Published May 11, 2018

WACO — It’s been three years since the bloodiest motorcycle gun battle in Texas history — a melee at high noon featuring dozens of guns, chains, knives and even machetes — left nine bikers dead, 18 injured and 177 in jail.

There are still few answers about what happened on May 17, 2015, or why the Bandidos Motorcycle Club and the rival Cossacks went to war at a Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco as local and state police watched nearby.

But as Thursday’s deadline approaches for new charges, the aggressive law enforcement effort once billed as a pro-active crackdown on biker violence has instead devolved into a struggling investigation marred by lack of evidence, prosecutorial overreach and a lame-duck district attorney’s office hobbled by unrelated allegations of corruption.

So far, not a single biker has been convicted of a crime. The only trial to date ended in December with a hung jury as 10 jurors voted for dismissal of the conspiracy case against a Bandidos chieftain from Dallas.

And more than 150 criminal cases have been dismissed outright, including more than 60 just this week. A growing number of civil lawsuits seek millions of dollars in damages for bikers who lost their lives, their jobs or their resources.

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Today, the beleaguered district attorney’s office is left with just two dozen criminal cases, including new charges of causing injury while inciting a riot, a far simpler crime to prove than the conspiracy to commit murder charges that were initially filed against so many. Several bikers also face charges of murder and tampering with evidence.

“They jailed them first and investigated second,” said Houston attorney Paul Looney, whose clients’ cases were among those dismissed. “They never had any evidence. There’s a handful of people who should have been jailed, but way over 100 shouldn’t have been handled as anything other than witnesses.”

Yet the shootout continues to rock the criminal justice system and Central Texas politics.

District Attorney Abelino “Abel” Reyna, a 45-year-old Republican who was admonished by a judge for using photographs of slain bikers in his re-election campaign, was easily defeated in the March primary by a Waco lawyer who vowed to take charge of the cases.

Reyna declined to comment about Twin Peaks or the recent charges. But defense attorneys say they will fight for more dismissals.

“Three years later, the truth has come out,” said Dallas attorney Clint Broden, whose client’s case was shuffled to a special prosecutor and then dismissed. “The way this case was handled is a true tragedy from so many perspectives.”

BLOODY SUNDAY

The legal saga began three years ago on a rainy spring Sunday.

The meeting was billed as an information luncheon on motorcycle safety and legislation.

Unknown to the public, however, law enforcement feared that two of the largest motorcycle gangs in Texas were about to settle up after more than a year of skirmishes and roadside fights. They lined up, many of them undercover, near the restaurant as nearly 300 bikers converged near the center of town, not far from the Baylor University campus, wheeling heavy Harley Davidsons into the parking lot of the popular franchise restaurant known for waitresses in skimpy outfits.

Officers — including an 11-member SWAT team — waited nearby in 10 police vehicles, joined by law enforcement agents from the Texas Department of Public Safety, game wardens and federal firearms agents.

Some believe the confrontation between the well-armed biker gangs stemmed from a simmering dispute over territory, signified by the right to display the word “Texas” on their leather jackets and vests.

The more powerful gang was the feared Bandidos, who control which clubs put a “Texas” banner patch under the mascot on the back of their leathers. Lined up against them at Twin Peaks were the Cossacks, a smaller club with origins in East Texas that was expanding and whose members wore the patch without the approval of the Bandidos.

Years later, what sparked the actual fight is still disputed.

The gunfight may have started as a fracas in the bathroom. Some say it erupted after a biker drove over a rival’s foot in the parking lot. However the melee began, surveillance video shows a gun battle that raged from the parking lot onto wide porches of the eatery.

Bikers weren’t the only ones shooting, however. Ballistics would later show that four of the nine people killed were slain by weapons fired by Waco police officers. Seven of the dead were members of the Cossacks, one was a Bandido and the ninth was unaffiliated.

DOCUMENTS: Police did little to stop Waco biker showdown

Waco police were quick to characterize the bikers as out-of-towners up to no good.

“This isn’t your churchgoing crowd that came out to have dinner with the family,” Waco police Sgt. Patrick Swanton said days after the shootout. “This is a gang-oriented criminal element that was in our city to conduct criminal activity.”

The Bandidos are considered one of the largest biker groups in the United States, and Texas is their home turf. But in recent years the Cossacks had been challenging that authority, according to an affidavit by Waco police officer Vincent Glenn.

“Cossacks threatened that Waco was a ‘Cossack’s town’ and nobody else could ride there,” Glenn said.

EYEWITNESS TO A MASSACRE

Cody Ledbetter, 29, a former member of the Cossacks gang who lives near Waco, rented a car and drove to the Twin Peaks meeting because his arm was in a sling. His stepfather, a Cossacks leader named Daniel “Diesel” Boyett, 44, met him there.

