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Author Topic: Fatal Beating 7/10/08 Hank Johnson 27 of Pasadena TX-Prosec. Conflict of Int?  (Read 6388 times)
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« on: March 24, 2010, 11:08:02 AM »

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6927225.html
MURDER MYSTERY
A mother's request for answers

Tuesday, March 23, 2010


Melissa Phillip Chronicle
Sandi Johnson holds the shoes her son was wearing when he was beaten. She says they were his favorites and the style is an example of his fun personality.


Sandi Johnson may finally learn what secrets lie in the blood beneath the fingernails of her only son, Hank, who was savagely beaten to death nearly two years ago.

At 8 a.m. today, the Deer Park resident is bracing herself to watch her 27-year-old son's body be exhumed from Forest Park Lawndale Cemetery in Houston. Arrangements have been made for blood specimens to be taken at the Galveston County morgue and then the body will be reburied.

“I closed his coffin myself after laying a flower inside when I last buried him,” Sandi said, in a voice choked with emotion. “I wanted the next time that I saw him to be in heaven. But I knew that someone would have to come back and dig his body up.”

She even delayed placing a marker on his barren grave for that same reason, and she said the funeral home did not clean under the nails to avoid washing away evidence.

Although her son's swollen and bruised body was barely recognizable to her in 2008, Sandi begged anyone who would listen then to sample the pink-tinged blood clearly visible under his nails. She left repeated messages with Robertson County District Attorney John Paschall during the 11 days before her comatose son was taken off life support.

But she said Paschall, who is responsible for prosecuting the case, never returned her calls. His chief investigator, Brian Bancroft, also ignored her pleas, she said, and nobody gave her an explanation.

At the year anniversary of her son's death, she hired an attorney to find answers and to this day remains distrustful of the exhumation procedure.

She fears Paschall may have a conflict of interest in the case.

Paschall's brother-in-law, Billy Blackburn, is cited in the district attorney's investigative report as having knowledge of her son's fatal beating on July 10, 2008.

Paschall and Bancroft declined to return phone calls inquiring about the case. Blackburn also could not be reached for comment.

However, if the media had not started asking questions, Johnson's attorney, Ty Clevenger, believes no blood analysis would be happening today. Clevenger has sent several letters requesting FBI and the Texas Attorney General's Office to intervene, saying the exhumation does nothing to “alleviate Paschall's egregious conflict of interest” which leaves Sandi with “no confidence” in the investigation.

Sandi said her son, a welder, was never one to seek trouble. His co-workers at Fiberglass Specialists in Pasadena — who accompanied him on that fatal trip to work on a power plant near Hearne in Central Texas — agree.

“He was all sensitive. Not the typical construction worker, but everybody loved him,” said Louie Madrid, one of the last to see him alive.

That's because Hank liked spending his spare time strumming his guitar or assuming the identity of a super hero for his mother's puppet show business. He had entertained thousands at birthday parties and area malls since he was 7 years old, his mother said.

On the night of the beating, Madrid saw Hank walking back to his hotel room alone after they had picked up some hamburgers. The next thing he knew, Hank's girlfriend, Sunney Carter, also working there as a welder, found him near death.

“He groaned but was never able to tell us anything,” Carter said.

Two guitars were missing, and some electronic games were bagged but left near the door as if the intruders left in a hurry.

The initial lead investigator, Hearne Police Sgt. Steve Stokely, declined to comment. He was removed from the case a few weeks after Hank's death because the district attorney announced he was taking over.

Stokely later was demoted from sergeant to a patrolman working the graveyard shift.

Clevenger filed a federal lawsuit in September against public officials, including Paschall. The suit says Stokely met with the FBI to complain about Paschall and that Stokely gave the FBI a tape-recorded conversation in which the district attorney threatens Stokely's job over the Johnson investigation.

Clevenger sent a letter Sept. 15 to Paschall demanding he remove himself from the Johnson murder probe since his brother-in-law professed to have knowledge about it.

According to the district attorney's investigator's report, Paschall said that he had interviewed Blackburn two days after the assault. Blackburn said a friend told him that he might need “help” because he suspected his girlfriend was sleeping with a worker staying at the motel.

Blackburn denied participating in the assault, and his hands showed no signs of being in an altercation, the report said.

In response to Clevenger's letter, Paschall wrote a letter the same day in which he refused to step down and called the allegations against him “spurious.”

“Mr. Blackburn's sole connection to this case is the mere fact that he is an acquaintance of certain persons of interest,” according to the letter.

He added Blackburn had since passed a polygraph exam that “confirmed” he was never a participant.

Clevenger said the county has no record of taxpayer money being spent on such a test, and Paschall has refused to provide proof of it.

Family photo
Photo taken in 2008 of Hank Johnson of Pasadena.



Undated photo of Hank Johnson of Pasadena taken while he was hospitalized after being brutally beaten.
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« Reply #1 on: May 03, 2010, 05:11:02 PM »

http://www.myspace.com/lovefriendly111 PRivate....mood=betrayed


A mother fights for answers
 
By YVETTE OROZCO
Updated: 04.05.10
Sandy Johnson waited nearly two years to place a marker on her son’s grave.

She dreaded the reason why, but knew it was inevitable.

