A father’s anger, a lawsuit against Harris County and lingering distrust

For Greg Dyksma, the story of his son’s death began with a trip home from the dentist.

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It was around 8:45 a.m. on Aug. 31, 2015. He and his daughter made early appointments so they could share the ride and get to work on time. They were returning to the Dyksmas’ home off Double Churches Road when they saw the Harris County coroner’s car out front, with a Columbus police escort.

That’s when Dyksma knew Nicholas was dead.

At that moment, everyone else in the family was home. The only one missing was 18-year-old Nick, who was supposed to have spent the night with a friend.

“My daughter was with me. My wife was in the house,” Dyksma recalled. “I knew, because why else would they be at my house?”

The police officer drove away, and Harris County Coroner Joe Weldon gave Dyksma the bad news: Nicholas got into a chase with police and died during his arrest.

“He said that my son was involved in a chase, and he was Tased and killed. That’s what he thought at first,” Dyksma said. “He asked a lot of questions.”

One was about drug abuse. Dyksma acknowledged Nick had used drugs.

“He said they would wait on toxicology to come back before they made a full determination, which I understood,” Dyksma said of the cause of death.

Dyksma had questions, too, that morning — one in particular: “I asked him where my son was.”

That’s when he learned his son’s body also was gone — to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime lab in Atlanta, for an autopsy. The GBI already had collected the remains from Columbus’ St. Francis Hospital.

Greg saw Nick’s body three days later, at the funeral home, before the cremated ashes were buried in Parkhill Cemetery.

He didn’t recognize his own son.

“My wife and I walked into the funeral home and we saw him lying in the casket … and I thought, ‘My God, they made a mistake. That’s not my son.’ They had put so much makeup on him that he wasn’t recognizable at all.”

Asked why so much makeup was applied, the mortician told Dyksma that Nick’s face was badly bruised and cut, “so I asked him to remove all the makeup and take pictures,” Dyksma said. “I have never seen them. I don’t want to see them.”

For months, this much is all Greg Dyksma knew for sure about his only son’s death.

“I was originally told that he hit a tree at 80 mph. Then the story changed to he hit a cop car at 10 mph. Then it changed to they pushed him off the road. So I heard all these stories, but nothing’s been confirmed.”

It has now.