The fight began as members of the Bandidos and Cossacks began taunting each other in the parking lot, Ledbetter recalled.

“Next thing I know, a punch gets thrown, and then I hear a pop and everyone just kind of stopped and looked around,” Ledbetter said recently, standing in the parking lot for the first time since that day. “And then I heard another one. And another one. And we all literally ran toward the wall and there was a pileup.”

As bullets zinged past, he looked back to see his stepfather drop among the rows of parked motorcycles.

“I thought he took cover,” he said.

Ledbetter got inside the restaurant and crouched next to a steel cooler.

“All you hear is shot after shot after shot, and you see people dropping, you see people falling over,” he said. “Then it all stopped. Cops came with suppressed weapons, with suppressed AR-15s, with tactical scopes.”

He said police rounded everyone up, put most in zip-ties and sat them on tailgates of pickup trucks that lined the parking lot at the rear of Twin Peaks.

WACO SHOOTOUT: Read our previous coverage on the shootout in Waco here

“When they walked us out the front door, I saw my dad, he was laying on the concrete,” Ledbetter recalled. “There was blood running down the parking lot.”

Ledbetter was eventually transported with more than 100 other bikers to the county’s convention center where they waited overnight to be processed into jail cells. Ledbetter said he spent more than 24 hours bound, his hands secured with plastic zip-ties.

His stepfather was shot by Waco police, and a McLennan County grand jury cleared the officers of any criminal responsibility for the deaths of Boyett and three other bikers.

Ledbetter returned to the same parking lot in April and sat on the curb next to the parking space where he last saw his dad. He quietly wiped his eyes, hidden behind mirrored sunglasses.

“That where my dad’s body was,” he said. “I just had to see it.”

After the shooting, Ledbetter quit the Cossacks, the club that his dad helped lead. He was shaken by what happened.

Reyna’s office dismissed criminal charges against Ledbetter in March after Looney, his attorney, demanded a jury trial.

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PROSECUTION QUESTIONED

The conduct of the Waco prosecution has been questioned, not only by a host of defense attorneys and civil libertarians, but even by some of the state’s toughest former prosecutors.

READ MORE: DA dismisses case against ex-biker accused in Twin Peaks shootout

Johnny Holmes, the no-nonsense Harris County district attorney for two decades, was sharply critical of how the Waco case has been handled.

“You’ve got to prove who the bad egg is,” Holmes said. “You can’t just say, 'I’m going to put all the chickens in jail.'”

And while Holmes said he had not studied the case, he said the recent flood of dismissals tells him the initial arrests likely were an overreach.

“It’s not about the numbers. If you can prove that 177 people committed crimes, you don’t dismiss them because of the numbers. Or at least I wouldn’t,” Holmes said. “The truth is, they probably didn’t commit a crime.”

That is a different view than Reyna took when he dismissed an initial cluster of cases in February.

“While probable cause for the defendants' arrest and prosecution remains, based on continued investigation, the State is exercising its prosecutorial discretion in dismissing this matter in order to focus its efforts and resources on co-defendants with a higher level of culpability,” Reyna said in statement.

“These dismissals should not be considered an exoneration of the individual defendants or the gangs they belong to,” he added.

Reyna oversaw the only case that has has gone to trial, a $680,000 affair that ended with Dallas Bandido Jake Carrizal walking out of the courthouse after 10 out of 12 McLennan County jurors said he was not guilty, resulting in a mistrial. He was re-indicted last week on a first-degree riot charge, which carries a maximum punishment of life in prison.

Defense attorney Casie Gotro, who represented Carrizal, said Reyna remains under a cloud of suspicion on unrelated allegations he fixed cases for friends and political supporters.

“It just stinks,” Gotro said. “Reyna is dismissing cases to avoid any hearing where his former assistant and former assistant DA were going to testify against him. He doesn’t want that to happen. They are going to testify that justice was for sale.”

Cody Ledbetter, a former member of the Cossacks motorcycle club, shows the Bible verse he had tattooed on his chest to remember his stepfather, Danny Boyett, who was killed during a shoot out in the parking lot of a Twin Peaks restaurant on May 17, 2015. The verse was a favorite of Boyett and his wife, Nina. Photo taken Wednesday, April 18, 2018, in Waco. ( Mark Mulligan / Houston Chronicle ) less Cody Ledbetter, a former member of the Cossacks motorcycle club, shows the Bible verse he had tattooed on his chest to remember his stepfather, Danny Boyett, who was killed during a shoot out in the parking lot ... more Photo: Mark Mulligan, Houston Chronicle / Houston Chronicle Photo: Mark Mulligan, Houston Chronicle / Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 20 Caption Close Three years after deadly biker shootout in Waco, criminal cases are unraveling 1 / 20 Back to Gallery

LAME DUCK PROSECUTOR

Reyna was elected in 2010 after defeating longtime incumbent Democrat John Segrest.

