A Chester man’s attempted-murder charge was dismissed in court. On the ride back to jail, he was paralyzed in a crash — then died.

By the age of 13, Richard Smith was more or less on his own. Both of his parents were dead. He later started selling drugs. A rap sheet going back to the mid-1980s documents semi-regular trips to prison.

Smith went by “Ice” around the city of Chester, a former industrial powerhouse in Delaware County. Faded graffiti still memorializes his moniker — some of it so old it might be his, others copycats.

In recent years, however, Smith, 55, had stayed out of prison. He started volunteering at a local church. He knew he’d screwed up for a large portion of his adult life and he was trying to atone. He was repairing his relationship with his family and even serving as a father figure of sorts to younger men in Chester.

“Ricky really started to make a turn in the right direction,” said Jay Harrison, pastor of True Vine Missionary Full Gospel Baptist Church. “He was getting it together, spending less time around the negative crowd.”

On the night of March 5, however, Smith was arrested by Chester police after a man was stabbed at the church.

A witness, Gus Hartas, told The Inquirer that the stabbing was accidental — that Smith was “just clowning around” with the other man, who lived on the property. Harrison also believes that to be the case. It was Smith himself who called for medical assistance.

“This guy had no intent,” the pastor said.

But police alleged the stabbing was intentional, and Delaware County prosecutors charged Smith with first-degree attempted murder, holding him on $500,000 bail at the George W. Hill Correctional Facility.

In prison, he passed the days reading the Bible and doing push-ups.

“He said, ‘When I get out I’m going to get you in the gym because you could lose a couple pounds, too,’” Harrison recalled last week with a chuckle.

On April 18, Smith had his preliminary hearing in district court in Chester. The man who was stabbed failed to appear. The charges were dismissed.

But on the way back to the county prison, his transport van was struck by a driver who apparently was fleeing police. According to the accident report, she blew a stop sign.

A law enforcement official familiar with the case said Smith was likely shackled and handcuffed to a belly band — but not wearing a seat belt. Smith was left paralyzed from his shoulders down.

Three weeks later, with little hope of recovery, Smith’s family took him off life support at Crozer-Chester Medical Center.

He died soon after, days before his 56h birthday.

At their home in nearby Ridley Park, Smith’s daughter, Sadie Smith Burnell, and her longtime boyfriend, Charles Slackway, are finalizing plans for a memorial ceremony. They’re still trying to figure out what happened.

“This situation is so bizarre. It’s just tragic,” Slackway said. “We don’t know anything yet. No investigators or detectives have contacted us.”

The accident report offers few details, but photographs of the van show that it sustained heavy damage. The area in the back for prisoners is essentially a metal cage with benches along the side walls.

“It looks like it’s for animals,” Smith Burnell said.

Smith’s death has received little publicity, but it has rattled constables in Delaware County, who handle prisoner transport to district court.

Louis Marcozzi, president of the Pennsylvania State Constables Association, said constables in the area typically don’t strap prisoners in with a seat belt, due to possible “security issues” caused by having to reach over them.

“That how it’s always been done,” said Marcozzi, who is also a constable in Delaware County and was called to the scene in Chester the day of the accident.

Marcozzi said the constable who was transporting Smith did nothing wrong. It doesn’t appear that the van even had seat belts, he said. But Marcozzi said he and other constables are reconsidering the no-seat belt policy.

“Our job is to take them back and forth without a problem. And there was a problem,” Marcozzi said last week. “We’re revisiting our polices. … It’s something, obviously, we can look at, we’re already looking at.”

In a follow-up interview this week, Marcozzi said he had already changed his own procedures for transporting prisoners as a result of the accident.

“Today was the first day I seat-belted someone in a van,” he said.

While Marcozzi described Smith’s death as a “freak accident,” news organizations such as the Marshall Project have documented dozens of crashes in recent years involving prisoners who were shackled but not wearing seat belts. Some, like Smith, suffered neck, skull and spinal injuries.

