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BRISTOW, Okla. — Two Mannford, Oklahoma, police officers misled colleagues by falsely alleging a driver had tried to run over them when she fled a traffic stop for a paper tag issue, a Tulsa World investigation shows. 

An Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper  with a maneuver that crashed the woman's car into a tree the night of Nov. 25 in rural Creek County. Crystal Marie Price — a 36-year-old Bristow mother of three boys — and her passenger, Dario Hendrix, 43, were both killed.

Mannford police had Price’s information from the get-go and could have opted to seek an arrest warrant to pick her up. Instead, police pursued her for an extended time at high speeds.

After that night, the officers' false claims about Price grew when put to paper.

Tristan Stacks and Connor Harrison each wrote in their reports that Price swerved at officers and struck Stacks with the side of her car. However, on the night of the chase, neither officer voiced that Stacks supposedly had been hit.

Their allegations are disproven by body-cam video reviewed by the Tulsa World and Lee Enterprises’ Public Service Journalism team. Both officers were off to the left side of Price's car when she drove off — neither officer in her path — and her wheels stayed straight.

The footage also indicates that Highway Patrol Trooper Robert Darnell didn’t seem to know there was a passenger in the car when Darnell intentionally hit it on Oklahoma 16 just east of Bristow.

Price's family members say they are devastated and without answers as they struggle to come to terms with her death.

KayCee Ragland, one of Price's two younger sisters, said neither the Highway Patrol nor Mannford police were forthcoming with information. And Ragland recalled how awful social media comments were from the public.

"They think they know the story, but people who know her know she's not some criminal," Ragland said of Price. "We promise you, this is a normal mom, and we don't understand how it even got to that point."

Mannford Deputy Chief Brett Gipson said there were no disciplinary findings or actions taken with Stacks and Harrison. Gipson and Police Chief Jerry Ridley didn't respond to specific questions about the chase.

The Oklahoma Highway Patrol wouldn’t respond to questions for the article.

Unlike Mannford police, OHP hasn't provided any records in response to the open records request from the World and Lee for documents and video.

Department of Public Safety Commissioner Tim Tipton — who was appointed nearly four years ago by Gov. Kevin Stitt — has refused to engage with the World and Lee or answer questions about the Highway Patrol's trend of deadly car chases.

 has uncovered reckless OHP trooper actions and false or misleading statements, shoddy record-keeping, failure to address "alarming" concerns expressed by commanders, and unwillingness to formally review several fatal pursuits despite red flags.

Families remember the two who died

Meshica Johnson said her biological brother, the passenger who died in Price's car, struggled in life with alcohol addiction and mental health as he tried to "find where he belonged in this world."

Hendrix had been unhoused for some time in Oklahoma after he left California for an attempt at a fresh start.

Johnson said her family wanted to get him into treatment. She said Hendrix aimed to become a better person for himself and his kids — but law enforcement took away that chance.

“Here in California, you get pulled over for an expired tag, they give you a ‘fix-it ticket,'” Johnson said. “You go and you take care of it. You don’t kill them.”

A fix-it ticket in California allows the person to correct the violation and show proof of the correction to a court of law.

The World and Lee spoke with Price's two sisters, her father, mother and stepmother, in a tearful interview recently at BDIW Law near downtown Tulsa. Attorneys Derek Ingle and Mike Jones are representing them.

Price was described as the family's glue who lived to take care of her three boys, ages 9, 11 and 15.

Family say Julian, David, and Kayden are bright, respectful and good kids — a credit to Price.

"It stopped too early," Amber VanOrsdol, Price's stepmom, said while fighting back tears. "They still need their mom to teach them. They need their mom."

Price also nurtured broken animals she found on the street and always named her plants.

Julie Byrne said she and Price were more than a mother and daughter. They talked all the time about everything and nothing at all.

Her dad, David VanOrsdol, said Price's laugh would fill a room. So could her voice while singing boy band music, such as NSYNC.

He still feels like he sees her once or twice a day when in public.

"Are you doing that?" Bryne asked. "I see her everywhere, (too)."

Leigha VanOrsdol said grief from her older sister's death caused her to pause her fall semester studying computer science at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma in Chickasha.

"I didn't go to classes the rest of the week, and I just, I couldn't study. I couldn't sleep," Leigha said. "I did go back to campus, but it was just every night — the (panic) attacks, the waves. And I couldn't study. I couldn't sit in a room quiet. I couldn't be quiet. I couldn't be around quiet."

As for Hendrix, he had two families, one biological and one adopted.

Angela Miller (Zittenfield), who lives in Sand Springs, became Hendrix's cousin when he was 2 years old. She recalled how much he enjoyed making street tacos, sitting under trees and playing board games.

Hendrix had a good heart, Miller said, adding neither he nor Price deserved to be killed.

"Because of his struggles he might have made some bad choices, but he wasn’t a bad person," Miller said.

