For six months, Orlando has been haunted by the death of Gerald Neal, a 59-year-old homeless man who was walking in the Holden Heights neighborhood at twilight when he was struck by two vehicles — first a car driven by a man apparently fleeing police, then by the pursuing police truck.
There have been questions about this case from the start — and as facts slowly came to light, more have been raised. The city’s report released after the Feb. 12 incident didn’t even include the fact that a chase was underway when Neal was killed, saying the officer involved in the crash was “conducting a traffic infraction investigation.”
Since then, the Orlando Sentinel and other media outlets have gradually extracted more information from affidavits, court records and most recently, body-cam video tha