There are several ways to look at it. It was Maurice Pierce, after all, who set the ball rolling when he showed up at Northcross Mall with a loaded .22 pistol in his waistband and sixteen rounds of ammunition in his jeans pocket, then told Hector Polanco that his friend Forrest Welborn had borrowed the gun and might have used it to kill the yogurt girls. And when the cop asked Maurice what he’d been up to on the night of the murders, he said hanging out with his friends Forrest, Rob Springsteen and Mike Scott. So there they were, the four guys.
If Maurice hadn’t pulled that prank, who knows? Paul Johnson might have found somebody else in the tips file to pursue and this whole story might have gone off in a completely different direction. But Maurice was Maurice, and that’s pretty much all there is to say about what he did and why he did it.
On Friday, December 23, 2010, he was living part-time in Austin with his sister, Renee Reyna, and part-time in Lewisville with his wife, Kimberli, and daughter, Marisa, who’d graduated from high school the previous June and was almost nine months pregnant with his first grandchild. In the spring, he’d face a felony charge for assaulting the Plano police officer. One reason he was commuting was that people in Collin County now knew who he was, which made jobs even harder to come by than before; also, he and Kimberli were having problems. So when one of her relatives offered him work in his Austin landscaping business, Maurice moved in with Renee.
They’d closed early that day because of the Christmas holiday, and then he’d gone out to have some drinks with friends. He was heading back to his sister’s—the same house where the task force Tasered him in 2007—to spend the night before driving home the next morning to spend Christmas with his daughter.
Marisa said she and her father spoke on their cell phones every night, and that night was no different from any other. Maurice was talking away when, at about 10:54, he exited Highway 183 and turned into Renee’s neighborhood on Parmer Lane. Most of the medium-size ranch-style houses had several big cars or pickup trucks parked in their driveways. When Maurice got to the stop sign at Shreveport and Carrera, the streets were empty and so, slightly zonked, talking to Marisa, he slid right through.
Who could have predicted that two cops would be staked out in the next block, watching for speeders? Who would have believed this coincidence, if that’s what it was? In fact, we might wonder why cops were patrolling a dark, quiet neighborhood in northwest Austin that late, only two nights before Christmas. When the story broke the next day, newspaper and television reporters would refer to the neighborhood as Metric. A couple of young people I know told me that drug dealers had moved to Metric because it was safe and out of the way. Maybe that was why a seasoned five-year veteran, Frank Wilson, had chosen that particular neighborhood as a training ground for his partner, Bradley Smith.
According to the incident report, when a black SUV ran that stop sign, the cops turned on their flashers. Later, Renee’s husband will say he actually saw the whirling lights from their living room window. Because Maurice was due back at any minute and was always getting in trouble, he wondered if it was happening again. When investigators listened to Marisa Pierce’s cell-phone conversation with her father, they reportedly heard Maurice say he was almost home and then noted a change in his voice. “They’re after me again,” he told his daughter.
“And then,” Marisa said later, “he told me he loved me and that he would never see me again.” Maurice kept going for a couple of blocks before pulling over. Wilson and Smith pulled up behind him.
The press will refer to this as a “routine traffic stop,” but as John Jones often says, no police work is routine unless you’re sitting at a desk doing paperwork. Once you’re on the street, anything can happen.
Maurice got out of his car. Police don’t like it when drivers do that, and he certainly had enough experience with cops to know that. But he thought he was in big trouble again and had already told Marisa she’d never see him again, so he did what he felt like. He exited his vehicle, as the police would say. Wilson approached on foot, with one hand on his holster, as protocol required.
There have been a number of shootings in Austin when a police officer has shot an unarmed man, claiming the victim had moved in a threatening manner or was holding something that looked like a gun. Usually, after an internal investigation, the cop is cleared. The chief finds a justification for the shooting; the family of the dead man raises a ruckus; life moves on. But to be on the safe side, Art Acevedo had ordered dashboard cameras installed in all police cruisers so that even minor traffic stops could be recorded.
The dash camera in Wilson’s car was running.
At this point, Marisa says she began wildly texting her father, who didn’t respond. She texted Reyna, who, in turn, texted Maurice and got no answer. “I think they’re after him,” her husband said. Pierce didn’t answer these texts for a simple reason, because instead of standing by his car waiting, he did what he always did when he was in trouble: He ran.
Frank Wilson pursued on foot, Smith following close behind in the cruiser.
