BN- WACO - Perhaps police and prosecutors have it all figured out or are still sorting things out. Perhaps there's a reason why 177 b...
But more than 100 days after a bloody clash at a Twin Peaks restaurant in May left nine dead, authorities remain tight-lipped about what happened and are proceeding with one of the largest criminal prosecutions ever in Texas. No details have been shared about which of the motorcycle riders allegedly harmed anyone else, as well as how many of the dead or 18 wounded were shot by police.
Video recordings made by cameras mounted in cruisers and other vantage points - including a hidden one up in advance of the clash - remain confidential, as do ballistics reports that would reveal what guns fired what bullets.
The silence has led lawyers, as well as the bikers and their families, to question authorities' motives for keeping quiet.
"Any time a prosecutor's office or a politician does not want people talking about something, one should raise a red flag and insist we talk about it," said Patrick Metze, a Texas Tech University School of Law professor. "They may say it is to protect the investigation, but they are protecting themselves from whatever it is that they don't want us to see or know about."
Waco police held news conferences immediately after the shooting but have been reluctant since then to provide more details. The McLennan County District Attorney's Office, the Department of Public Safety, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and even the Waco Fire Department, which sent paramedics to the scene, also have declined to comment.
Bikers and their lawyers were providing accounts of what happened until prosecutors asked for a gag order in late June. The order - approved by a judge who is the district attorney's former law partner - remains in place, forbidding some parties involved from publicly discussing matters.
Several media companies have objected to the order. The matter is on appeal.
Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who is a professor at Loyola Law School, in California, said that determining what happened at Twin Peaks is especially complicated because of the bulk of forensic, visual and other evidence as well as eyewitness accounts.
She also said that prosecutors will not try and convict everyone charged.
"Some of the people targeted as defendants will undoubtedly become witnesses," she said.
"The goal is to put enough pressure on people to cooperate and go after the key players," she continued. "They basically want everyone to feel the squeeze, so that they would rather cooperate than face trial."
Videos still not released
Everyone charged in the case is accused of being part of an organized crime conspiracy to commit murder as part of an ongoing turf war between the Cossacks Motorcycle Club and the Bandidos Motorcycle Club, which was born in Houston and is one of the largest biker clubs in the United States.
The comparable instances to what happened in Waco are few. In 2002, members of the Hell's Angels and Mongols clashed at a casino in Laughlin, Nev. Three people were killed in a brawl that involved dozens.
In the end, 42 people were indicted. A federal judge then threw out the charges against 36, according to news reports. The remaining half dozen were convicted.
Metze, the Texas Tech law professor, said the public has grown used to being shown video to respond to concerns about police shootings.
"Why have we not see any video yet?" Metze said. "Since when does law enforcement not immediately start releasing video of these things?"
The families of those killed are waiting for answers, said Nina Boyett, whose husband Danny was fatally shot. "I need some kind of closure," said Boyett, who said she visits the cemetery three or four times a week and scrubs the Internet for anything new about the case. Boyett's grave is marked by a rustic wooden cross made from the floorboard of a cattle trailer. There is a also vase of roses, with one flower for each year the couple was together.
Until the information is provided, Boyett said, "our minds are just going 90 to nothing trying to figure out what happened."
Lucien Haag, a New Mexico-based firearms and ballistics expert, cautioned that the answers Boyett and others seek won't come as quickly as they do on television shows like "CSI."
"Bullets are going 1,000 miles an hour, and maybe faster, and slam into a person, wall or bone," Haag said. "They are a mess."
Those facing charges also feel as if their lives are on hold.
At a recent round of hearings here, a judge declined to throw out charges against a Brenham bank teller, Morgan English. She has no criminal record, and authorities conceded at the hearing that they didn't know of any witnesses who saw her take part in the melee.
Stretching for the maximum
The next step takes prosecutors behind closed doors to a grand jury, which will decide who among the bikers is to be indicted.
"When you combine an extreme level of talent with an extreme level of moral crusade, you can get dangerous outcome, and that is what happened here," English's Houston lawyer, Paul Looney, said of the assistant district attorney spearheading the prosecutions.
Looney said that he's never seen anything like the way the wheels of justice turn here.
"I am spending all of my hours shopping bookstore to bookstore for the Book of Waco," Looney said, "because the criminal procedures being followed in Waco are not in any of the $400,000 worth of books I have in my law library."
Among the issues that have raised eyebrows from the start was the rounding up of so many bikers. So many people were arrested that they had to be brought to the city's convention center rather than jails for processing.
And instead of being held for a few hours or days until their likely roles could be sorted out, they were kept weeks and months on $1 million bail a piece.
Charles Rose, a professor at Stetson Law School, in Florida, said the Twin Peaks case is illuminating the warts of a system that has to strike a balance when deciding who to charge.
Prosecutors appear to be stretching for the maximum of what they can do under the law, he said, to make things as painful as possible for the bikers.
"If you are a district attorney who is elected, and you have this shoot-out in your jurisdiction,"he said, "you cannot be perceived by the electorate as not dealing with the problem as strongly and appropriately as possible."
More: http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Sound-of-silence-in-Twin-Peaks-biker-case-drawing-6488604.php
