‘Whole thing is bizarre.’ Man punched off-duty GA cop before I-75 death, sheriff says
It was just after 9:30 on Sunday night.
A police officer from southeast Georgia, who earlier had driven the few hours inland to Forsyth’s Georgia Public Safety Training Center for a seminar this week on sobriety-testing devices, headed out to grab a burger.
The place he went first wasn’t open, so in his marked squad car he cruised up Interstate 75 toward an exit maybe 10 minutes north that has an all-hours truck stop.
The officer, Robert M. Mydell, who works for the Glynn County Police Department, would later describe to sheriff’s investigators in Monroe County what happened next.
“So he’s in the left lane, he says he’s running about 80 miles an hour,” Monroe Sheriff Brad Freeman said in an interview with The Telegraph this week, recalling Mydell’s account to investigators. “There’s hardly any traffic out there. And he sees this guy coming in the left lane (behind him).”
Mydell, 27, who was at the wheel of a white cruiser with an emergency-light bar on its roof and “POLICE” written in reflective lettering on its rear end, figured, “This guy’s just gonna pass me on the right,” Freeman said.
The oncoming car, a green, four-door 2000-model Acura, was doing 95 mph, maybe 100, the sheriff said.
Instead of swooping around to pass, the Acura “just plows into the back of” the police car, Freeman said.
The impact all but ripped off the Dodge cruiser’s back bumper and caved in its trunk.
“It wasn’t like (the Acura) was running 5 miles an hour more and tapped” Mydell’s car, the sheriff said. “I mean, he crushed (the cruiser).”
In the collision, the Acura, said to have been driven by a 25-year-old man named Markel Matthews, of Forsyth, was “catapulted” and spun down a roughly 30-foot slope on the freeway’s northbound shoulder.
The officer wheeled over to the emergency lane.
The spot, about 4 miles north of Forsyth, lies half a mile south of Johnstonville Road in a patch of interstate where timber has recently been cut along the roadside.
“He kind of collects himself,” Freeman said of the officer, then Mydell stepped out of his patrol car and goes to check on the Acura’s driver.
“Well,” Freeman continued, “the guy (Matthews) gets out of his car and immediately punches the officer in the face, knocks him unconscious.”
‘They get in a scuffle’
The sheriff said that when Mydell, the officer, came to after an instant that Matthews was on top of Mydell, beating him.
“I guess just (Matthews) caught (Mydell) off guard. ... You’re there to check on somebody and (Matthews) attacks him,” Freeman said.
Exactly what happened as the men tussled — there was no known video of the episode as Mydell wasn’t on duty and no in-car cameras were recording — is not certain.
“Some of the stuff we’re not gonna release right now,” Freeman said, “but they get in a scuffle.”
An investigation won’t be completed for weeks, but at some point in the encounter, according to the officer, Matthews told him, “You will have to kill me.”
Matthews was then said to have dashed into the freeway’s three northbound lanes, where he was struck by several cars and killed.
In describing what officer Mydell said happened leading up to that, Freeman said: “(He) managed to get (Matthews) off of him, and tries to go to his car and get his gun, because he didn’t even have a gun on him. ... (Matthews) runs out into traffic and, based on what we know, just basically lays down in the road. And then was hit probably by 12 to 15 cars.”
‘You just don’t know’
Investigators, at least for now, are left with are guesses about what may have prompted Matthews’ actions.
“One theory that we have is that this might have been ‘suicide by police,’ but that’s just a theory,” Freeman said. “The reason this guy did this died with him. You don’t know that you’ll ever know.”
The sheriff said Matthews, who in the past had lived in the Griffin area, was living with a girlfriend in Forsyth.
Freeman said the girlfriend spoke to investigators “and she didn’t really have a lot of insight into it other than the fact that he had left his cellphone” at her house.
“I don’t believe we’ll ever really know exactly what was going through his mind. Was he in some kind of mental distress? You just don’t know,” Freeman said.
There was speculation that Matthews may have targeted the police car.
“The whole thing is bizarre,” the sheriff said. “What’s the odds of him running into a law enforcement officer that’s just (driving) down the road? ... If he was gonna hit somebody (at random) in the rear-end on the interstate, well, obviously he had passed several cars on the interstate, he could have done that. But it’s like he came up on the police car and said, ‘Well, here’s my chance.’ Not that we know he did that, but it would seem like he did that because he would have passed numerous cars before he got to the Glynn County police officer.”
Mydell seemed shaken up, the sheriff said, when he visited the officer while Mydell was being treated at a Forsyth hospital in the hours after the crash.
“You could tell he was a little bit, I guess you’d say, shell-shocked,” Freeman said of Mydell, who half a decade ago was president of student government at the College of Coastal Georgia.
“I’ve never seen a guy with a concussion,” the sheriff continued, “but if I did I would say he looked like he might have had a concussion.”