When asked, Ron Lara will admit that the Cold Case Unit had certainly kept up with Maurice; they knew where he lived, what jobs he’d held, what kind of car he drove and, of course, all about his troubles in Collin County. Maybe they were still hoping to make a Yogurt Shop deal with him before he went on trial for the assault, but Lara and other officers insisted they weren’t actively tracking him. As for Frank Wilson, he hadn’t lived in Austin at the time of the murders, the arrests or the trials, so the name Maurice Pierce meant nothing to him. He was simply pursuing someone who’d aroused his suspicion by running from a straightforward traffic stop.
Everybody I’ve talked to or who was quoted in the press thinks Wilson was telling the truth. It all happened so fast, and the night was dark. Even people who don’t believe in coincidences think maybe this might be the exception.
In no time, Wilson caught up with the runner and they tussled. Wilson wore a utility knife on his duty belt for backup, and Pierce grabbed for it.
Aside from the policemen’s testimony and the dash-cam video, you can’t really tell what happened. There were no witnesses, and while the dash camera captured the struggle, details are fuzzy. What is clear is that at some point Maurice snatched Wilson’s knife from his belt and slashed the right side of his neck, nicking his carotid artery. Pierce then ran off, but before falling to the ground, the officer grabbed his revolver and fired one round.
Maurice Pierce made it through a few front yards before collapsing in a driveway only a block or so from his sister’s home.
Renee Reyna says she heard the pop.
Smith called for assistance and applied pressure to Wilson’s neck to stanch the blood flow. An ambulance arrived within minutes. Transporters from the ME’s office soon zipped Maurice in a body bag and drove him to the morgue. On the Christmas Eve news, a man who lived nearby told a reporter that he’d heard a gunshot and had gone to his front door and looked out in time to see a man fall into a driveway and not get up. When the station’s video camera panned the neighborhood, you could see Christmas lights in the windows of every house.
Five hours after the shooting, a detective came to Carrera Lane to tell Reyna that a police officer had shot a man they were almost certain was her brother.
After a night in intensive care, Frank Wilson was released; he went home to spend the holidays with his family.
Victims’ Services sent e-mails to the families of the four girls that evening to inform them of the shooting before they read about it in the paper or heard it on TV. One girl’s father texted his ex-wife to say, “Ding Dong the witch is dead!”
On Christmas Day, the Statesman’s lead story was headlined YOGURT SHOP SUSPECT DIES IN SHOOTING. There were photos of Pierce, Wilson and Smith, and a map of the area where the traffic stop and shooting had occurred.
Five months later, on May 22, 2011, the Statesman ran another front-page story—headlined WHO WAS MAURICE PIERCE?—which was accompanied by the photo taken the day he was released from jail in 2003, when, in his loose white T-shirt and blue jeans, he sprinted away from reporters. That was the day before he wished the press and the city of Austin “Godspeed.” The paper then told Maurice’s story, mostly from his family’s perspective. Ever since the Yogurt Shop arrest, they said, his life was about the murders and nothing else. He couldn’t get work or sign a lease without somebody saying, Aren’t you the one…He was afraid of the police and saw them coming after him everywhere, even when the family took trips out of the state. Marisa said she tried to convince her father to live within the limits of the law and that if he was ever pulled over, he should simply “take the ticket” and move on. But that’s something he would never do.
On September 22, 2011, after a Travis County grand jury declined to indict Frank Wilson, investigative details were revealed that, as the Statesman put it, shed new light on Pierce’s mind-set the night he died. Apparently, after having dinner with a nephew, he’d gone to the apartment of a woman who provided police with a written statement saying that she and Maurice had been in an intimate and tumultuous relationship off and on for six months, but she’d pretty much ended it because of his fierce fits of jealousy, which once had led him to strike her in the face. On December 23, he’d arrived, uninvited, at her house around six-thirty and had begun drinking and “getting very jealous.” When he got out of line, she’d poured a can of beer over his head. He’d left at about ten. Among the papers sent to the grand jury by the DA’s office was a toxicology report showing that when Pierce was shot he had a blood-alcohol level of 0.14, well above the 0.08 legal driving limit.
It’s possible to take an ironic narrative slant on the life of Maurice Pierce as the story of a risk-taking boy who would not live to see his first grandchild or ever get out from under the sway of his demons, who could never manage to follow his daughter’s advice and just take the ticket. People convinced he was the Yogurt Shop ringleader might well have imagined that a vengeful God had finally delivered justice. Others might wonder if, had he lived, he could’ve cleaned up his act and moved on.
My guess is, Maurice knew all along what lay ahead for him. Behind the high-wire shine in his eyes was pure sadness, obvious in every photograph as he sits there looking beyond the camera lens into what seemed to be his inevitable future, eyebrows pressed down at the outer edges like a soulful clown’s. Maybe it’s only because I know what was going to happen that I see something in that gaze that says, This will never end well, not for me.