The Body in Room 348 is a great article. It’s a compelling page-turning murder mystery. A middle aged oil and gas man is found dead in his Beaumont, Texas hotel room. It looks like a heart attack, but the medical examiner says that the man has massive internal injuries in his groin, his intestines, and his heart. It’s like someone dropped a safe on him, or he was in a high-speed accident.
I won’t spoil the whole story for you, but they eventually found the person who caused his death. It turned out that the medical examiner had missed an entry wound from a bullet. And when they tried to convince the District Attorney down there to charge the shooter with a felony, they got some attitude.
If he had come forward at any time prior to Brennan and Apple’s solving the mystery, which had taken about eight months, it is unlikely he would have been charged with manslaughter, much less have gone to jail. Mueller had gambled from the start that whatever connection he had to Greg’s death would never be discovered. The odds in his favor were good, too. As it was, even after the connection was made, the county district attorney’s office had been reluctant to prosecute the case as a felony.
Brennan had turned that idea around. When he found out that the prosecutor might opt for a plea deal, he flew to Beaumont and joined a meeting between Apple and Paul Noyola, an investigator for the D.A.’s office. Noyola explained that accidental gun discharges in Texas were not uncommon, and that juries and judges tended to understand them, and that … well, the whole issue of accidental deaths was a fairly gray area of the Texas criminal code. In other words, the whole thing was looking like more of a hassle than a slam dunk.
Guns go off all the time, and sometimes people get killed because of it, but, you know, it’s a gray area. Texans understand that this stuff is quite common, and so who are they to sit in judgment.
Again, I don’t want to spoil the fun of reading the article, but the idea that you can shoot and kill a person and not get charged with at least manslaughter is incredible to me. The only reason this guy got hard prison time is because he didn’t admit what he had done.
What kind of culture is that?