Last year, the New Haven Police Department banned the use of prisoner vans without seat belts after Richard “Randy” Cox, 36, suffered a severe spinal injury in the back of a van and was paralyzed when an officer slammed the brakes. This month, a bill requiring the use of seat belts passed the House of Representatives in Connecticut.

David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, said courts have found that the government has a duty to provide for the basic health and safety of people who are in custody.

“I would say having a policy of not allowing incarcerated people to use a seat belt while being transported exposes them to an unreasonable risk of harm,” Fathi said.

Prisoner transport policies also received national attention in 2015 following the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. The 25-year-old Black man, charged with carrying an illegal knife and fleeing officers, died of a severe spinal cord injury after riding in a police van. He was shackled but not belted.

“We know he was not buckled in the transportation wagon, as he should have been,” Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said at the time. “No excuses for that, period.”

Philadelphia police have a long history of “nickel rides,” when rogue officers would rough up prisoners by putting them in a police wagon without a seat belt and subjecting them to high-speed stops. The practice came under internal review following a 2013 Inquirer article about a stonemason whose neck was broken while he was riding handcuffed in a police van, and others who alleged similar abuse.

Prisoners going to and from court in Philadelphia, however, are transported by the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office. Teresa Lundy, a spokesperson for Sheriff Rochelle Bilal, refused to say this week whether prisoners are secured with seat belts.

Smith Burnell said she wants to know why her father wasn’t secured in the van. She also wants more details about the police chase that might have put her father and others in Chester at risk.

“We just don’t want it to be swept under the rug,” she said. “I want it to be acknowledged.”

“You can make 1,000 mistakes, but while you’re being transported, you still have the right to be treated humanely,” Slackway said. “I’ve had dreams from this. Just imagine sitting in the back of a cage, then out of nowhere, your life just … .”

Questions have arisen about why Smith was in prison in the first place.

Hartas, who said he was at True Vine church on the night of the stabbing, told The Inquirer last week that it was a clear accident, possibly involving a knife with a spring-assisted release.

“It came out while he was giving him a hug,” Hartas said of Smith and the victim. “The cops are trying to make it out to be something it’s not.”

Hartas said Smith called the ambulance for the man and explained to police it was an accident. The victim could not be reached.

Chester Police Detective Patrick Flynn said the investigation did not support that account.

“There was some kind of fight between the defendant and victim, at which point the defendant stabbed him,” Flynn said. “Whether it was intentional depends on who you ask.”

Flynn said the attempted first-degree murder charge was due to the severity of the injury, and was ultimately the decision of the Delaware County District Attorney’s Office.

Margie McAboy, a spokesperson for the DA’s office, said prosecutors had been planning to refile the charges after they were dropped in Chester district court.

“Then the accident happened,” she said.

Regardless, McAboy said it was unlikely that Smith would have immediately been released from prison after his last court appearance. She said the accident was still under investigation and had no update.

At the time of his arrest, Smith had been doing masonry and contracting work, and had helped turn empty offices into sleeping quarters at the church, which runs a program to get men off the streets of Chester.

Court records show that his last felony conviction was more than a decade old, and he hadn’t been arrested recently for serious crimes. He had an open misdemeanor harassment case from last year.

A week before his case was dismissed, Smith told Harrison that he’d wanted to travel to Texas when he got out, but promised he’d come back occasionally to work on the church.

“He said, ‘We’re going to finish what we started,’” Harrison said. He added: “We’re gonna miss that fella. He was the energy in the house.”

Smith Burnell said her father’s criminal past doesn’t tell the man’s full story. He was funny, had boundless energy, a positive outlook, and had acknowledged several years ago that he needed to make changes.

“He’s been trying so hard to live right, to do right, to get close with God, to not do the wrong thing, so that I would let him be a part of my life,” Smith Burnell said through tears. “I was so hard on him. And he was trying. He didn’t even get to do it.”