Man killed in police chase was a longtime felon -- and guest lecturer at VCU

A man killed in a police chase Friday night after a convenience store robbery was a longtime felon and budding writer whose work is scheduled to be published next year.

Andre Raymon Simpson, 38, had been in and out of area courts, even arguing his own felony cases, before helping to commit an armed robbery Friday night on East Main Street, according to police, and then dying with his accomplice in a high-speed crash on New Market Road in Henrico County.

Simpson, who contributed to a book scheduled for publication next year called "The Prison Inside Me," writes in it about the damage done to him when a close relative introduced him to heroin. Simpson was 12 at the time, living on Church Hill.

Virginia Commonwealth University writing professor David Coogan, who is editing the book, said Simpson had appeared in person before his class last week. "He'd worked with us three years, and this was the first time he wasn't working from prison and able to be here in person," said Coogan, who described Simpson as a mercurial man who was as insightful as he was intelligent.

"But he had trouble turning the insights about his life into action."

Police in Richmond and Henrico, meanwhile, are declining to provide details of the chase that killed Simpson and another man Friday night minutes after the robbery of an East Main Street convenience store in the city.

An investigative source in each jurisdiction, however, said yesterday that police had the two men under surveillance at the time they robbed a Fas Mart store at 2600 East Main St.

Unclear was why a robbery observed by police led to a high-speed chase and two deaths.

The crash is the third incidence of fatal high-speed chases in Henrico and Richmond in recent months. Four people have died.

Danielle Bellio, 25, died Nov. 21 on Springfield Road after she ran a stoplight and fled Henrico police. Robert S. White, 32, died in the city while trying to elude police and after hitting a utility pole near the Fifth Street Bridge on Sept. 17.

Richmond police also chased a Henrico man on Nine Mile Road in the county in October, which ended with the man's car slamming into the rear of another vehicle near New Bridge School. That man faces multiple charges of improper driving and eluding police.

State police identified the two men who died in the Friday night chase as Simpson and Lawrence E. Murchison, 32, of Richmond.

A police lieutenant in Henrico initially said that two men were being pursued by at least two cars each from Henrico and Richmond at speeds reaching 80 mph.

Yesterday, a Richmond police spokesman declined to comment on the chase, deferring to Henrico. A spokesman for the county department declined comment.

The men fled in a 2009 Dodge Ram 1500 pickup truck, which broke apart minutes later when it struck a utility pole, turned upside down, and then hit a tree on New Market Road near Hickory Avenue.

State police said the crash occurred at 11:09 p.m.

Simpson had a long criminal history of drug, assault and larceny convictions in the city and Henrico dating to December 1990, according to court and Corrections Department records.

Simpson made headlines earlier this year when he won acquittal from a Henrico jury on an armed-robbery charge after representing himself. The robber wore a mask and a heavy overcoat, and witnesses could not identify Simpson as the robber. Prosecutors subsequently dropped other charges that could have given Simpson a life sentence.

Police once found him wearing a dress after they arrested him for a robbery.

Dennis Martin, a lawyer who assisted Simpson, called him an enigmatic person but a man with superior intelligence. "At one point he called me his father, even though I'm younger than he is," Martin said earlier this year.

Henrico Deputy Commonwealth's Attorney Michael Feinmel said yesterday that he was saddened to hear of the deaths of Simpson and Murchison but said Simpson had led a life of crime and danger.

"He was the sort of person capable of bringing violence to every situation," Feinmel said.

Coogan said he learned of the fatal crash Sunday morning and notified his undergraduate students by e-mail yesterday that the man who had just lectured them was dead.

Coogan said in his e-mail that the robbery Friday and Simpson's death crushed his hope that Simpson had reached a new level of self-control and had found what Simpson had called "my hidden treasures and talents."

"I saw him try to unlock that vault by trying to become a fireman this fall," Coogan wrote his students.

"He didn't want to see his childhood dream die. And I know that's not a lie."

Contact Bill McKelway at (804) 649-6601 or bmckelway@timesdispatch.com.

Contact Reed Williams at (804) 649-6332 or rwilliams@timesdispatch.com.