A Biker Grabbed A Police Officer’s Arm In The Middle Of An Arrest And Got Tackled And Cuffed Too — Then They Reviewed The Body Cam Footage
Part 2
I need to tell you about Grace. And about a little house in East Austin. And about the Saturdays.
Grace was born in March of 2009 at Seton Medical Center in Austin. Six pounds, eleven ounces. Perfect.
She didn’t pass her newborn hearing screening.
They tested her again at a month. Then at three months. Profound bilateral sensorineural hearing loss. Both ears. Born that way. Nothing anybody did. Nothing anybody could have done.
Her mother and I were twenty-five and thirty-six. We didn’t know a single Deaf person. We didn’t know a single sign.
We didn’t know anything.
Her mother left when Grace was three. That’s her story to tell, not mine. I’ll just say she couldn’t do it.
So it was me.
A welder. Forty years old. Working sixty hours a week. With a three-year-old daughter I couldn’t talk to.
I mean that exactly. I couldn’t talk to her. She couldn’t hear me. I didn’t know her language. She didn’t have one yet.
She’d get frustrated and scream. I’d get frustrated and go out to the garage and punch the heavy bag until my knuckles bled.
I’d never felt so useless in my life.
A speech therapist at the clinic gave me a name.
“There’s a man in East Austin,” she said. “Retired teacher from the Texas School for the Deaf. He teaches ASL to families. In his house. Saturdays. He won’t take money. He says it’s what his own teachers did for him.”
She wrote an address on a sticky note.
Mr. Leon Pierce. Waller Street.
The first Saturday, I almost didn’t go in.
I sat in my truck outside a little blue house with a porch swing and a lemon tree in the yard, with Grace asleep in her car seat, for twenty minutes.
I was ashamed. I didn’t know how to explain that I didn’t know how to talk to my own kid.
Then the front door opened.
A man came out on the porch. Sixty, maybe. Black. Thin. Gray hair cut short. A short-sleeved button-up shirt tucked into pressed slacks. Reading glasses on a cord around his neck.
He looked at my truck.
He raised one hand and waved me in.
Leon Pierce had been born Deaf in 1957. In Waco. His parents were hearing. They didn’t sign. He didn’t have language until he was six, when they sent him to the Texas School for the Deaf here in Austin.
“Six years with no words,” he signed to me, slowly, that first day, with his daughter-in-law interpreting. “I will not let that happen to her.”
He pointed at Grace.
Every Saturday. Two years.
Nine in the morning to noon. Leon’s living room. Leon on the couch. Grace on the rug with flash cards and a box of wooden blocks with letters on them. Me on a kitchen chair that was too small for me, sweating like I was in a welding booth.
He taught her first.
Then he taught me.
Milk. More. Daddy. Dog. Stop. Hurt. Happy. Sorry. Again.
Grace learned faster than me. By a mile. She’d laugh at my clumsy hands. Leon would laugh too. A silent laugh. His whole body shaking.
He never once took a dollar. I tried. Every Saturday. I’d leave cash under the lemon tree pot on his porch. Every Saturday, the next week, it’d be in an envelope on my truck seat with a note.
No.
The first time Grace signed I love you to me, she was four.
We were in Leon’s living room. She was sitting on the rug. She looked up at me and put her little hand up.
Thumb out. Index finger up. Pinky up.
I didn’t know what it meant yet.
Leon did. He looked at me. He put his hand on his chest.
Then he made the same shape. And pointed at Grace. And at me.
I had to go out on his porch for a while.
I got the tattoo a week later.
In 2018, my shop closed. I got a new job in Lockhart. Thirty miles south. Grace got into a program at the Texas School for the Deaf that included cochlear implants when she was nine. With the implants and years of therapy, she learned to hear some, and to speak. She’s fully bilingual now. ASL and English.
We lost touch with Leon.
I sent him a Christmas card that first year. He sent one back.
The second year, my card came back. Return to sender. Moved.
I always meant to find him. To thank him properly.
I never did.
Part 3
That Saturday in October, I was face-down on the asphalt in a grocery store parking lot on East Cesar Chavez.
