Whipped Cream Difficulties

I’m a little behind on this due to last minute shopping, but I think it is worth noting.

Late last night, an APD officer shot and killed a man after a foot pursuit. The officer and his partner originally were trying to make a traffic stop; the suspect fled, the officers pursued on foot, the officer in question found the suspect, the suspect stabbed the officer in the neck (with a knife he took from the officer’s duty belt), and the officer fired one killing shot. (The officer is still in the hospital.)

This is weird enough to be noteworthy; things like this don’t happen very often in Austin. But the story gets even stranger; the dead guy was Maurice Pierce.

For those of you outside of Austin, or those who don’t remember, Maurice Pierce was one of four men who were charged in the 1991 murders of four teenage girls at a yogurt shop in north Austin.

The “yogurt shop murders” were, and are, a big deal in Austin. So far, nobody’s been convicted in these murders; the case against Pierce was dropped when prosecutors said they didn’t have enough evidence against him. One other suspect was freed before trial; the other two suspects stood trial, were convicted, and had their convictions overturned by the Court of Criminal Appeals due to “unexplained DNA” that didn’t match any of the four suspects.

I’m not sure what to make of this; Pierce had earlier violent run-ins with APD and Lubbock police officers, according to the Statesman. Clearly, he wasn’t a choir boy, but nobody’s been able to come up with enough evidence to pin the murders on him. The only thing it seems like we can say is that this is going to make the truth about the murders much harder to find; I’m hoping APD doesn’t seize on this as a chance for “exceptional clearance“.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 24th, 2010 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Clippings, Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.