The SUV crash that caused the massive Sept. 16 pipeline explosion and fire near the border of Deer Park and La Porte was not an accident and wasn’t caused by the driver suffering from a medical event, top officials from the two cities told Houston Landing.

The statements by Deer Park’s mayor and La Porte’s emergency response coordinator, which were made without providing supporting details or evidence, are at odds with family members’ beliefs that the driver suffered a seizure before the crash.

“It was a criminal investigation because for all intents and purposes, it was an intentional act,” Deer Park Mayor Jerry Mouton, Jr., said Tuesday evening. “You don’t just accidentally end up where that car ended up at. It wasn’t an accident.”

La Porte’s emergency management coordinator, Johnny Morales, told the Landing in a separate interview that the cause of the crash “was not medical in nature.”  Morales and Mouton did not provide further details.

“You can follow up with the police department. They released the investigation report,” Mouton said. “That’s been a case that’s pretty much cleared and shut at this point.”

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But a spokesman for the Deer Park Police Department said the investigation is still ongoing and no report has been released. 

“While we have opinions of what happened, we’re sticking with what’s supported by facts,” Deer Park Police Lieutenant Chris Brown said Wednesday. He said the department is still waiting on the medical examiner’s office to complete its investigation. “So we have not made any determinations as of right now,” Brown said. 

The statements by Deer Park’s mayor and La Porte’s emergency official surprised the family of Jonathan McEvoy, Sr., the 51-year-old man who died in the inferno after the white Lexus SUV he was driving rammed through a chain-link fence and into the above-ground pipeline after leaving a nearby Walmart Supercenter parking lot.

The collision ruptured the pipeline, igniting the natural gas liquids it was carrying and spewing a tower of flames that burned for more than three days. The intense heat burned and melted power lines, parts of nearby homes and cars, and reduced McEvoy’s body to bone fragments. Hundreds of homes and businesses in Deer Park and La Porte were evacuated or lost power.

“We were all led to believe he had a seizure,” said the man’s eldest son, Jonathan McEvoy, Jr., during a brief call while he worked a night shift at a refinery on Tuesday. He said nobody from Deer Park had told him the investigation into his father’s death had been completed.

Delma McEvoy, who was married to Jonathan McEvoy, Sr. for about 28 years before amicably divorcing almost two years ago, said she can’t imagine any scenario where he would have crashed the car intentionally. 

“I don’t believe that. That’s not something he would do. He doesn’t have that in him to do something like that,” said Delma McEvoy.

She said her ex-husband had recently suffered from occasional, infrequent seizures in which his body would stiffen and he would recover with no memory that anything had happened. 

Jonathan McEvoy, Sr., had been in the process of seeking treatment for seizures at the time he crashed the SUV into the pipeline, Delma McEvoy said. Evaluation of his condition had been delayed, she said, by bureaucratic issues associated with workers compensation medical coverage for the problem after he fell during a seizure while working at his former job for a package delivery company.

Delma McEvoy said family members told police about the seizures, the workers comp case and the co-worker who witnessed the fall. 

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Brown, the Deer Park police spokesman, told Houston Landing that the potential for a seizure causing the crash “has been considered. But like I said, everything’s still under investigation.”

The impression left on family members, however, has been that investigators have long assumed the collision was intentional. 

Delma McEvoy said she thinks investigators have had a difficult time seeing how it could be possible the SUV driven by her ex-husband – if he were unconscious while having a seizure – could leave the paved Walmart parking lot, travel across an expanse of open grassy field end up crashing into one of the handful of above-ground pipeline structures that dot the area.

She said the implication of investigators’ questions have been “what are the odds of somebody having a seizure, what are the odds of them going and picking up speed and hitting – of all spots – hitting that spot, right?”

Investigators asked family and close friends if Jonathan McEvoy Sr. had left any note, or had been in any arguments, or if he had been paid to hit the pipeline, Delma McEvoy said.

Yet there was no note left behind, no arguments and no indication of anything out of the ordinary in the days and hours before the Monday morning crash on Sept. 16, she said.

On the Saturday before the crash, Delma McEvoy said her ex-husband called her, as he typically does, to catch up on how their youngest son was doing in his first semester away at college and chat about other events like his recent trip to Utah for work.

“He was his regular self, and we laughed and we talked,” she said. On Sunday, he ran errands with their eldest son. 

Monday morning, in the hours before the 10 a.m. crash, was equally mundane, according to what Delma McEvoy says her ex-husband’s roommate has told the family. 

“He just woke up in the morning and was going to go to Walmart, he was going to get some shoes,” Delma McEvoy said. The roommate’s house in Deer Park was about five minutes from Walmart. He had asked the roommate if she wanted to go shopping with him but she wasn’t interested, Delma McEvoy said. 

Jonathan McEvoy Sr. then drove his roommate’s white SUV to Walmart and sent her a text to let her know he had arrived since he didn’t often use her car, Delma McEvoy said. 

Various witnesses in the in the parking lot that morning would later tell reporters they had seen what some described as a possibly an elderly driver, possibly a woman hunched over in the slow-moving SUV, before the vehicle inexplicably left Walmart’s paved parking lot and gained speed as it drove across the grassy utility right of way, then crashed through the chain-link fence that had surrounded the natural gas liquids pipeline operated by Energy Transfer Company.

It’s unclear when the Deer Park Police Department investigation will be completed. A spokesperson for the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences said Wednesday that the medical examiner’s investigation of the case is still pending and there is no estimated date for its completion. 

Alison Young is Houston Landing’s Associate Editor-Investigations. You can reach her at alison@houstonlanding.org.

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