| (Editor's Note: This is the third story of a three-part series.)
Joe Hinton thinks the driver who ran over and killed Judy Jones last year in Wallis should have been prosecuted.
Hinton, of Houston, is a wreck reconstruction expert who has decades of experience in investigating vehicle crashes, with expertise in railroad and automobile crashes. He said the driver of the commercial flatbed truck who triggered the crash that occurred on Aug. 17, 2006, on Highway 36 should have been prosecuted under the criminal negligence homicide provision in the Texas penal code.
He said all a grand jury needs to indict someone is probable cause, which he said was apparent here.
An Austin County grand jury saw the case differently, no-billing driver Silvio Henao, 57, of Richmond, in December.
"It is unexcusable, in my opinion, to not reach an indictment under probable cause of criminal negligent homicide in this case, but that's my opinion," said Hinton, who started work in investigating crashes for Southern Pacific Railroad in 1969.
The Wallis Police Department and the Texas Department of Public Safety investigated the crash. Information from the investigation was turned over to Travis J. Koehn, Austin County district attorney.
Hinton said he thinks Koehn influenced the grand jury, a charge the district attorney denies.
"The grand jury makes its own decision," Koehn said Friday. "I would not have influence on it one way or another."
Jones, who was 62 when she died, was run over on the sidewalk in front of her business, JJ's Stuff N Such, a popular antiques store. She died at the scene. Her widower, Bob Jones, 63, of Simonton, said he and his family cannot understand why no charges were filed against Henao, who did not receive even a traffic citation. Wallis police officer R.F. Griffin said recently that no ticket would be issued because the grand jury made its decision on the case, and thus any citation would be moot.
The Jones family has been seeking answers for a year.
"If we did nothing, nothing would be done," Jones said during an interview recently with his attorneys. "It would be just like a puff of wind, nothing happened. Except it was a horrible, horrible event that occurred on Aug. 17."
And then the second horrible event occurred in December, Jones said, when the grand jury no-billed Heano. The Jones family is now involved in a pending civil lawsuit against Henao and his company, Bison Building Materials Ltd. of Houston.
On a flat-screen television in Hinton's office on Friday morning, Hinton presented aerial photographs of the short stretch of road where the crash occurred. The truck's driver veered off the road and onto the sidewalk as he traveled south on the road that afternoon. There were no other injuries.
Hinton's aerial-view pictures showed the path of the truck, and Hinton used mathematical notations to convey the zone of preventability method used to determine whether someone had a reasonable chance to prevent the wreck from happening. He said he thinks Henao had a chance to stop before he hit Jones.
"In doing one of these, we survey the scene, we inspect the vehicles, we collect forensic information and shoot aerials of it to make a determination of something that's long been asked," Hinton said.
That question: Was the accident preventable?
Henao did not have drugs or alcohol in his blood and was not asleep. He did not remember what happened. His truck was safe and fully operational. He was not forced off the road. His truck eventually came to a stop, apparently slowed by debris that came off the buildings, Hinton said. (Hinton showed a photograph of two-by-fours stacked in the cab of Henao's truck.) Nobody seems to know for sure why Henao didn't brake or stop when he pulled onto the sidewalk.
Until now, possibly. Henao's lawyer, Jeff Diamant of Houston, said his client blacked out during the wreck and does not remember what happened. Henao has been diagnosed with benign brain tumors, which were unknown to him at the time of the crash.
Hinton said that the information he had at the time of the investigation led him to believe that that Henao did not make a reasonable effort to prevent the wreck. He said, though, that a medical condition could have prevented someone from making a proper decision behind the wheel.
Otherwise, Hinton said, "To not present this case properly is an insult to the law enforcement officers that spent the time to gather the facts. This is nothing but an insult."
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