The March 23 exhumation of Hank Johnson’s body from Forest Park Lawndale Cemetery in Houston will hopefully lead to clues regarding his death. Blood samples obtained will be taken to the Galveston County morgue and results could take weeks or months.

But the exhumation was just the beginning of the next chapter in Sandy Johnson’s long search into the reasons behind the death of her only son on July 10, 2008.

“I don’t trust them,” she said of the Robertson County officials who ordered the exhumation after two years of trying to claim the case shut.

The Pasadena-area resident has been trying to find answers since the day her son was found beaten and near death in his Central Texas hotel room.

Blood found underneath Hank Johnson’s fingernails was never examined by authorities in Hearn, a city in Robertson County, where the 27-year-old welder had gone to work on a power plant nearly two years ago. Items were missing from the hotel room where he was staying. His girlfriend found him near death.

For 12 days, he would lie comatose and dying in an area hospital until Johnson had to make the choice to remove her son from life support. She dressed and buried him then, and on March 29 she dressed and buried him again.

Since his death, Johnson has become a one-woman crusade to get authorities in Robertson County to listen. But those officials have so far shut her out. When she called and left messages repeatedly about the visible blood stains on her son’s fingernails, while he was in a coma and now, nearly two years later, when she places those officials in the glare of the media spotlight.

“The D.A.’s office kept telling me to leave them alone, that there was no case,” Johnson said.

Robertson County District Attorney John Paschall, who was the prosecutor in the case, has not answered those calls nor has chief investigator Brian Bancroft.

“They’re still being very quiet,” said Johnson’s attorney, Ty Clevenger.

With the DA’s brother-in-law cited in the investigation as having knowledge of her son’s beating, Johnson questions if Paschall has a conflict of interest in the case. Clevenger said Paschall sent a letter to him personally stating that a polygraph confirmed that his brother-in-law had nothing to do with the murder, but refused to provide any record of such evidence.

“We’ve even asked for the financial records verifying that they had a polygraph examiner do this, but they’re saying they can’t produce any,” Clevenger said. “That tells me it never happened.”

The original investigator in the case has since been demoted from sergeant to night patrolmen on the graveyard shift, having been removed from the case by Paschall. Clevenger believes authorities exhumed the body only when prompted by negative media attention.

“None of that happened until the press really started pushing the story,” he said.

Clevenger has requested the involvement of the FBI and the Texas Attorney General’s Office into the case. Authorities from the Hearn Police Department and Robertson County District Attorney’s Office were unavailable for comment.

At Johnson’s request, the funeral home did not clean the blood from Hank’s fingernails for the same reason his grave was not given a marker.

“I never ordered his stone because I knew that they were going to do this, I just felt it, but I didn’t think it would be 12 months,” she said. “The next time I wanted to see my son was in Heaven.”

Hank Johnson worked as a welder for Fiberglass Specialists in Pasadena, but grew up, said his mother, with the sensitivity of an artist. Whether he was playing his guitar or letting children chase him around as a member of his mother’s puppet theater troupe in Pasadena, he was an original.

He also left two young children.

When news of his exhumation was shown on TV, now 6-year-old Lily Johnson immediately recognized her father.

“She pointed at the TV and said, ‘That’s my daddy!’” Johnson said. “She knows what is happening and she asks, ‘Why would anybody want to hurt my daddy? My daddy was so funny.’”

Challenging authorities in Robertson County has consumed Johnson’s life for almost two years and, until she gets answers, her son’s death remains an open case and an open wound. Identifying her son’s murderers will not bring him back, she said, but can begin the chapter of healing.

“They’ve got to be prosecuted, they’ve got to be put in jail,” Johnson said.

Hank Johnson’s body was exhumed and reburied the same day. His mother watched as his body was lifted, and then lowered for the second time.

“I think that was the hardest part of this,” she said. “Taking my son’s clothes to the funeral home is something that is unnatural and doing (it) twice is devastating. They have a word for a man who loses his wife, or for a woman who loses her husband, but they have no words for a parent who loses a child. There is too much pain to describe it.”

Johnson finally ordered the marker for her son’s grave, one week after he would have turned 29 in March. The text is simple: Hank Alan Johnson, Beloved Father. underneath those words, Johnson chose the title of her son’s favorite song as the centerpiece to his epitaph, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “A Simple Man.”

“Mama told me when I was young,

“Come sit beside me, my only son.

“Be something you love and understand,

“Be a simple kind of man.”

It was the last song Sandy Johnson heard her son play on the guitar. She didn’t understand the personal significance until later.

“When I actually listened to the song’s lyrics, I realized it was about a mother telling her son to be good,” she said. “Now that song always gets me, it just gets me.”
http://www.hcnonline.com/articles/2010/04/05/pasadena_citizen/news/040410_sandy_johnson.txt
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« Reply #2 on: June 27, 2012, 06:04:33 AM »

Houston, TX Unsolved Murders & Cold Cases

http://www.houstonunsolved.com/index.php?topic=303.25

last post was 6-16-12  interesting thread
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Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware/Of giving your heart to a dog to tear  -- Rudyard Kipling

One who doesn't trust is never deceived...

'I remained too much inside my head and ended up losing my mind' -Edgar Allen Poe
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