Explanation in immigrant shooting quickly raised doubts
By John MacCormack
Express-News Staff Writer
Web Posted : 11/14/2002 1:55 PM
ROCKSPRINGS — Law enforcement officers doubted Coy Brown’s version of the shooting of an unarmed, undocumented Mexican immigrant within hours of the event back in 2000, according to trial testimony.
“I told Mr. Brown he wasn’t telling the truth, and I asked him to tell me the truth,” Edwards County Sheriff Don Letsinger said in testimony today.
“He didn’t say much. He asked me how I knew,” said Letsinger of Brown, who had claimed he shot in self-defense after finding two Mexican men breaking into a neighbor’s cabin.
Brown, 58, is on trial on charges of aggravated assault in the shooting of Juan Mauricio Gonzalez, who was wounded in the buttocks on April 10, 2000, on a remote Edwards County road.
In his testimony Wednesday, Gonzalez said that Brown shot him without provocation after they met on a back road. Gonzalez said he and a companion were on their way to Brownwood when they encountered Brown, who was bearing a pistol.
Gonzalez, 44, of Hidalgo, Mexico, was spared serious injury when the bullet struck a can of beans he was carrying in his backpack and deflected downward into his buttocks.
In a written statement Brown made to police that night, he said he and his wife, Jessica, had followed tracks from a caliche road to a hunting cabin where he was met by two Mexican men rushing out the door.
Brown said the older of the two Mexican men had a water jug in his hand and made oral threats and gestures.
“He had the bottle gripped in his hand. He took another step or two towards us. I took this to be an aggressive movement,” Brown told police.
“I felt he intended to do bodily harm to me or my wife,” he said. “I pulled my 9 mm semi-automatic pistol and I fired 3-4 rounds. I fired three shots in the air and one in the ground.”
Brown said he then marched the two men back to the caliche road and down to a neighbor’s ranch, where he reported the break-in. He then left before authorities arrived.
But Letsinger said that when he took Brown back to the cabin later that night he could find no sign of a break-in, nor could he find any human footprints over a stretch of soft earth that Brown said he and the Mexican men had traversed.
“He said it must have been the weather,” Letsinger said of Brown’s explanation for the absent footprints. But Letsinger said other footprints and tire tracks made that day had not been erased.
In summing up the case, Letsinger testified, “I can find no reason why Coy Brown shot at either one of those men.
“I carry a 9mm (pistol). I know what a 9mm can do,” the sheriff testified under cross-examination. “It’s a deadly thing to shoot a 9mm at a person for any reason.”
Brown, who faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted, is expected to testify in his own behalf.