John Jefferson
Inset: John Franco (Gregg County Sheriff’s Office). Background: Defense attorney Richard Hurlburt, left, and convicted murderer Jessie Brown (KLTV/YouTube).
A Texas judge sent a man to prison for 40 years for murdering another man who allegedly threatened to release naked pictures of his stepdaughter.
Court records show a jury on Friday convicted 42-year-old Jessie Clifford Brown on a murder charge in the 2015 death of John Allen Franco, 24, in Liberty City, which is about 120 miles east of Dallas.
The Gregg County Sheriff’s Office said its deputies responded around 10 p.m. May 20, 2015, to a car crash in the area of Old Highway 135 and Small Wood Road. But when deputies responded, they found the man they later identified as Franco was not suffering from injuries consistent with a car crash. Instead, an autopsy determined he died from a gunshot wound to the side of the head. Franco, a woman and his daughter, who was 2 years old at the time, were also in the car.
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According to the criminal complaint obtained by the Longview News-Journal, the woman told deputies they were driving when a blue truck tried to run them off the road. Franco later stopped at a light when three men reportedly got out of the truck and walked up to his vehicle, the woman reportedly told detectives. One of the men had a gun. Franco hit reverse but “something caused the driver’s side window to break,” the affidavit reportedly said. The woman could only describe the men as “country looking.”
With Franco still behind the wheel, the car crashed, and the woman called 911. Paramedics rushed him to the hospital where doctors pronounced him dead.
Franco’s murder went unsolved for about two years until a tipster came forward to identify the three men in question: Brown and two other men who have not been publicly identified.
The complaint reportedly said one of the men with Brown that night said the suspect was fuming about Franco allegedly threatening to share nude photos of his stepdaughter. Franco and the stepdaughter were reportedly in a relationship. Per the warrant, the man told cops the group drove around looking for Franco, even stopping at a house they erroneously thought was his.
“(The man) stated that (Brown) approached Franco’s driver’s side window and struck the window with the gun,” the warrant reportedly said. “(The man) stated that he next heard what he described as a ‘loud boom.’”
They then fled the scene.
During closing arguments at the trial, Brown’s attorney Richard Hurlburt suggested his client may not have been the shooter and that he was not acting like a guilty man.
“If someone kills someone you’re going to keep the weapon?” he asked jurors, according to Tyler ABC affiliate KLTV. “You’re going to put it in the normal place you would any other weapon in the house? You’re not going to throw it in a lake somewhere to get rid of it? People get found guilty of things they didn’t do all the time.”
But prosecutor Stacey Brownlee of the Gregg County District Attorney’s Office said Brown’s intentions were clear as soon as he walked out of his truck with a gun.
“When you get out of the truck and you pull that hammer back and you bang it against the window you’ve committed an act clearly dangerous to human life,” she said.
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