When Your Coworker Tells You About the Mass Shooting He Survived.
I started my first job as a lawyer about nine years ago at a small firm in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. My first day on the job, I found three things waiting for me at my desk: (1) some business cards with my name on them, (2) a stack of HR papers, and (3) a loose bullet rolling around in the top right drawer.
As I raised up the bullet to examine it under the light, I heard my new boss say, sheepishly, “Oh… uh… The guy who used to be in this office, he always had a pistol with him. But he’s not the only one. Go down the hall, and I’m sure The Judge will show you his gun if you ask him.”
Later that day, I found myself in a large corner office full of old western knick knacks talking to The Judge, the oldest lawyer at the firm. I won’t share his name here, but since he was an ex-judge, “The Judge” is all we ever called him, often to the slight confusion of our clients. (Since most trial lawyers have had to do their share of groveling before judges, most of them don’t mind relishing the “judge” title just a little once they get it — and The Judge was no exception.)
As I handled the tiny, almost toy-like .38 special The Judge had pulled out of his desk, he told me the story behind why he carried it: Decades earlier, The Judge had been involved in a courthouse shooting that left multiple people dead.
Enough years have passed that I can’t recount the exact words of his story, but the events went something like the following.
It was the early 1990s. The Judge was a justice on the court of appeals. Though it has since relocated, the court of appeals was, at that time, on the top floor of what we now call the “Old Courthouse.” Imagine an 1800s-era granite building that little kids like to pretend is a castle. The Old Courthouse had such a classic look to it, it was featured a few times in Walker, Texas Ranger, the painfully cheesy action series from the 90s featuring Chuck Norris as the inexplicably-karate-trained Texas cop. (True to form, The Judge interspersed this Walker, Texas Ranger trivia while he recounted the shooting that almost left him dead.)
That day, the Court was having oral argument. For nonlawyers, oral argument in an appeals court means a panel of three judges is seated at the bench while lawyers come and present arguments about their cases. There are no witnesses, no entry of new evidence, and usually no surprises. As far as court appearances go, it’s fairly mundane.
Argument had begun like normal. The Judge was one of three justices seated at the bench. The presiding justice sat in the middle, with The Judge to his right, and another associate justice to his left.
Then the first shot rang out without warning.
Minutes earlier, while the attorneys had been making their arguments, a lawyer whose name wasn’t on the docket had quietly stepped into the spectator area and sat down and waited. He was in a suit and tie and blended in. This man, The Shooter, had had a family court rule against him in his child custody case the day earlier, and he was out for blood. Since the family court wasn’t in session, apparently the court of appeals was the next best target.
The Shooter stood up, raised the pistol toward the bench, and started firing. The presiding justice and the associate justice to his left were shot. The Judge managed to duck under the desk as the two men next to him were getting hit with bullets.
“I wasn’t thinking about much in those moments since it all happened so fast, but as I was huddled on the ground hearing each shot go off, I swear I knew it was about a family law case,” the Judge later told me. “I’ve done my share of criminal defense work. The real crooks consider the risk of going to the slammer a cost of doing business. And if it happens, they can’t say they didn’t see it coming. It’s the family law clients you have to worry about. Those family lawyers are the ones who really need bars on their office windows and the fancy security systems.”
The Shooter emptied his pistol and then reloaded for more. By then, two of the justices had been shot, one of the appellate lawyers had been fatally wounded and another lawyer was injured.
“Nice guys,” The Judge said as he recalled the names of victims. “Everyone liked them.”
With two judges and multiple lawyers shot and bleeding on the ground, the Shooter turned and ran.
As he descended the four flights of stairs, the Shooter encountered another lawyer on the stairwell. Witnesses say they heard him beg for his life and yell for help just before he was fatally shot moments later.
The Shooter sprinted out the building and a massive manhunt began.
But The Judge didn’t have much to say about the manhunt. “They got him in Dallas later that day when he more or less went to the news media to tell them he did it.” In all, the two justices who had sat next to the Judge survived but were seriously wounded. Two lawyers were dead.
As interesting as the story was, the main thing that struck me was how it rolled off of The Judge’s tongue like he was chatting about a movie he watched the day before. Maybe he had told the story so many times the act of retelling it had slowly detached itself from the horror of the underlying events he was describing. Or maybe the passage of time can’t help but dull the sharp edges on the memory of an ordeal as it drifts further into the past and years turn into decades.
Whatever the case, The Judge was casual as ever as he recounted detail after detail. For example, the evening of the shooting, the police almost shot a delivery boy outside the Judge’s house. (The Judge’s wife forgot to tell the police protection team she had ordered pizza.) “We went out front after hearing some noise and saw this poor kid with his arms straight up in the air clutching a pizza box for dear life, while the police had five guns pointed at him,” he said with a smile.
Despite confessing to the media, The Shooter pleaded not guilty and represented himself at the criminal trial.
To his surprise, The Judge was called by the Shooter as a witness. The Shooter asked the Judge what color suit The Shooter had been wearing on the day in question, and The Judge couldn’t recall. The Shooter asked what color pants he had been wearing on the day in question, and The Judge again couldn’t recall.
“Since you can’t even get the basic details right — how tall the man you saw was and what he was wearing. How do you know that it was me?” the Shooter asked.
“Because it’s your face I see over the gun, when I wake up in the middle of the night,” The Judge said. The Shooter had no further questions.
The Shooter was convicted and sentenced to death. He declined every opportunity to appeal.
“My daughter, more than anybody else, wanted him dead,” The Judge would later tell me after I had been with the firm for a few more years. “She wanted to see him killed for what he did. But I remember sitting next to her the day of his final hearing. After the court exhausted every explanation about what failing to appeal would mean, the court finally told him what his ‘death date’ was going to be. And she was really shaken by that.”
The Judge never told me anything about the execution. And I didn’t ask.
“Anyway, since then, I always carry a concealed weapon, and can you blame me?”
Though the court of appeals is gone, the courtroom where the shooting happened is still in use. I’ve had numerous hearings there myself over the years. You can still see the bullet holes in the back wall.
It’s been nearly a decade since my first day at the firm. The top drawer of my desk doesn’t have any bullets rolling around in it anymore. But each time news of another mass shooting appears in the headlines, I always think about the Judge and whether he still has his .38 in a desk drawer. . . just in case.