A Waco native who earned his law degree from hometown Baylor University, Reyna worked as a defense attorney and law partner with Judge Matt Johnson, now one of the two district judges presiding over the Twin Peaks cases. The judge recused himself from one of the biker cases in October but continues to preside over others.

Reyna has a notable legal lineage and is the son of retired Justice Felipe Reyna. The elder Reyna was also district attorney of McLennan County before he served on the 10th Court of Appeals.

Reyna has denied any wrongdoing. Before the election, Reyna held a press conference saying “motorcycle gang defense attorneys” were blaming him for delays and unrelated allegations of case fixing.

“The continued abuse of the criminal justice process and repeated attempts at political smear tactics are nothing more than an attempt to vote me out of office, avoid justice and distract from the events,” Reyna said. “I have seen and heard the allegations made against me. Let me be clear, I have never shown favoritism to friends or supporters. I have followed my oath to do the right thing at every turn.”

Critics say that in crucial hours immediately after the biker shootout, Reyna instructed Waco police to not only question but arrest nearly everyone at the scene.

Reyna was trounced in the March GOP primary by attorney Barry Johnson. The Democrat who filed for the position has suspended his campaign, but another attorney is hoping to make an independent bid for the seat in November.

Johnson said the investigation was botched.

“It was our position that it was mishandled by the district attorney because he went out to the scene and took the investigation away from the Waco Police Department, who had crime scene investigators on the scene,” Johnson said.

Reyna, moreover, may have waived his immunity from civil lawsuits by acting outside the scope of his duty, Johnson said.

“The investigation was hijacked from the experts, the crime scene investigators,” he said.

BIKERS AREN'T LOWLIFES

At a biker bar 90 miles south of Waco, Cyndi Smith is tired of hearing the stereotypes about bikers.

“There were some bad people out there that day, but not the majority of them,” she said on a recent Thursday afternoon, lighting a Carnival cigarette after opening Cyndi’s Hawg Hangout, a bar she established a decade ago.

“Bikers aren’t lowlifes. They aren’t high school dropouts. There were engineers there,” she says in rapid-fire declarations. “You can’t be a bum and live this lifestyle. I have a $38,000 bike.”

RELATED: Life and death in Waco: A biker's story

The lumbering smoky hall has a horseshoe bar and exposed wooden rafters adorned with biker flags. It sits at the bottom of a steep slope off the side of Highway 21, in the middle of Central Texas between Bastrop and Bryan-College Station.

Smith has been a member of the Line Riders, an independent club, since 2005. She looks at the inked sleeve of tattoos on her left arm to double-check the date she joined.

Her husband, who joined three years after she did, is the current president and was at the shoot-out. He was arrested and bailed out after several weeks. His case has been dismissed.

Cyndi Smith was not at Twin Peaks because her bar holds church services every Sunday from 11 a.m. to noon.

“No alcohol is served,” she laughs.

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TRIAL FALLOUT

The legal wrangling is likely to continue for years, with civil lawsuits filed seeking millions of dollars in damages.

Dallas attorney Don Tittle, who represents about 115 of the Twin Peaks plaintiffs, said the county’s liability is “astronomical.”

“Their lives were turned completely upside down, lost jobs, paid tons of money to lawyers, bail bondsmen, you name it,” Tittle said. “Having a murder charge where you could go to prison for the rest of your life hanging over your head for three years, that never should have been filed, is the real damage.”

The problem, he said, was that officials saw that the potential suspects were bikers, mostly from out of town, and treated them all like criminals.

McLennan County Judge Scott Felton, the county’s chief financial officer, said he hopes the wave of dismissals will nullify most of the lawsuits.

“A lot of these cases are being dismissed by the DA, which could hopefully eliminate the risk of a civil case being tried,” Felton said. “So, we’re not sure what our liability may be.”

He believes the county’s insurance and “strong financial state” will mitigate the risk of a massive hit to county coffers if the county loses the suits.

Felton said the enormous tab from Carrizal’s trial — the only case that has been before a jury — for security, indigent defense and other costs was largely picked up by a “county essentials grant” from the state. He said security fears surrounding biker protests drove up costs for the first trial. Any subsequent trials would cost less.

“I guess it’s unfortunate that we’re in the central location on I-35 that made it accommodating for a meeting of statewide groups,” he said. “While we work hard to do the hotel and visitor marketing to get people to come here and meet, that’s one group we weren’t marketing to, I can promise you that.”

Brian Rogers covers Houston crime and courts. A licensed attorney who loves telling stories, Brian covers breaking news, civil and criminal trials, and the political underpinnings of criminal justice. You can email him at brian.rogers@chron.com or follow him on Twitter at @brianjrogers.

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