Police chase persons of interest in Royse City double murder
ROYSE CITY, Texas - Two men that police hoped to question about a recent double murder were taken into custody at the end of a high-speed chase that went through four cities Wednesday morning.
The chase began after police from Royse City, Rowlett, the Texas Rangers and the Texas Department of Public Safety arrested two people for a double murder that happened in Royse City on Feb. 3.
As the officers were executing one of the warrants in Rowlett, they saw two more persons of interest drive by. The officers tried to stop them but instead, they took off in a white car.
Video from SKY 4 showed officers chasing the car west on Interstate 30 into Dallas. They went north on Highway 75, south again and around the city a few times before the car finally stopped near I-30 and Bobtown Road in Garland after heading through Mesquite.
“The whole time, we was doing hand demonstrations, put your hands up, put your hands up,” said Dorothy Brown, who saw the chase.
The driver, 18-year-old Jaraveon Randle, was taken into custody. His 18-year-old passenger was texting his girlfriend throughout the chase.
“I was on the phone the whole time, the whole time the high-speed chase was happening,” the passenger’s girlfriend, Micah Traylor, said. “He was in the car and he was telling the dude to pull over and the dude didn’t want to pull over.”
Both the driver and the passenger were then taken into custody without incident. It’s not clear what charges they may face.
Royse City police said investigators want to talk them about the Feb. 3 murder. Two people were shot and killed in the Woodland Creek subdivision.
The names of the two murder victims and the two murder suspects who were arrested before Wednesday's chase have not yet been released.
Rowlett police say both men were persons of interest who drove up to a house on Mariner Drive Wednesday as police were serving a capital murder warrant for the February shooting death of two teenage boys — a current and former student of Royse City High School.
Another warrant was being served simultaneously in Arlington for the same crime.
Both capital murder suspects were taken into custody, but when police encountered Randle and his passenger driving by the Rowlett house, they tried to pull them over.
That’s when police say they took off, reaching high speeds as they tried to evade arrest.
“We was begging, ‘Put your hands up, put your hands out the window,’ and they did it. And when they got out the car, I told them like this, I demonstrated [putting their hands out] and I said do this,” Brown added. “I said lay down and they laid down. As he was laying down, they was both looking at me like that. I said lay down.”