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- This will probably be the last daily update from me unless something changes. But the hospital in Decatur is overflowing this morning and has 42 COVID patients.
- Boom! The Messenger has obtained some of the phone recordings between former school board President Thomas Houchin and former Superintendent Joseph Coburn, and has printed relevant parts of them today. They are pretty incredible and give rise to a lot of issues. Go buy a paper. Excerpt below.
- Although tiny things like this are buried in there, too. Sheesh.
- The Messenger has placed all the recordings online. (There will be some dead spots due to the school's redactions pending an Open Records fight to resolved by the AG.) Man, there are a ton of Decatur names which are thrown around. And the audio is riveting!
- June 3rd call. (2 hours, 12 minutes) Edit: Holy cow! Wait until you hear who Thomas Houchin has in mind for the new Decatur football coach! 1:50:00
- June 8th call. (1 minute, 44 seconds)(Heavily redacted - basically worthless)
- June 14th call. (2 hours, 3 minutes)(This one is contentious and turns out to be a wild ride )
- June 17th call. (10 minutes, 15 seconds)
- Our embattled and indicted Texas AG responded yesterday to having another Republican challenge him for his job by invoking his higher power. Four sentence statement. Three references to Trump.
- The case of missing Gabby Petito is fascinating. Police in Utah released the full one hour bodycam yesterday of her and her boyfriend's interaction with police. She's an emotional mess and is dealing with some big issues, but I don't think she was in fear of him at the time.
- And, yeah, all fingers point to him as a suspect since he's lawyered up but, if he's guilty of something, any prosecutor has a heck of a problem right now because he was smart enough to simply shut up.
- Side note: That case would make me nervous as a cop. Every routine encounter you have with someone is now on video, and you never know when it will be national news. Although this particular cop probably caught hell at home for being recorded as telling the girl, "My wife has really really bad anxiety [too] and she takes medication for it daily. Sometimes, it’s not enough. Sometimes it just builds up. I will say this, when my wife got put on the medication, within a week, I saw a complete turnaround in her attitude. Her demeanor. She wasn’t nearly aggressive, or angry."
- In the other high profile national case, the high-tone South Carolina lawyer turned himself in yesterday on attempted insurance fraud charges. I'm not certain of this, but I've read that the insurance policy did not have a suicide exclusion clause, so the company would pay even if he killed himself or had someone else kill him. But that gives rise to a legal question: Is it an offense to intend to commit a crime (insurance fraud) and you do an act in furtherance of the intended crime (hire someone to kill you) but your scheme, if it had worked out, wouldn't have been insurance fraud at all? My gut reaction is "no", but this isn't exactly something I deal with every day.
- There was a meth bust in Wise County but, unless my math is off, our Sheriff says that meth is going for about $31 a gram. 15 pound seizure = 240 ounces. 240 ounces = 6,720 grams. Value of bust was $210,000 per Sheriff. $210,000/6,720 = $31.25 a gram. I also thought it interesting he said that, “That’s probably the biggest seizure of methamphetamine we have ever made.”
Stealing highway signs again. - Dear Kids: Don't be stupid.
- Every time you hear about county officials being arrested, it seems like it comes out of Starr County.
- The silence of TDC is amazing. Thread.
- Good grief, Minnesota DPS. How about not shooting innocent people as an option? It's a traffic stop, not a hostage situation.
- I woke up in the middle of the night a couple of days ago and, for some reason, stumbled upon the Wendy Williams show on one of the local channels. I almost made it a bullet point the next day to tell you there's something not right about her because she was acting so odd, but I didn't because I figured no one would care. You still may not care, but this got my attention yesterday.
- Time which has passed since the Wise County Sheriff's Office has failed to solve the murder of Lauren Whitener in her home at Lake Bridgeport: 807 days.
- Messenger: Above the Fold
