The Waco Biker Shootout Left Nine Dead. Why Was No One Convicted?

[Demovictory9]

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The Waco Biker Shootout Left Nine Dead. Why Was No One Convicted?
How 177 arrests led to no convictions — a tangled, seven-year tale of prosecutorial hubris and tenacious defense.



Moments after the Bandidos arrived at Twin Peaks, a fistfight broke out, followed by gunfire, then utter havoc. One Waco police officer described the aftermath as looking like something “out of a video game.” Bloodstained concrete. Guns, knives, brass knuckles and batons scattered across the scene. Nine dead, 20 wounded. “In 34 years of law enforcement,” a spokesperson for the Waco Police Department told reporters, it was “the most violent crime scene I have ever been involved in.” The police ended up arresting 177 bikers, an event described in this newspaper as “what appears to be the largest roundup and mass arrest of bikers in recent American history.”

The event quickly became a national story. Like the average news consumer, Looney first reacted to all this with astonishment: Sunday afternoon, gunfire everywhere, nine dead?

But as he followed the narrative over the next week, he became suspicious. The 177 arrests seemed awfully high, and all the bikers, regardless of the evidence against them, were slapped with identical felony charges and million-dollar bonds. “I just couldn’t believe it,” Looney told me. “It defied credibility.” While the D.A.’s office issued news releases and mug shots of the bikers were splashed across newspapers throughout the state, Looney said he “saw nobody stepping forward to counter the narrative,” one that was “completely damning” the accused. “And I just felt like somebody needed to get in there with a bunch of resources and change the narrative and get to the bottom of what’s happening.”

Patches on a Bandido’s vest commemorate Candyman, a Bandido who was killed in the fight.Credit...Eli Durst for The New York Times




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In the end, though, Carrizal, in his thick black glasses, soft-spoken and obviously intelligent, made a surprisingly compelling witness, undermining the state’s portrayal of him as a violent gang leader. He claimed the Cossacks had ambushed his crew, and he began crying when talking about his father, Chris Carrizal, who was known as Shovel, being shot that day. Before Twin Peaks, he had never been arrested. A Cossack, he said, threw the first punch, and Carrizal got in a single punch before being swarmed: “I remember they had brass knuckles, and they were trying to get inside my face shield — they were trying to hit inside there. I was just kicking and punching. I remember I had a foldout pocketknife in my pocket. And I was trying to get that pocketknife because I wanted to get them off me, and I never could.” Tommy Witherspoon, who covered the trial for The Waco Tribune-Herald, told me that Carrizal was “the most effective defendant I’ve ever seen take the stand in his own defense, and I’ve been doing this for 40 years.”

On Nov. 10, 2017, after deliberating for 14 hours, the Carrizal jury announced that it could not reach a verdict, and the judge declared a mistrial.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/magazine/waco-biker-shootout.html