Posted on 07/15/2016 7:14:22 PM PDT by Elderberry
Two more bikers arrested after the Twin Peaks shootout in Waco filed a civil rights lawsuit Friday, claiming they were improperly arrested with no evidence of wrongdoing and denied due process.
Christopher Eaton and Owen Bartlett, both members of the Los Pirados Motorcycle Club, bring the total of bikers who have filed civil lawsuits to 15.
The lawsuit lists Eaton as a Dallas County resident and says Bartlett is from McLennan County and names McLennan County District Attorney Abel Reyna, Waco Police Chief Brent Stroman, Waco police Detective Manuel Chavez and an unnamed Department of Public Safety agent as defendants.
All defendants previously have declined to comment on the lawsuits.
All 15 of the bikers filed suit in federal court in Austin and all are represented by Dallas attorney Don Tittle, who successfully represented nine sheriff’s deputies who sued McLennan County and Sheriff Parnell McNamara on claims they were retaliated against for backing McNamara’s political opponent.
“Neither of these guys have been indicted and neither had anything whatsoever to do with the violence that occurred,” Tittle said. “Mr. Eaton was employed at DFW Airport before the incident and still works there today. However, the false charges against him have cost him dearly from both a professional and personal standpoint.
“Mr. Bartlett is a devoted family man with three children under the age of six. His wife was left at home with a newborn while he was wrongfully jailed for more than a month. The cloud that continues to hang over these guys is just ridiculous. It’s way past time for the DA to publicly exonerate them and many others.”
The suit alleges unlawful arrest and due process violations and claims the plaintiffs were arrested with no evidence that they committed any crimes or had any ties to warring biker groups the Bandidos or the Cossacks.
“Despite a total lack of particularized evidence relating to specific individuals, defendants Stroman, Chavez and Reyna determined that individuals would be arrested and charged with engaging in organized criminal activity based entirely on their presence at Twin Peaks, the motorcycle club that defendants presumed an individual was associated with, and/or the clothing they were wearing at the time of the incident,” the suit alleges. “Rather than investigating the incident and relying on actual facts to establish probable cause, defendants theorized that a conspiracy of epic proportion between dozens of people had taken place and willfully ignored the total absence of facts to support their ‘theory.’ ”
The suit claims the arrest warrant affidavit, which was identical for all arrested that day, falsely alleges that the bikers all were members of a criminal street gang. The document was drafted by the DA’s office and obtained by Chavez.
“That statement is categorically false,” the lawsuit says. “It is an indisputable fact that defendants did not possess any reliable, particularized information to indicate that plaintiffs themselves were members of a criminal street gang on or before the date such fact was sworn to by defendant Chavez.”
Biker Ray Nelson filed a motion two months ago to disqualify Reyna from prosecuting the cases because of his role in the investigation and his decision to charge the wide array of bikers. A hearing on that motion was set for June 13 but was postponed until Aug. 8. Nelson’s attorney charged that Reyna “commandeered” the investigation after Waco police detectives had already processed a busload of bikers, identified them and allowed them to go home that evening.
The motion also claims that Reyna, as a defendant in the civil lawsuits, has a conflict of interest in prosecuting the cases because he has a financial stake in the outcome of the criminal prosecutions.
“In the aftermath of the incident at Twin Peaks, defendants apparently concluded that the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution ceased to apply and could be ignored given what they perceived as an immediate need to announce the re-establishment of law and order in their town,” the suit alleges.
Bikers = white, so guilty
BLM = blacks, so victims of racism
These suits will win. We don’t just point our finger and impute guilt. What is the evidence and do we have self defense or not? They want to use RICO but not against hillery. I think Waco will loose MILLIONS . They bit off way more than they could ever chew.
Where’s the intent?
The media’s silence on this is sickening. That alone speaks of ‘false flag’ and subsequent cover-ups on an epic scale, even among court officials.
Even here it gets downgraded to General Chat.
A lot of relevant stuff here gets downgraded.
IBTG
And that'll be enough to satisfy some.
Not me.
When Constitutional due process is disregarded, willfully and under color of Law, there should be strict Accountability. The strictest.
But instead, some "Law and Order" types cheer it on.
Not me.
One man's Tyranny is another's Justice, apparently...
“The 10 Baddest Names in Motorcycle Gang History”
5. LOS PIRADOS
Like the Bandidos, Los Pirados are a member of the United Clubs of Waco—and call themselves crazy. No, literally: the word pirados translates from Spanish as “freaks” or “nuts.” The Spanish word for crazy, pirado, might ultimately come from the Greek pyr, meaning “fire.”
http://mentalfloss.com/article/64263/10-baddest-names-motorcycle-gang-history
The Cossacks, the Bandidos, and the BLM could take each other out for all I care. Safer for the rest of us. To be honest.
“The Cossacks, the Bandidos, and the BLM could take each other out for all I care. Safer for the rest of us. To be honest.”
As long as they don’t take their fights to family plazas ...
“Los Pirados Motorcycle Club”
hmmm... Bandido support club ....
Oh, it doesn’t mean pirates after all? I wondered.
People use the term crazy for all manner of things, harmless or otherwise. The possible connection with “pyr” is curious. Flaming crazy? Flames are a common decoration in connection with hot-rods and racing, and in biker decor.
I could find far, far worse things to get bent out of shape about.
This sounds like too fragile a case to hold together under any kind of competent defense effort. There hasn’t been an actual court case here, is the problem. So the cat and mouse game continues, where the process is the punishment.
I mean, against any kind of competent defense effort...
So this less than a day planned visit is a humongous issue, but being unlawfully detained for 30 days is nothing?
Odd scale of importance you have.
It looked like a very small group, if anyone, “took their fight to a family plaza.” They’d met for 20 years at that spot and nary a problem. And — there is still fact finding to occur — it may have been exacerbated worse by the presence of police firing into a crowd than it would have been at a solely biker function where everyone who didn’t want to be in the fight had just run for the hills.
I think bikers are living in your noggin rent free. You could always evict them, but then you’d have no more fun ragging on them.
It’s not the latest Trump tweet.
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