Nine died in the nation’s deadliest biker shootout. Texas prosecutors couldn’t convict a single person.
Who will be held accountable for the deaths of nine people during a biker-club shootout in the middle of a Twin Peaks restaurant parking lot in broad daylight in 2015?
No one, the McLennan County district attorney’s office announced Tuesday.
Barry Johnson, the county’s district attorney, said his office would drop all remaining charges against the bikers, bringing the years-long saga to a remarkably anticlimactic end without obtaining a single conviction against any of the notorious brawl’s participants.
The announcement comes nearly four years after roughly 200 members of rival motorcycle clubs descended on the Waco strip mall parking lot, allegedly to settle a territorial dispute. Before long, it devolved into a bloody melee. Terrified diners enjoying a midday lunch took cover in the restaurant as dozens of Bandidos and Cossacks bikers exchanged gunfire and brandished knives. Overwhelmed police failed to stop the violence, instead adding to it with more gunfire. In just minutes, nine people died, making it the deadliest biker shootout in U.S. history. At least 20 were critically injured. Dozens of guns and knives were abandoned as swarms of tattooed men scattered.
Nearly everyone at the scene — 177 people — was arrested.
What followed was a prosecutorial fiasco as one by one, the criminal cases collapsed under a former district attorney’s leadership. During the four years of prosecution against dozens of alleged gang members, only a single case went to trial, resulting in a mistrial. The vast majority of the original 177 cases were dismissed.
For Johnson, who took office Jan. 1, the mess he inherited was too hopeless to clean up. He suspected further prosecution of the remaining 24 individuals would fail, just like the rest. It was time to let it go, he said.
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