Cuffs on my wrists. A knee in my back. The woman officer’s. Officer Lisa Huang. I learned her name later. She was strong. She knew what she was doing.
Eight inches from my face, the old man was lying on his stomach. Cuffed too. His cheek on the pavement. His glasses under the Buick.
Officer Brandon Tate, the young one, was standing over both of us. Breathing hard. Radio in his hand. Calling for backup.
People were gathering on the sidewalk. Phones out. Filming.
Somebody yelled, “Leave that old man alone!”
Somebody else yelled, “That biker attacked a cop!”
I didn’t fight. Not for one second. I let them cuff me. I let them hold me down.
But I didn’t stop talking.
“He’s deaf,” I said. Into the pavement. Over and over. “He’s deaf. He can’t hear you. He couldn’t hear any of your commands. He’s deaf.”
“Shut up,” Officer Tate said.
“He was signing to you. Every time you saw his hands move. He was telling you he’s deaf.”
“I said shut up.”
“He was reaching for his wallet. Not a gun. His wallet. He was trying to show you it’s his car.”
Officer Tate didn’t answer that.
Then Officer Huang leaned down by my ear.
“How do you know he’s deaf?”
“Because I can read what he’s saying.”
She was quiet a second.
“What’s he saying?”
I looked at the old man. His hands were cuffed behind his back now. But his fingers were still moving. Small. Trying.
I couldn’t see them from where I was.
“Uncuff one of his hands,” I said. “Just one. Let him sign. I’ll tell you every word.”
“Not a chance.”
“Then look in his back left pocket,” I said. “He’s got a wallet in there. That’s what he was reaching for. If it’s his car, the registration’s in the glove box and his license is in that wallet.”
The old man couldn’t hear any of this.
He didn’t know what I was saying. He didn’t know I was trying to help him. All he knew was that a big red-bearded biker had run across the street and grabbed a cop and gotten tackled next to him.
He was terrified.
He was seventy years old, on his stomach on hot asphalt, in handcuffs, with no way to explain himself.
His face was wet. Tears or sweat, I couldn’t tell.
Officer Huang stood up.
I heard her talking to Officer Tate. Low. Arguing a little.
Then I heard her boots crunch on the asphalt. Going around the other side of the old man.
She knelt down next to him.
She reached into his back left pocket.
She pulled out a worn brown leather wallet.
Part 4
She opened it.
Texas driver’s license. LEON A. PIERCE. 1957. Waller Street, Austin.
I stopped breathing.
Officer Huang didn’t notice my face. She was looking at the wallet.
Tucked in the clear plastic sleeve right behind the license was a laminated card. Red border. White background. Bold black letters.
I AM DEAF. PLEASE WRITE OR TEXT. I CAN READ LIPS A LITTLE. I CANNOT HEAR YOUR COMMANDS. THANK YOU.
She read it. Twice.
She looked at Officer Tate.
Officer Tate looked at the card.
His face changed.
Officer Huang went to the Buick. The driver’s door was locked, but the passenger window was down two inches where Leon had been working the hanger through. She called for a slim jim from the second unit that had just pulled in. She popped the door. She opened the glove box.
Registration. Maroon 2009 Buick LaCrosse.
Registered owner: Leon A. Pierce.
She held it up so Officer Tate could see.
Then she turned around and looked at the woman who’d called 911. A woman in her thirties standing by the grocery store doors. Who’d seen an old Black man with a coat hanger at a car door.
The woman looked at the ground.
Officer Huang came back. She knelt down next to Leon.
She unlocked one of his cuffs. His right hand.
He brought it around from behind his back. Slowly. Shaking. He was scared they’d hit him again.
Then she looked at me.
“Okay,” she said. “Tell me what he’s saying.”
Leon’s hand came up.
He didn’t sign to her. He didn’t know she was asking.
He signed the same thing he’d been signing for five minutes. The same thing I’d watched from across the street.
Index finger. Ear. Mouth.
Deaf.
Flat hand on his chest. Then pointing at the Buick.
My car.
