The week before the trial Mark told me that the sheriff’s department was watching Eric closely. They had a plan to stop him, if he avoided the metal detectors and brought a gun in through a back door. They thought Eric might hurt someone.
—Ron Herrington
On the afternoon of Monday, March 19, 2012, Eric Williams’s theft trial began. Because of concerns about what he might do, precautions had been established to text those involved when Eric entered the courthouse, and when he left.
In the 422nd, Judge Chitty sat in his usual chair behind the bench, while at the prosecutor’s table Mark reviewed his opening statement. If worried about the volatility of the man on trial, Mark appeared confident and eager. “Mark had his game face on,” said Ragsdale, the bailiff.
At Mark’s side towered Mike, as big and bulky as Mark was slender. Eric must have looked like a gift to a DA who’d run on a “regain integrity in Kaufman County” platform. That the suspended justice of the peace backed Mike’s opponent undoubtedly made the trial loom even sweeter. Perhaps buoyed by her husband’s enthusiasm, in the back row Cynthia nodded and smiled at well-wishers, as usual her hands busy, this time twisting and turning yarn as she knit. She appeared eager to watch Mike’s first trial as DA as he took an errant public official to task.
At the defense table, David Sergi and John Sickel sat beside Eric, his face as placid as on the day deputies arrested him. In his mind, Eric estimated he had a fifty-fifty chance of an acquittal.
Noticeably absent was Kim, who despite her husband’s crisis spent her day at home in bed, after downing a heavy dose of prescription meds. Over the months, Kim had seen Eric’s resentment grow. Around the house, he ridiculed Mark’s rail-thin build, calling him “Fuck Stick.” At other times he mocked Mike, whom he’d dubbed “Sluggo.”
Although she felt weak and tired, Kim, who remained convinced Eric would prevail, had wanted to go to the trial. Eric didn’t want her there. Instead, to gain sympathy, he preferred the jury and judge believe she was bedridden.
Throughout the trial, the courtroom crowd ebbed and flowed, local lawyers filing in and out, listening to snatches of evidence between their own obligations, leaving to meet with clients or file motions. Curious, they wanted to see the evidence.
On the stand, Lori Friemel recounted the day she discovered the monitors gone, and how she saw Eric on the surveillance tape walking them out the IT department’s door. On a schematic of the building, she explained his route, one that didn’t require using his passkey, ensuring there wouldn’t be a record he’d been in the building. When she’d looked at video from previous weeks, she tracked Eric walking out with other items, acting as if shopping in her office.
When it came time to show the video to the jurors, David Sergi renewed a previous objection, charging that it wasn’t a complete record. Judge Chitty ruled against him, and in the courtroom, the lights dimmed. On the screen Eric, just as Friemel described, circulated through the building into the IT room, and then walked out with three boxes marked Dell.
Eric Williams carrying out two monitor boxes in a still taken from the surveillance camera
Evidence photo
To prove Eric hadn’t simply made a mistake, that he knew how the county handled equipment purchases, Mark asked Friemel questions about the laptop she bought for Eric soon after he took over the JP court, putting into evidence the written request with Eric’s signature.
The testimony damaging, Eric paid little notice. Behind the defense table, he acted like one of the attorneys, writing notes. “Whatever was going on around him, he never changed expression,” said Bruce Bryant, an investigator on the case. “I thought he must have been wired different than most people. He looked as unconcerned as if he was at home watching TV.”
For those in the courtroom throughout the trial, the evidence disproved many of the rumors that had circulated in Kaufman’s law community. One was that Eric had taken the monitors out of frustration, after having requested them for months without IT following through. Instead, Friemel testified that Eric had never asked for the monitors, and that if he had, she would have ordered them, since he had more than ample funds in his technology account.
In response, Sergi hammered on where the two monitors were found, one on Eric’s JP desk in the sub-courthouse, the other in his Sport Trac in the parking lot, the vehicle he used to go back and forth to the jail.
“Did you at any point . . . give Eric Williams your consent to enter the IT offices, to take the monitors?” Mark asked George York when he took the stand.
“No,” he said.
Back and forth the questioning went, as the tension in the courtroom mounted. No exchange was more heated than the one over the authenticity of the video, which Sergi insisted was incomplete and unreliable, and Mark countered simply missed segments of time because the motion-activated camera turned off and on.
On the stand, Ernie Zepeda, wearing his captain’s uniform from the sheriff’s department, explained how they set the trap, installing cameras inside Friemel’s office to watch Eric. Again a video played, this time of Eric walking out of the IT room with a laser cartridge. After Eric’s arrest, Zepeda searched his truck. “There was a lot of weaponry, a lot of firearms in there.”
“Did you ever find the third monitor?” Mark asked.
“No,” Zepeda answered.
