A judge in Texas gave one man 40 years in prison for killing another man who allegedly threatened to make naked pictures of his stepdaughter public.
In Liberty City, which is about 120 miles east of Dallas, John Allen Franco, 24, died in 2015. On Friday, a jury found 42-year-old Jessie Clifford Brown guilty of murder in his death.
Around 10 p.m. on May 20, 2015, the Gregg County Sheriff’s Office said its deputies were called to the area of Old Highway 135 and Small Wood Road for a car accident.
But when deputies got there, the man they later identified as Franco did not have the kinds of injuries that would be expected from a car accident.
His body was found to have been shot in the side of the head, according to the autopsy. Franco, a woman, and his 2-year-old daughter were also in the car.
The Longview News-Journal got a copy of the criminal complaint, which says the woman told the police that she and her husband were driving when a blue truck tried to hit them and take them off the road.
Later, Franco stopped at a red light, and the woman told police that three men got out of the truck and walked up to his car.
A man had a gun. The affidavit said that when Franco put the car in reverse, “something caused the driver’s side window to break.” The woman could only say that the men looked like they were from the country.
The car crashed while Franco was still driving, and the woman called 911. The paramedics took him to the hospital right away, but the doctors there said he was dead.
It took about two years for Franco’s murder to be solved before someone came forward with information that named Brown and two other men who have not been publicly identified.
One of the men who was with Brown that night reportedly told the police that the suspect was furious that Franco was allegedly going to share naked pictures of his stepdaughter.
There were rumors that Franco was seeing the stepdaughter. The man told police that the group drove around looking for Franco and even stopped at a house they thought was Franco’s but wasn’t.
“The man said that Brown went up to Franco’s driver’s side window and hit it with the gun,” the warrant reportedly said. “The next thing the man said he heard was what he called a “loud boom.””
After that, they ran away.
Richard Hurlburt, Brown’s lawyer, said at the end of the trial that his client might not have been the shooter and that he was not acting like he was guilty.
KLTV in Tyler reports that he asked the jurors, “If someone kills someone, you are going to keep the gun?”
“Are you going to hold it like you would any other weapon in the house?” You will not just throw it in a lake to get rid of it, right? “All the time, people are found guilty of things they did not do.”
But Stacey Brownlee, a prosecutor with the Gregg County District Attorney’s Office, said it was clear what Brown was up to as soon as he got out of his truck with a gun.
“When you get out of the truck, pull that hammer back, and hit the window with it, you clearly did something that could kill someone,” she said.
