Fired Quitman Police Captain’s Suit Headed to Jury
After six days of testimony, closing arguments in Terry Bevill’s wrongful-termination lawsuit are scheduled for Wednesday morning before U.S. District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III of Sherman.
Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
Bruce Tomaso spent more than 30 years as a writer and editor at The Dallas Morning News. When asked what positions he held there, he usually says it’s easier to list those he didn’t.
As enterprise editor on The News’s breaking news desk in the summer of 2016, he played a key role in covering the downtown shooting spree that left five police officers dead. For its coverage, The News was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Reporting.
He spent most of 1997 in Denver covering the federal criminal trials of Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Four years later, he covered McVeigh’s execution.
His first major reporting assignment for The Texas Lawbook was a retrospective on the 20th anniversary of the $119.6 million verdict for 10 young men who’d been molested as children by Rudy Kos, a priest in the Catholic Diocese of Dallas. The stories earned Bruce and his Lawbook editor, Allen Pusey, the Dallas Bar Association’s 2018 Stephen Philbin Award for Feature Writing.
In 2019, he covered the seven-week medical fraud trial of nine physicians, healthcare executives and others associated with Forest Park Medical Center, a now-defunct Dallas surgical hospital.
He’s a member of the Alumni Hall of Fame at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He and his wife, Dallas attorney Patricia A. Nolan, have one grown son, who is smarter than either of them.
He will drop everything, including preposterous sums of money, to see Lady Gaga, Notre Dame football, or the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team.
You can reach Bruce at bruce.tomaso@texaslawbook.net.
After six days of testimony, closing arguments in Terry Bevill’s wrongful-termination lawsuit are scheduled for Wednesday morning before U.S. District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III of Sherman.
Jeff Fletcher, Wood County’s former state district judge, joins fellow defendants in Terry Bevill’s wrongful-termination suit in denying there was any conspiracy to punish Bevill for saying in 2017 that a friend couldn’t get a fair trial in the East Texas county.
Fired Quitman police captain Terry Bevill’s wrongful-termination case in Sherman could go to a federal jury as soon as midweek.
At the conclusion of Friday’s court session before U.S. District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III, Bevill’s lawyers said they have two witnesses yet to call, and will probably rest on Tuesday.
The other two defendants in Terry Bevill’s wrongful-termination suit are listed as potential witnesses in the ongoing jury trial before U.S. District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III in Sherman.
Had it been up to him, Ex-Chief Kelly Cole said, his second-in-command “probably would have gotten couple of days off” for violating policy by signing an affidavit stating that he didn’t think his friend could get a fair trial in Wood County.
Terry Bevill, the fired officer, testifies that he was nearly ruined in the seven years since he signed an affidavit saying he didn’t think a friend could get a fair trial in Wood County. Defense counsel say he was terminated not out of retribution, but because he violated Quitman city policies.

When Terry Bevill signed an affidavit in 2017 saying he didn’t think a friend could get a fair trial in Wood County in East Texas, he didn’t know he was signing the death certificate for his law enforcement career.
On Monday, a federal jury will determine if Bevill was wrongly fired.
Meta Materials Inc. of Nevada agreed in a cease-and-desist order to pay a $1 million fine. A lawsuit against the company’s two principal executives remains pending in the Southern District of New York.
In 2019, Terry Bevill sued his former bosses in Wood County, contending they retaliated against him because he supported a change of venue for a friend charged with facilitating the escape of a jail inmate. Bevill, an Oak Cliff native, said in an affidavit that jailer David McGee could not get a fair trial in the East Texas county because of the personal relationships involving the sheriff, the district attorney and the presiding judge in the case.
Dr. David M. Young of Fredericksburg was accused of prescribing orthotic devices and genetic tests for thousands of patients he never met. He was convicted by a jury Friday and is scheduled to be sentenced in October.
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