Another mother fights to pull answers from the NC Highway Patrol after son’s death
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Mother sues N.C. Highway Patrol after son died during trooper’s high-speed attempt
- Investigations show policy breaches, undisclosed reports and minimal discipline
- Appeals court revived negligence claims; Supreme Court paused case pending review
Before her son left for his senior year at East Carolina University, Lisa Higgins worried the way mothers do about him riding in the front seat of a State Highway Patrol car during an internship.
Would he wear a bulletproof vest?, she remembers asking. Carry a gun?
Michael Higgins told her all would be OK. His supervisors told him he’d ride with an experienced trooper out of harm’s way, he said.
Those promises haunt Lisa. Michael wasn’t kept safe. And it wasn’t a gunman who put him in danger. It was men wearing the silver badge that Michael dreamed of earning one day.
“They put him in harm’s way, and now he is not here,” Lisa told The News & Observer in a series of interviews.
Michael, 22, died buckled into the front seat of a trooper patrol car whose driver lost control after reaching at least 113 mph just before he hit a curb on a dark county road. Highway Patrol policy makes clear the trooper who crashed the car wasn’t supposed to have an intern on a ride-along, according to court documents.
Even more troubling, Lisa contends, the Highway Patrol kept key facts from her about what happened that night. After more than two years of “double-talk,” Lisa concluded they weren’t taking her seriously, she said, forcing her to file a lawsuit against troopers at the agency Michael sought to work for.
“I believe in law enforcement, but the way law enforcement is treating me and my family — it’s just a disgrace. It’s torture,” she said, during an interview on the rural Pitt County road where Michael died.
A News & Observer review of lawsuits and court settlements revealed four more cases where Highway Patrol officials took steps to shield themselves from scrutiny after controversial actions by troopers.
In two instances, a Highway Patrol official and a prosecutor offered to dismiss criminal charges against people only if they agreed not to sue.
Highway Patrol officials declined to answer questions about the lawsuit linked to Michael’s death or about the other cases. Pitt County District Attorney Faris Dixon Jr. didn’t respond to The N&O’s phone messages and texts.
What happened to Michael?
In the first hour after midnight on a muggy August night, Trooper Omar Romero Mendoza and Michael responded to a wreck in eastern Pitt County, at the intersection of Grimesland Bridge and Smithtown roads.
A woman who’d been drinking ran a stop sign and crashed into a ditch, injuring herself and a passenger, according to court records and interviews about the night of Aug. 22, 2020.
A third woman, who knew the two in the wreck, stopped to help. Later, she got back behind the wheel to follow an ambulance carrying her friends down Smithtown Road.
“Go stop her. She’s drunk,” another trooper at the scene told Romero, court documents state.
The woman’s head start opened a stretch between them on a dark country road, which Romero had never driven on before.
Romero slammed his foot to the gas, leaving black skid marks that still stain the pavement. The black-and-gray patrol car tore down the road lined with scattered homes, cow pastures and wooded lots.
113 mph, one hand on the wheel
Romero later testified that at 113 mph, he still felt in control — even with only his left, nondominant hand on the wheel. Less than a mile from the crash scene, he missed a yellow warning sign and the first curve that followed.
Romero pressed the brakes, feeding the car’s loss of control and launching it over a farm driveway, striking a wooden utility pole on its passenger side, bouncing off trees and smashing through a white wooden fence.
Responding crews cut Michael from the patrol car, its passenger side completely crumpled. An EMS worker cut through his seatbelt.
He was pronounced dead on the side of the road, among scattered black and gray pieces of the crushed patrol car.
While Highway Patrol investigative reports that followed were highly critical of Romero, his punishment was minimal.
But Lisa didn’t know that for years.
Lisa isn’t the only North Carolina mother who has had to fight for answers about the behavior of Highway Patrol members.
Tyrone Mason died in October 2024 after crashing his car on Capital Boulevard in Raleigh. Raleigh police told Henrietta Mason, his mother, repeatedly that the trooper who called in the crash wasn’t involved, Mason said. But Mason knew they were wrong.
After the Durham woman convinced a State Bureau of Investigation official that there was more to the story, an investigation revealed a shocking conversation. Body cam video recorded a trooper and his supervisor agreeing to lie to Raleigh police and say the trooper had not attempted to stop Mason’s car before the fatal crash, according to court documents released in May.
It was Mason’s experience that prompted The N&O to investigate other allegations against the state’s Highway Patrol.
Seeking answers for years
Before the chase, Michael had grown from a boy strapping police lights to his bike and pretending to pull over his younger brother, to a young man finishing his last year at East Carolina University in a hurry to become a local officer or a trooper.
The bigger dream was to work his way up the federal system and become a Drug Enforcement Administration agent.
A trooper told her Michael had died in a car wreck, but didn’t offer any details, she said.
After the crash, a Highway Patrol news release acknowledged that Michael died after a trooper lost control of the car while attempting to stop a suspected drunk driver. Within days, the agency honored Michael by naming him an honorary trooper.