His 25-year-old daughter, Tirsia Hendrix, put her father's ashes in an urn of his die-hard favorite team: the Dallas Cowboys. 

She knows he is at peace now. But Tirsia said she can't find closure until she knows more about what happened and why.

"I just want the truth to come out," Tirsia said. "These officers, they lied about (Crystal) trying to hit them."

'Fake' paper tag had been 'colored on'

At the outset of the 10-minute traffic stop at dusk on Oklahoma 51, Mannford Police Officer Tristan Stacks accused Crystal Price of having a “fake” paper tag.

It had been “colored on,” Stacks told her, with a date of Sept. 31 — not a real date.

Price replied that her tag was real. She suggested her ex-husband might be to blame for the date discrepancy but acknowledged that, regardless, it was expired.

Price already had handed over her license and paperwork. Stacks went to his patrol car to run her information. Officer Conner Harrison later arrived to talk with Stacks.

Eventually, after Stacks returned to her car, Price wouldn’t voluntarily step outside. So he threatened to physically remove her to take her to jail for a suspended driver’s license and unregistered car.

Price rolled up her window and drove straight ahead to try to get away — both officers to the left of her car, not in front.

Her front wheels stayed straight when she pressed the gas pedal. Stacks then turned to hurry back to his patrol car.

During the high-speed chase, Stacks falsely claimed to someone on his cellphone that she “almost ran me over.” About a minute later he told a dispatcher over the radio that Price had “tried to run over officers.”

He repeated the falsehood twice more at the fatality scene.

Stacks never once alleged that Price hit him with her car in the four instances in which he is heard on video telling his story.

Nevertheless, Stacks and Harrison each later wrote falsely in their reports that Price had physically hit Stacks “with the rear quarter panel of the vehicle."

'There were two in there?'

The mangled 2024 Hyundai Elantra was on its side, wrapped around a tree in a tangle of brush near a creek.

The two Mannford officers, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper and a Creek County sheriff's deputy searched the scene with lights.

It’s unclear how much OHP Trooper Robert Darnell knew when choosing to engage in the pursuit and then ending it with an intentional vehicle hit to the car.

But Darnell didn't appear to know there was a passenger at stake, too, according to a verbal exchange on the body-cam video.

Officer Stacks: “I only seen two in the vehicle, initially."

Darnell: “There were two in there?”

Stacks: “Yeah. There was a female and an unknown passenger.”

A few minutes later, Stacks told his original false claim to Darnell after Darnell had asked what happened.

“I tell her, ‘Get out, or I will get you out,’” Stacks said. “At that point she throws it into drive, she cuts the wheel all the way right at him (Harrison) and takes off. And that’s when we initiate a pursuit.”

Harrison then repeated the false claim, too.

Darnell: “So she took off and it was right at you?”

Harrison: “Yes.”

Stacks was hired Nov. 10, 2021, and Harrison was hired Nov. 19, 2023, according to information provided by Mannford police.

High-speed chase unnecessary; maneuver dangerous

The pursuit of Price wasn’t necessary, according to Mannford’s policies and best practices touted by the U.S. Department of Justice and Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit organization of policing experts whose guiding principle is the sanctity of human life.

Mannford’s policy generally discourages “extended pursuits” of violators for misdemeanors that don’t involve violence or weapons “independent of the pursuit.” And in deciding whether to discontinue, officers should consider if the suspect's identity is known, as well as whether the chase risks outweigh the need for "immediate capture." 

The 2023 report from DOJ and PERF encourages agencies to direct officers not to chase if the suspect’s identity is known, the suspect can be apprehended later and if delayed apprehension doesn’t significantly increase the risk to the community.

More broadly, the report recommends law enforcement only engage in car pursuits if an officer knows a violent crime has been committed and if there is an imminent threat to the public based solely on that crime — not the suspect’s driving behavior.

Additionally, the report says the “controversial” maneuver to spin out a fleeing vehicle “should be prohibited under all but very narrowly defined circumstances” because of how risky it is, the extensive training necessary to use it and a lack of empirical evidence to show under what conditions it can be performed safely.

However, Oklahoma Highway Patrol extensively uses the maneuver, often called a tactical vehicle intervention (TVI) or pursuit intervention technique (PIT), as Trooper Darnell did to Price and Hendrix.

all other Oklahoma law enforcement agencies combined — as reported by .

OHP troopers have intentionally hit or spun out at least six fleeing vehicles and killed nine people since 2016, according to a World database of deadly Oklahoma police car chases.

Four of those nine deaths were passengers in eluding vehicles. None of the chases was prompted by a violent crime.

Service Oklahoma — the repository for all car crash reports filed in the state — doesn’t have a collision report from the Highway Patrol to document Darnell's intentional hit of Price and Hendrix.

The World in its series reported that the Department of Public Safety has through standard collision reports across Oklahoma.

in March 2024 to remove any policy language that had governed the actions or decisions of troopers who engage in chases, according to previous World and Lee reporting.