Fingers tapping his hip. Drawing a small rectangle in the air.
Wallet. Pocket.
And then one more. Something he hadn’t signed before. Slow. Tired.
Please.
I read it out loud. Every word. Officer Huang listened. Officer Tate listened.
When I said please, Officer Tate turned around and walked a few steps away and stood with his back to all of us and his hands on his hips.
They uncuffed Leon first.
Officer Huang helped him sit up. Got his glasses out from under the car. Wiped them off on her own uniform shirt and handed them to him.
He put them on.
Then they uncuffed me.
I sat up. My cheek was raw from the pavement. My wrists were red.
I turned to Leon.
He was looking at me.
Through his reading glasses. Squinting. Like he was trying to place me.
Ten years. A beard. Thirty pounds. A shaved head. A lot of gray.
He tilted his head.
Then his eyes got wide.
His hands came up.
He signed one word. A name sign. A sign that’s only used for one person.
Thumb and two fingers. Tapped twice against his chin. Then two fingers making a shape like a little bird.
The name sign he’d given my daughter. In his living room. Fourteen years ago. Because she used to flap her arms when she got excited.
Grace.
He looked at me.
Grace’s father?
Part 5
I signed back.
My hands were shaking. I’m not as fast as Grace. I’ve never been. But I’d learned in his living room. He’d taught me.
Yes. Hal. Grace’s father. Mr. Pierce. It’s me.
He stared at me.
Then he put both hands over his face.
And I watched a seventy-year-old man who’d just been thrown to the ground and handcuffed in front of a crowd start to cry in a grocery store parking lot.
Not from fear anymore.
Officer Huang was standing right there. She saw it. She didn’t understand.
“You know him?” she asked.
I couldn’t talk for a minute.
“He taught my daughter,” I finally said. “She was born deaf. Her mother left. I couldn’t talk to her. I didn’t know how. She didn’t have any language at all.”
I looked at Leon.
“Every Saturday for two years. In his living room. He taught her. And me. For free. He never took one dollar.”
I swallowed.
“Everything she can say to me. Every word. He gave her that.”
Officer Huang looked at Leon for a long time.
Then she looked at me.
I asked Leon what happened. I signed it. Slow.
He told me.
He’d stopped at the grocery store for lemons. Locked his keys in his car. It happens. He’s seventy. He’d gotten a coat hanger from the store manager and was trying to hook the lock.
He never heard the sirens.
He never heard the officers.
The first thing he knew, he saw a gun out of the corner of his eye.
I reached for my wallet, he signed. To show them. My card. The card says I am deaf.
He looked at Officer Tate.
They thought it was a gun.
Officer Tate came back over.
He was young. Twenty-six, I found out. Two years on the force. He’d never had a single complaint.
He stood in front of Leon.
He didn’t know what to do with his hands.
He looked at me.
“How do I say I’m sorry?”
I showed him.
Fist. Thumb out. Circle on the chest. Over the heart.
Officer Tate did it. Clumsy. The way I did it the first time. Fist on his chest, circling.
Sorry.
Leon looked at him for a long time.
Then he signed back. I didn’t have to translate that one.
He nodded.
The body cam footage was reviewed that night by an APD sergeant named Delgado. Then by the Office of Police Oversight. Then by a lot of people.
Both officers’ cameras. Every second.
It showed Leon working the coat hanger with his back to the street. Never turning when they shouted. It showed him startle. Spin. Drop the hanger. Reach for his back pocket.
It showed the takedown.
And it showed, clear as day, Leon’s hands coming up from the pavement. Over and over.
Touch the ear. Touch the mouth.
The sergeant counted.
Seven times.
Seven times in four minutes, Leon Pierce told those officers he was deaf.
Nobody in uniform knew what it meant.
The other thing the footage showed was me.
Running across Cesar Chavez Street. Grabbing Officer Tate’s arm. Not hitting. Not shoving. Holding. Screaming he’s deaf.
Then going down. And not fighting. Not once.
And then, for four straight minutes, lying cuffed on the pavement repeating the same thing over and over until somebody listened.
Part 6
On Monday, the Austin Police Department called me.
