Last Chance To See 600 sq mi: Hidden
Missed Connections: Gefilte Fish...and "Chain Connections"
H-Town Rock
Rock Talk, Vol. IX
A group of activists held a press conference yesterday demanding a search for murdered A&M student Tynesha Stewart's remains — despite Stewart's family's request that a search not be conducted. "We respect the wishes of the family, but we too are a family and we too have been traumatized by the rollercoaster that we, the community and the greater public have been put upon — not only by the heinousness of the crime that has been described to us in all of the public pronouncement, but also in the unqualified incompetence of the mishandling of this case by the sheriff's department," Robert Muhammad of the Nation of Islam told KHOU.
The allegation of incompetence by Harris County sheriff's investigators is the basis of the call for a search: Activists claim the sheriff's office mishandled the case every step of the way, including putting Stewart's family off when they tried to file a missing person report — the sheriff's office says it has no record of that happening — and, later, not arresting confessed killer Timothy Wayne Shepherd when firefighters and a deputy went to his apartment to find out why flames had been seen leaping from barbecue grills on his apartment's balcony. They found burned meat in Shepherd's kitchen and saw raw meat in his bathtub — he said it was chicken — but Shepherd said he had the grills under control, so the authorities left without incident. And finally, the activists say, police made a misstep by saying there would be no search for Stewart's body, then taking the first steps toward a search, then announcing that Shepherd had dismembered Stewart's body, burned the parts on the barbecue grills and presumably thrown the remains in garbage bins, so a search would not be productive. (There is still the question of how Shepherd could have totally incinerated Stewart's body on barbecue grills — a cremation expert told the Chronicle that "there should be some type of remains left" — but the sheriff's office hasn't directly addressed that.)
Muhammad said the case against Shepherd is too weak without a search of area landfills, but Harris County DA Chuck Rosenthal said cases can be prosecuted without bodies. "There are at least some things we can look at to see whether or not we can match DNA evidence," he told the Chronicle. As for the decision not to search, Sheriff Tommy Thomas addressed it in an open letter: "We knew ... that there were no remains and that any search would be fruitless," Thomas wrote. "Our mission all along was to preserve the dignity of Tynesha Stewart, to bring the least possible grief to Tynesha’s family, and to bring the criminal investigation to a point that would ensure as much as possible a conviction for this heinous crime. I pray that the public would understand the decision was based on information that could not be released at the time. Had there been even a remote possibility that Ms. Stewart’s body could have been returned to her family, I assure you that the Harris County Sheriff’s Office would have been the first to step forward and initiate that search." As KHOU points out today, landfill searches have been successful in other places, but that's not likely to trigger a search here.
Muhammad said he believes the handling of the case had nothing to do with evidence: "My gut tells me it is because she was young and black ... and poor," he said. "The facts tell me it was because [sheriff's investigators] were incompetent." With regard to the search, Texas EquuSearch founder Tim Miller said the group backed off after Stewart's family asked it to: “The family contacted us and basically said, 'You know what? We're trying to put our lives back together. It's going to be way too painful if the search goes on, so would y'all just please step back away from it and not do the search?'" Miller told KHOU. But that has no bearing on what the activists' effort: "We're leaving the family out of this," Deric Muhammad of the Millions More Movement Ministry of Justice told KPRC.
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