177 Arrests. Zero Convictions. What Happened in Waco?
You probably remember the pictures from Twin Peaks. Bikes in the parking lot. Cops everywhere. Then came the number that made national news: 177 arrests. Nearly four years later, prosecutors dropped the last of the charges. How many people who saw the arrest headline ever saw how it ended?
The parking lot
On May 17, 2015, gunfire broke out at a gathering of motorcycle riders outside the Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas. Nine people died. At least 20 were injured. Police arrested 177 people. The shooting and the arrests were separate events, and sorting out what any particular person had done became central to the cases that followed.
Riders rally outside the McLennan County Courthouse in Waco in June 2015, weeks after the arrests. Photo by Pat Jones Photography via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The tension continued long after the shooting. In November 2016, Biker Nation reported that members of the rival clubs showed up at a Waco Harley-Davidson dealership. Police were called, but no violence occurred.
From mass arrests to a mistrial
By April 2017, the costs of the Waco investigation and trials were mounting, with court-appointed defense attorneys reviewing hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence.
The first case to go to trial involved Christopher Carrizal, a Bandidos chapter president. The jury could not reach a verdict in 2017, and the judge declared a mistrial. Our November 2017 report covered that first trial’s failure to produce a conviction. Prosecutors later narrowed the cases they were pursuing. In April 2019, McLennan County District Attorney Barry Johnson announced that the remaining criminal charges would be dropped. The prosecution ended without a conviction in the Twin Peaks cases.
The McLennan County Courthouse in Waco, where the first Twin Peaks case ended in a mistrial. Photo by Pat Jones Photography via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
How did it end without a conviction?
After prosecutors dropped the last charges, the questions and accusations didn’t go away. Were the defense attorneys that good? Did police or prosecutors make mistakes from the start that the case couldn’t recover from? With so many people at Twin Peaks that day, how did the case end without a single conviction?
Questions about the police response were already being raised while the cases were underway. Our October 2017 coverage examined an officer’s recorded statement that she thought police were supposed to stay back and let the rival clubs “fight this out”, along with reports of warnings before the shooting. That article reflects the information available at the time.
A witness can tell you what they saw from where they stood. Prosecutors still have to prove what a specific defendant did. After the first trial ended with a hung jury, that burden was still there for every case the state chose to pursue.
Why the ending matters
The criminal cases left families without verdicts explaining who was responsible for the deaths. They also left riders who had been arrested with a very different ending from the one many readers might have assumed after the first headlines. Civil lawsuits over the arrests took a separate path. A federal court order in one of those suits records that the state eventually dropped the remaining charges.
When the next club case makes news, watch the verbs. Arrested, charged, convicted and sentenced describe different things. In Waco, the distance between the first and last of those words is the story.
Read the latest Biker Nation news.
Sources
- The Texas Tribune, final criminal case outcomes
- Associated Press, arrest count and charges dropped
- U.S. District Court, background in a related civil case
Cover photo: motorcycles lined up outside the McLennan County Courthouse in Waco during a bikers rally on June 7, 2015, three weeks after the Twin Peaks shooting. Photos by Pat Jones Photography via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
