All remaining criminal cases will be dismissed from the 2015 Twin Peaks biker shootout in Texas that left nine dead and 20 injured, ending a four-year prosecutorial fiasco that resulted in no convictions, reports the Waco Tribune-Herald. McLennan County District Attorney Barry Johnson said he will drop the remaining 24 criminal cases to “end this nightmare that we have been dealing with in this county since May 17, 2015.” Johnson’s decision means no one will be held accountable for killing or injuring bikers or for engaging in a chaotic battle in a shopping center parking lot in front of a Sunday lunchtime crowd. Johnson said, “We are not able to prosecute any of those cases and reach our burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Johnson inherited the Twin Peaks cases when he took office in January, and said he has spent 75 percent of his time with a team of prosecutors and investigators trying to determine how to resolve the remaining cases. Some 200 bikers were arrested after the shootout on identical charges of engaging in organized criminal activity and held on $1 million bonds each. Former McLennan County District Attorney Abel Reyna sought indictments against 155 bikers and chose to try Jacob Carrizal, the Bandidos Dallas County chapter president, first. That case ended in a mistrial in 2017, with most of the jurors favoring acquittal. No other defendant has been tried since. Johnson hammered Reyna for his handling of the Twin Peaks cases, and he won the March 2018 Republican primary by 20 percentage points. After the primary, Reyna dismissed all but 24 of the remaining Twin Peaks cases. A special
prosecutor called Reyna’s mass prosecution strategy a “harebrained scheme” that was “patently offensive.”