the teen driving his scooter on the wrong side of the road, according to a deposition.

Wolk did not respond to repeated interview requests, and the department declined to make him available to answer questions.

Ryan was an eighth-grade student who loved “anything on wheels,” according to his father, Neal Miller, and he aspired to work as a mechanic.

But Wolk testified that he was concerned that the teen was either intoxicated or suicidal: “I just seen disaster coming. That’s why I took action to stop him.”

Wolk pursued Ryan Miller for about a half-mile, twice swerving his car into Ryan’s path.

In Liam McKenna’s view, Wolk’s tactics exposed the public to more danger.

“The fact that they kept him on and it happened again — there’s no words. It’s unreasonable. It’s ridiculous,” McKenna said. “He [treated] his car like a battering ram.”

Last spring, 17-year-old Tyjana Motley was six months pregnant and craving a taste of freedom.

“She’d been in the house for five months,” said her mother, Octavia Motley. She was strict because she didn’t trust her daughter’s friends. “I didn’t want anything to happen to the baby.”

The sedan was an unmarked state police car. A trooper tried to pull them over. But Isaiah Miller sped off.

That’s when Octavia Motley’s phone rang. It was Tyjana. “She just said he was going too fast, and that she wanted to get out of the car.”

Her daughter sounded terrified, she said. “She was confused about why the police were chasing her.”

Under a Pennsylvania State Police policy that allows troopers to pursue whenever a driver does not stop as directed, no matter the reason for the initial stop, troopers undertook pursuits more than 1,300 times in 2023.

By comparison, New Jersey State Police engaged in just 126 pursuits, in part due to an effort there to curtail chases and reduce injuries.

More than two-thirds of the Pennsylvania state trooper pursuits were in response to alleged traffic violations, or other offenses normally dealt with by writing a ticket.

And an Inquirer analysis of court dockets found that surprisingly few pursuits yield criminal convictions.

Since 2021, only about one-third of state police pursuits resulted in a conviction of a driver or passengers for a misdemeanor or felony. But about a quarter of those convictions were for offenses related to fleeing rather than for any underlying crime. (Those figures exclude summary and traffic offenses, and any relatively low-level cases accepted into diversion programs and subsequently expunged.)

About 6% of all state police pursuits eventually yielded a conviction for a felony other than fleeing police — mostly intoxicated driving, car theft, or aggravated assault.

But chases for low-level charges can carry a high cost.

About 30% of pursuits in Pennsylvania result in crashes. (In New Jersey, where policy limits dangerous driving maneuvers and the circumstances under which pursuits are permitted — for instance, ordering officers to terminate pursuits if they have the driver’s identity and could make an arrest later — just over 10% of pursuits end in crashes.)

State police pursuits have caused more than $24 million in damage since 2019.

The state has also paid out more than $15 million for crash-related lawsuits in the last several years. More than half that stemmed from a single incident, when state police in Bristol spotted a 17-year-old and chased him. The teen wound up crashing into a car carrying a woman and five children, all of whom suffered serious injuries.

More lawsuits involving high-speed state police chases are pending, including one filed by the family of a Lancaster County woman, Alicia Whisler, who was killed while driving her child to school in 2022, and another by a Norristown man who survived a crash in 2023.

A spokesperson said that Pennsylvania State Police investigate all crashes that result in death or serious injury — but that the outcomes “are considered personnel matters and cannot be disclosed.”

Officers in the state police’s Troop K Media station, who chased Isaiah Miller’s Taurus, conducted the most pursuits of any unit over the last four years.

Media was also alone among state police units in pursuing suspected shoplifters, dockets show. The troopers did so at least 11 times since 2021.

In February 2024, Media troopers spotted a car carrying four young adults — alleged Lululemon shoplifters — and chased that car until it crashed.

A few months later, according to news reports, police suspected Tyjana Motley and her friends of having shoplifted from Lululemon as well.

According to a lawsuit Octavia Motley and others filed, one trooper rammed the Ford Taurus full of teens with his police car. A door swung open as a backseat passenger tried to get out. Then Isaiah Miller accelerated and the door slammed shut. The Ford sped down Route 322 in a 70-mph chase.

Octavia Motley knew little of that as her daughter screamed into the phone for help.

She heard a horrible crash — then silence, and then sirens.

The car had collided with a concrete bridge embankment. Ikeam Rogers, 20, Ka-Lyn Billups, 21, and the driver, Isaiah Miller, all died in the crash.

Tyjana Motley was rushed to the hospital, where doctors performed an emergency C-section. But neither she nor her unborn son survived.

Compared with the wide discretion afforded state police, Philadelphia police may pursue suspects only in limited circumstances. As a result, they report engaging in fewer chases — under 150 a year.

Of the reported pursuits, the Philadelphia Police Department concluded only around half were justified.

Yet, unjustified pursuits rarely lead to discipline, U.S. District Judge Mitchell Goldberg noted in a 2016 case: “Despite finding dozens of pursuits each year to be unjustified, in the five years preceding the injury the Department sustained only six findings that officers violated [the directive].”