On cross-exam, Sergi repeated his accusations that there were flaws in the state’s case, most importantly how the video had been made, simply copying it onto a thumb drive. And he insisted that his client had returned the third monitor, the missing one. “Eric is maybe not the most politically astute person . . . He steps on people’s toes?” Sergi prodded.
“I wouldn’t know,” Zepeda answered.
“You are aware that Judge Williams had a county car allowance and he was allowed to transport county property in his vehicle?” Sergi asked.
“Yes, I am,” Zepeda answered.
One question brought consequences the defense hadn’t intended, when Sergi asked: “You’ve known Eric Williams a long time. You’ve never known him to steal anything, correct?”
Zepeda agreed, but Mark latched on to that question, arguing before Judge Chitty that Sergi had put a “skunk” in the jury box by insinuating “there’s no other thefts.”
The defense attorneys vigorously objected, but in the end Judge Chitty agreed with the prosecutor. “Are you aware that Eric Williams has been charged with a theft over several periods, several different episodes, stealing money from the county by accessing improperly the county law library fund?” he asked.
“That’s correct,” Zepeda answered.
Perhaps Eric’s attorney could have argued away the one charge involving the monitors, but knowing of other theft allegations had to have affected the jurors.
Later, many would say Mike, a big, bustling presence in the courtroom, looked proud throughout the trial, sometimes glaring at Eric, at other times almost grinning. It was his first trial as DA, and he relished the experience.
Eric’s situation only worsened when Mark listed the items ordered for the law library. A goose-necked light for a laptop, for instance, that couldn’t have been warranted since the law library didn’t have a laptop. The gaming headphones perhaps could have been useful for dictation, but another item was a global positioning system for a laptop. “Is there anything like that in the law library?” Mark asked.
“No, sir,” Lori Friemel answered.
From scissors to Post-it notes, from pens and envelopes to memory sticks, door stops, and DVDs, none of it had been found in the law library. Eric had purchased four computer mice, but the library had only one.
The defense did what they could. Regina Fogarty described Eric as a hands-on JP who’d worked hard to improve the office. Lanith Derryberry, a former designer for Texas Instruments, voiced the defense’s view of the surveillance tape by labeling it unreliable. Yet Mark defused the argument, and Derryberry admitted he looked through the video and hadn’t seen Eric return the third monitor to the IT room.
“These actions have thrown a cloud over every elected official in the county!” Mike railed in closing arguments. “Eric Williams is a judge. He’s supposed to protect the good people from bad people. He was supposed to protect them from people like him.
“This is a classic case of the fox watching the hen house . . . We expect more from our leaders . . . you have to be able to show everybody else out there that the people of Kaufman County will not tolerate this from their regular citizens or their leadership, elected or not elected. . . . We pay the price for it being held to a higher standard. He took an oath to do just that. He spat on that oath.”
“You know the defendant is, as has been pointed out, an army officer, member of the Texas military forces, an elected official, a licensed lawyer. He is really an American hero,” David Sergi countered. “Now, did he do something silly? I kind of compare Eric to a Dudley Do-Right. He tries to do the right thing. He’s trying, but he makes mistakes . . . a rookie JP in a courthouse that I think you can see is a snake pit.”
Rather than stealing, Sergi said Eric simply tried “to bring the JP office into, frankly, into the 20th century, not even the 21st century.”
When it came to the supplies ordered for the law library, Sergi offered multiple explanations, including that the earphones were for the lawyers to plug into the computer to listen to continuing education classes. “The district attorney’s office has done its best to make mountains out of mole hills. . . . It doesn’t rise to the level of criminality.”
Before he asked the jurors to find Eric not guilty, Sergi said, “Violation of some administrative policy? Maybe. A crime? No, sir.”
The last to speak, Mark attacked: “You just heard about me trying to paint an evil picture of Eric Williams. Well, I don’t think I need to do that. I think the pictures that are in evidence, the video, the still photographs clearly paint an evil picture of Eric Williams, an elected politician who’s a thief. There’s no worse thief than that. You put him in office, you give him a key to a building . . . and he steals from you. That’s evil.”
Over and again, Mark suggested jurors review the video, paying attention to Eric’s body language as he “cased the joint.” If Eric had been there to “do good for the county,” as he claimed, why did he make sure no one saw him before he walked out with the boxes?
“This guy’s sitting over at the end of counsel table,” Mark said, pointing at Eric. “He’s an elected public servant who is just a flat-out thief and burglar and needs to be removed from office and convicted of being a thief and a burglar.”
Less than four hours after they retired for deliberation, the jurors did as Mark and Mike requested. In the courtroom, one spectator watched as the guilty verdict was read. “Eric was really still. Hardly moved,” she said. “But I thought I saw a tear in his eye.”