They were dropping the charge against me. Interfering with public duties. I hadn’t even known they’d filed it. They apologized for that too.
On Wednesday, the chief of police held a press conference.
Leon was there. In a pressed shirt and his reading glasses. With a certified ASL interpreter standing next to him.
I was there too. In the back.
The chief apologized. Publicly. To Leon Pierce by name. She said the officers acted on a call they believed was a crime in progress, and that the department had failed to give them the training to recognize a Deaf man trying to communicate.
“That failure is ours,” she said. “Not his.”
She announced mandatory training. Every sworn officer in the Austin Police Department. Communicating with Deaf and hard-of-hearing people. How to recognize ASL. How to recognize a Deaf ID card. What deaf looks like when someone signs it. How to slow down. How to write. How to text. How to wait.
And she announced who’d be teaching it.
Leon Pierce.
He said yes on one condition.
He signed it to the chief through the interpreter, right there at the podium, and the interpreter’s voice cracked a little saying it out loud.
Officer Tate takes the class first. Front row.
The chief looked at Officer Tate, who was standing at attention along the wall behind her.
He nodded before she could even ask.
That night, I drove home to Lockhart and told Grace everything.
She was seventeen. A senior at the Texas School for the Deaf. Taller than her mother ever was. Red hair like mine. Fierce.
She didn’t remember Leon’s face. She was only seven when we stopped going to Waller Street.
But when I showed her the name sign he made in that parking lot, the one he gave her, the one with the little bird, she put her hand over her mouth.
She remembered that.
Part 7
The first training session was held in January at the APD training academy on Shaw Lane.
Ninety officers in a big classroom. Officer Brandon Tate in the front row, center seat, a notebook open on his desk.
Officer Lisa Huang next to him.
Leon Pierce stood at the front of the room in a pressed shirt and his reading glasses on a cord.
He doesn’t use his voice. He’s never used it.
So somebody had to voice for him. Interpret his signs into spoken English for ninety hearing officers.
He’d asked for someone specific.
Grace stood next to him.
Seventeen. Red hair pulled back. A white blouse. Her hands steady.
She’d driven up with me that morning. She’d practiced all week. She’d asked me fourteen times if she looked okay.
Leon looked at her and signed something private. I could see it from the back of the room, where I was sitting with three of my club brothers in our vests.
Ready, little bird?
She signed back.
Ready.
He started to sign.
She started to speak.
His hands. Her voice. Perfectly together. Like they’d been doing it for years.
They had, in a way. They started on his living room rug, with wooden blocks.
“My name is Leon Pierce,” Grace said, as his hands moved. “I was born Deaf. I have been Deaf for sixty-eight years.”
He paused.
“Three months ago, I was lying face-down on the pavement on Cesar Chavez Street in handcuffs. I told the officers I was deaf seven times.”
He held up his hand.
Index finger. Ear. Mouth.
“This is the sign.”
He did it again. Slow. Ninety officers watching.
“Today, you will all learn it. So that the next time somebody says it, somebody will understand.”
Then he asked Officer Tate to stand up.
Tate stood. Front row. Red-faced.
Leon signed to him. Grace voiced it.
“Officer Tate. Show them what you learned first.”
And Officer Brandon Tate, twenty-six years old, two years on the force, raised his right hand in front of ninety of his colleagues and made a fist and circled it over his heart.
Sorry.
Then he did one more. Slow. Careful. Practiced.
Index finger. Ear. Mouth.
Deaf.
He looked at Leon.
I understand now.
Leon nodded.
Then he turned and looked to the back of the room. At me.
He raised his hand.
Thumb out. Index finger up. Pinky up.
Grace saw it. She turned too. She raised her hand. Same shape.
I raised mine.
The same shape that’s tattooed on my left forearm.
Three of us. In a police academy classroom on Shaw Lane. Ninety officers watching and not understanding a thing.
Nobody had to translate that one.
👉 If this story stayed with you, follow our page for more stories from the road — and take one minute today to learn the sign for “deaf.” Someone may need you to know it. 🏍️🤟