Some pursuits are not formally reported, court records show.

In 2020, when Philadelphia Officer Christian Kane took off in pursuit of a suspected drug dealer, his partner misled police dispatch about the chase, an internal investigation found. The chase ended when the suspect crashed into another car, killing a 47-year-old mother of four, Virgen Martinez.

In 2017, another officer, Dwayne Merrell, also failed to notify supervisors of a six-mile chase that ended when the 17-year-old suspect struck a woman and child in a crosswalk — leaving them unconscious, according to court records.

The total number of reported crashes involving Philadelphia police was about 500 annually between 2019 and 2023, injuring a total of around 750 officers and civilians.

Not all of those were pursuit-related. But almost two-thirds of the crashes were preventable, according to the department’s Safety Review Board. The records show that the board recommended discipline in only about 30% of preventable crashes.

In many cases, officers were soon back behind the wheel.

Merrell, for one, was driving again in 2020, when he got into his seventh preventable crash in 11 years.

Officer Marc Peterson had been in four crashes and retrained eight times when he chased an alleged stolen car in 2019. The fleeing car crashed into a postal worker, crushing his legs, according to a lawsuit the city settled for $250,000.

A department spokesperson said Kane, Merrell, and Peterson all received retraining, but did not specify what that entailed and declined to make the officers available for interviews. Kane declined to comment, and the other officers did not respond to requests for comment.

The department has never stripped an officer of driving clearance, the spokesperson said, but sometimes sends a supervisor to ride along as a form of retraining.

That was the case for Officer Anthony Jann — who in 2020 ran a stop sign and collided with a passing SUV, injuring two people, according to a lawsuit the city settled for $325,000. He was then in another preventable crash in April 2023.

That May, a 22nd District sergeant got into the car with Jann to ride along on a routine patrol.

Then, Jann pursued a suspect, went the wrong way down a one-way street, collided with the fleeing vehicle — and crashed into a nearby home. The crash left the sergeant with a fractured spine, according to a source with direct knowledge of the situation who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss it. Nearly two years later, the sergeant has not returned to active duty, the department spokesperson said.

Jann, who remains on the job, did not respond to a request for comment.

Higgins said many officers still associate chases with good police work that can lead to apprehending violent felons.

Despite knowing the risks, he said, “there is always this is other voice: ‘Why are they running?‘”

Some Philadelphia police officers blamed the department’s strict chase rules for enabling a culture of lawlessness, particularly with dirt bikes.

The Millers’ house rules were clear: Ryan Miller was not allowed to ride his Yamaha scooter on the street. But on a sunny May afternoon in 2019, the teenager rolled his scooter out onto Tacony Street and took off.

Then Wolk spotted him driving the wrong way, and chased him through the residential neighborhood.

Twice, Wolk swerved his SUV into the path of Ryan’s bike. Each time, Ryan managed to evade him.

Then a tow-truck driver joined the chase. (Though not permitted, that is not unheard-of, according to Jones, the ex-cop and activist who, like Wolk, worked Highway Patrol.)

As Wolk dropped back, the tow-truck took the lead. Moments later, Ryan sped through a red light and collided with a tractor-trailer. He was killed instantly.

Wolk initially told investigators there had been no pursuit, according to court records.

Neal and Donna Miller, Ryan’s parents, went door to door, collecting surveillance footage and speaking with witnesses, to piece together what happened to their son, Neal Miller said.

They would not learn about Wolk’s driving record until later.

Higgins, the former New Jersey police chief, said departments should have an early-warning system to flag officers involved in multiple crashes.

Four collisions, he said, would be a lot for a veteran officer over the course of a career. And depending on the severity of the crash, discipline should range from extensive retraining to reassignment, desk duty, or suspension.

But the Philadelphia Police Department does not provide any tactical pursuit training, let alone retraining.

For patrol driving, the sole on-road training test at the Northeast Philadelphia police academy involves navigating a winding obstacle course with traffic cones in a parking lot. Retraining includes refresher courses on policy and occasional supervised shifts.

A police department spokesperson said disciplinary and retraining recommendations are “case dependent” and declined to elaborate on specific outcomes.

In pursuing Ryan Miller, Internal Affairs concluded, Wolk violated multiple directives. It is not clear if he faced any discipline.

The Millers sued the city and Wolk.

In the deposition, Wolk said he had been involved in about 10 pursuits. He expressed regret over Ryan’s death — particularly that he had almost stopped Ryan, but that he had gotten away. Wolk wished he “would have tackled him so all this would have never happened.”

But the city argued it was Ryan’s own recklessness, not Wolk’s pursuit, that caused the crash. A federal judge dismissed the case, finding the Millers did not show Wolk intended to harm Ryan. The Millers are now appealing that decision.

“The person that killed him is still walking free,” Neal Miller said, “so how do you grieve?”

Staff writer Chris A. Williams contributed to this article.

This article was supported in part by funding from the Stoneleigh Foundation, a philanthropic organization seeking to improve the life outcomes of young people. Inquirer articles are created independently of donor support.