SHERMAN — When Terry Bevill was fired as the No. 2 cop in Quitman, Texas, then arrested for aggravated perjury, it ruined his law enforcement career, his standing in the small East Texas community, his bank account and, nearly, his health, Bevill testified Tuesday.
But none of that, according to lawyers for four East Texas public officials Bevill has sued, was the result of a conspiracy — as his federal civil complaint claims — to punish the 19-year law enforcement veteran for saying under oath that he didn’t think a friend could get a fair trial in Wood County, of which Quitman is the seat.
“He was terminated not for what he said, but what he did,” Lance Vincent, the defense lawyer for the city of Quitman and its former mayor, David Dobbs, said in his opening statement to the jury. “He violated a [Quitman Police Department] policy” by signing an affidavit in support of his friend’s unsuccessful motion for a change of venue.
The friend, David McGee, was charged with and later convicted of tampering with a government record to facilitate the escape of a county jail inmate — a woman charged with driving while intoxicated with a child passenger, a woman with whom, according to court records, McGee had had a sexual relationship.
Bevill, Vincent said, was “throwing his weight around to try and help a friend out.”
Bevill, 64, is the first witness in the jury trial of his suit before U.S. District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III in Sherman. After roughly five hours on the stand, his testimony is to resume Wednesday morning.
In a low baritone — think Sam Elliott with a hefty dash of East Texas drawl — Bevill alternately described his ordeal in the years after he was fired and arrested as “shameful,” embarrassing, “very degrading,” humiliating and “nauseating.”
“My faith in the system — it went away,” he said. “My faith in humanity — I lost a bunch.” He testified that he developed a stress-induced bleeding ulcer. There were days, he said, when “my stomach hurt so bad as a grown man I wanted to lay down and cry.”
His suit, filed in June 2019 and amended in August of that year, contends that he “became the target of retaliation and punishment” for speaking out in 2017 against three prominent officials: Jeffrey Fletcher, the state district judge in Wood County at the time, James Wheeler, then Wood County’s district attorney, and Tom Castloo, then the county sheriff.
Those three — a “trilogy of power” in the largely rural county, as one of Bevill’s lawyers, Sean Joseph McCaffity characterized them in his opening statement — acted in cahoots to pressure Mayor Dobbs to fire Bevill, then the second-in-command captain of the Quitman Polce Department, because they were incensed at Bevill’s affidavit saying he didn’t believe that a friend, the jail administrator in Wood County, could get a fair trial there because of improperly close relationships between Fletcher, Wheeler and Castloo.
Bevill’s lawsuit seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. He is represented by, in addition to McCaffity, Laura Benitez Geisler, Jody Leigh Rodenberg and Rebecca Neumann. All are with Sommerman, McCaffity, Quesada & Geisler of Dallas.
Dobbs is represented by, in addition to Vincent, Douglas Alan Ritcheson, both of Ritcheson, Laufer & Vincent of Tyler. Castloo, the former sheriff, is represented by Robert Scott Davis and Robin Hill O’Donoghue of Flowers Davis of Tyler. Wheeler, the former Wood County DA, is represented by Grant David Blaies of Fort Worth. And former Judge Fletcher is represented by Brianna Michelle Krominga and William David Wassdorf of the Texas attorney general’s office.
McCaffity called Bevill’s firing and his subsequent arrest on an order from Judge Fletcher, “a grave injustice.”
“He dared to speak out against powerful people. … He stood up for what was right,” McCaffity told the eight-member jury.
Characterizing the treatment of Bevill as a violation of his client’s First Amendment rights, McCaffity said: “What happened here violates not only common sense but the principles we hold dear as a country.”
Lawyers for the defendants said in their opening statements that there was no collusion among the officials. They said Dobbs decided on his own to fire Bevill after ordering an outside investigation of Bevill’s actions. In terminating Bevill, they said, the mayor concluded that Bevill’s affidavit — in which he identified himself as Quitman’s police captain — violated two city policies.
One policy said in part, “Members of the Department shall not take part or be concerned, either directly or indirectly, in making or negotiating any compromise or arrangement for any criminal or person to escape the penalty of law. Employees shall not seek to obtain any continuance of any trial in court out of friendship for the defendant, or otherwise interfere with the courts of justice.”
The other policy said, “Peace officers shall at all times conduct themselves in a manner which does not discredit the Peace Officer profession or their employing agency.”
Bevill, occasionally speaking directly to the jurors, whom he addressed as “folks,” said his affidavit supporting McGee’s motion for change of venue violated neither of those policies —though he did concede under cross-examination that a change of venue would almost surely have delayed his friend’s trial.
After McGee’s motion for a change of venue was denied, he was convicted in a two-day trial in Wood County and sentenced to two years in prison. At the conclusion of McGee’s trial, Fletcher, who presided over the criminal case, announced that he was issuing a warrant for Bevill’s arrest, alleging that the police captain had committed aggravated perjury, a felony. The judge called Bevill’s affidavit a “lie, pure and simple.”
The criminal case against Bevill dissolved when a grand jury refused to indict him, but that didn’t occur for 16 months. By then, his lawsuit contends, “he was unable to work in any law enforcement capacity.”
Bevill testified that he had trouble finding even find menial work, like cutting grass, while the criminal charge was hanging over him.
One condition of his release on bail after his arrest was that he submit to regular drug testing at the Wood County probation office. Sometimes, he said, he was made to wait in a room with drug offenders he’d arrested. “It was shameful,” he said. When his name was called, his probation officer would accompany him to the restroom and watch him “pee in a cup. … It was very degrading.”
He lost his health insurance as a city employee, something he learned about, he testified, when he took his gravely ill wife, Edwinna, to visit to the doctor and was told he’d have to pay for the appointment out of his pocket — with money he didn’t have on him.
And, he said, he and his wife had to rely on their grown children to pay their bills, such as utility bills.
“Everybody knows that it’s a parents’ job to help their children,” he said. “It’s not a parent’s job to take from their children.”
At the end of his direct testimony, he was asked by Geisler if, knowing what knows now, he would again sign that affidavit.
“I would,” he said. “I would have to. From the moment I wake up, I’m the first person I look at in the mirror.”
The trial is expected to last two weeks.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the employer of Brianna Michelle Krominga. She is an assistant Texas attorney general.