Officials told Lisa that a report on the wreck should be ready in three months, which she said did not happen. Lisa and her mother repeatedly met with Highway Patrol leadership and the Pitt County District Attorney’s office, seeking answers about what happened.
But she wasn’t getting the full story, she said.
“I should have had a lot of answers before I did, and it’s a disgrace,” said Lisa, whose family started a scholarship in Michael’s honor for teens pursuing a degree in criminal justice studies at ECU.
$1 million settlement offer
Her first attorney was offered a $1 million settlement before they filed a lawsuit, but signing it would both limit access to information and the Highway Patrol would have refused to acknowledge wrongdoing, she and her current lawyer confirmed. So Lisa turned it down.
She hired lawyer Jim White of Chapel Hill to find answers and focus on accountability.
White filed a lawsuit in April 2022, alleging “gross negligence” and “willful and wanton conduct” by Trooper Brandon Cruz, who was at the crash scene, Romero and supervisors.
That enabled Lisa to read the accident reconstruction report, watch interior and exterior patrol car video from the patrol car, and sit through depositions — sworn, pre-trial interviews — of one Highway Patrol member after another.
“We kind of found out how many people failed Michael,” Lisa said.
An ‘inevitable’ crash and a broken rule
Among the many things that Lisa learned from pushing so hard was the danger from Trooper Romero’s driving.
“The probability of a collision occurring was inevitable at that speed, and the severity of personal injury and/or property damage was extremely high,” the Highway Patrol’s 2020 reconstruction report states.
“This action led to the collision that resulted in the death of Michael Steven Higgins,” states a Highway Patrol personnel report.
Also, what Michael told her — that he’d ride with a senior trooper or field training officer — wasn’t just a promise. It was required.
For Michael’s final ride-along, he was paired with Trooper Brandon Cruz. But Cruz had “some errands to run” and passed along Trooper Romero’s number, the lawsuit states.
Neither Cruz nor Romero, both about 26 years old, held a high enough rank to take interns on ride-alongs under Highway Patrol policy.
A personnel report, dated just over a year after the crash, found that Romero had “grossly inefficient job performance.”
Romero’s punishment listed on the sheet: a written warning.
‘He just made a bad call’
Michael’s mother’s lawsuit contends Romero ignored policies prohibiting chases with civilians in the car, and also failed to notify a supervisor about the chase.
State law allows law enforcement to exceed the speed limit “when operated with due regard to safety” when chasing suspected law violators. The exemption, however, doesn’t protect police from “the consequences of a reckless disregard for the safety of others,” the law states.
In court filings and hearings, troopers’ attorneys, who include contract lawyers working with those in the Attorney General’s Office, disputed the assertion that the crash violated the chase policy. In fact, the situation technically didn’t involve a chase, they argue.
Instead, Romero was attempting to catch up to a woman suspected of driving drunk, a leading cause of traffic deaths nationwide, Romero’s attorney, Brian Williams, said at a recent hearing, according to a transcript.
It wasn’t improper for him to go fast, Williams said. He just didn’t expect the curve.
“The mistakes that were made were confined to a three-to-four-second period as he approached the curve,” Williams said. “He just made a bad call.”
Where the lawsuit stands
It’s not clear whether Lisa’s lawsuit will ever get in front of a jury.
In June 2023, Wilson County Judge William Wolfe ruled the case against Romero didn’t meet the legal threshold for gross negligence or willful and wanton conduct and dismissed it.
Lisa appealed. On Jan. 15, a divided N.C. Court of Appeals revived the lawsuit.
Romero took part in “a chase at an unnecessarily high speed, showing reckless disregard” for Michael’s safety, Judge John S. Arrowood wrote in an opinion.
“It should be for the jury to determine whether defendant Romero’s actions were needless or manifested a reckless indifference to the rights of Michael,” he wrote.
Romero’s attorneys appealed to the Supreme Court, warning the ruling could erode officers’ immunity, a protection they say allows police to do their jobs without hesitation.
“This ruling has a chilling effect on daily law enforcement activities on public roads, state-wide,” attorneys representing the troopers argued in court documents.
On Feb. 21, the Supreme Court paused the lawsuit while it weighs whether it will consider the case. There is no deadline for it to make a decision.
Michael’s last minutes
Lisa wants much more to come from the loss and grief.
She wants the Highway Patrol to train its troopers better, follow its own rules, and bring in outside investigators when officers are accused of wrongdoing. She also wants more transparency for families like hers.
One of the hardest revelations for Lisa after filing the suit, she said, was what she witnessed in the patrol-car video.
A Highway Patrol official told her about a week after the wreck that he had seen it.
“How did he look?” Lisa asked about her son.
Happy, she said the official told her.
But when she watched at home, she saw Michael glancing at the speed, then the road. Her heart broke.
He wasn’t happy, she said.
“He was scared.”
Virginia Bridges covers criminal justice in the Triangle and across North Carolina for The News & Observer. Her work is produced with financial support from the nonprofit The Just Trust. The N&O maintains full editorial control of its journalism.
This story was originally published December 18, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
