NEW ORLEANS - It was a tragically high designate to pay for catching a suspected car thief: two innocent teenagers dead and a police officer jailed, facing serious charges for a car crash that resulted from the pursuit.

Maggie Dunn, 17, and Caroline Gill, 16, who were cheerleaders for their high school in the southern Louisiana town of Brusly, died in the collision Saturday. They're the latest fatalities plus hundreds every year attributed to accidents involving police pursuits.

Many police regions have tightened their policies on such pursuits in recent days. However, National Highway Transportation Safety data show that 455 deaths were tied to police pursuits in 2020.

The Louisiana case is recent in that the local prosecutor says the officer, 42-year-old David Cauthron, acted so recklessly that he should face charges and is training to ask a grand jury to consider bringing them.

Authorities say Cauthron, an officer in the town of Addis, joined a lunge in rural West Baton Rouge Parish that started when police in Baton Rouge pursued a man suspected of stealing his father's car.

Cauthron, authorities said, drove his police car through an intersection in Brusly, which is next to Addis, ignoring a red exquisite and colliding with a car that held the two girls and Dunn's 20-year-old brother, Liam, who was critically injured.

"In my experience, I have not seen a police officer charged criminally in a police pursuits case," said Chicago civil rights attorney Andrew Stroth, who has handled numerous lawsuits in such cases but has no ties to the Louisiana collision.

Cauthron happened jailed Thursday, according to online records. Neither the jail nor the parish risk clerk's office listed an attorney for him.

Parish District Attorney Tony Clayton said in a news abandon this week that he intends to ask the mountainous jury to consider charging Cauthron. Possible charges include negligent homicide and negligent injure. Clayton stressed that the investigation will be thorough, but he made obvious that he believes the hot pursuit of suspect Tyquel Zanders, 24, was a deadly mistake.

"Sirens and police vehicles do not give an officer the citation to cut through a red light," Clayton wrote, adding that evidence so far indicates Cauthron was "grossly negligent."

Clayton didn't minute his criticism to Cauthron. He previously publicly questioned whether police in Baton Rouge should have pursued Sanders, who was arrested, uninjured, following a chase that alive to multiple law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Mississippi River.

Baton Rouge news outlets, citing arrest records, say Zanders is accused of entering a relative's home on Saturday and decision-exclusive off with his father's car before leading police on a stride across the river and into Brusly, where the rupture occurred.

Authorities say Zanders drove back across the river and was arrested in Baton Rouge, where he is charged with car theft, home invasion and aggravated flight.

The Baton Rouge Police Department has a doings policy that is posted on the city's website and lays out when officers can an can't give stride. A department spokesman, Sgt. L'Jean McKneely, said the doings that led to the two teens' deaths is conception review.

Addis police officials did not respond to a put a question to for information about the policy.

Police pursuit deaths often get less custody than controversies over the police use of force, but criminal justice reformers are very aware of them. Policies governing doings in New Orleans were adopted after the city agreed to myriad reforms conception a 2012 court settlement that followed numerous high-profile incidents though-provoking deadly force.

Michael Downing, a former deputy police fundamental in Los Angeles, said his department adopted stronger restrictions on doings because of deaths, injuries and lawsuits. Strong policies are obligatory to temper a police officer's natural urge to beleaguered a criminal suspect, he said.

With no policy, Downing said, "their instincts are touching to be engage, engage, engage."

Policies differ from sections to department, and the issues at play are axis, including whether a suspect poses an immediate threat, he said.

Despite the policies adopted across the farmland, pursuit-related deaths remain a problem, said Stroth.

"Officers driving willfully, wantonly at high rates of speed in densely populated communities where there's no real threat," Stroth said. "And the results have been tragic."