TX Observer: “Now that Gray was finally facing a judge and jury, the evidence presented against him seemed flimsy at best—no weapon, no fingerprints, no DNA, no identifying witnesses, no surveillance footage, no motive, nothing actually connecting him to the crime. The prosecution’s case relied almost exclusively on cell phone tower data known to be unreliable, particularly from that time period. After years of being held without a conviction, it appeared this man might now be convicted without evidence. And no one in the courtroom—not the state, the defense counsel, or the judge—seemed alarmed. There was an eerie normalcy to the palpable callousness playing out before our eyes.
That callousness crept forward in nearly every interaction within this trial, including many details pointing to a very problematic investigation. Once the two co-defendants were identified as persons of interest in the case, after a year and a half of fruitless searching, other important leads were dropped or simply not pursued thoroughly. Witnesses were badgered and harassed on the stand in ways that felt far beyond even a confrontational cross-examination. The accused man’s friends had been coerced, threatened, intimidated and treated as suspects themselves by investigators to the point that implicating the defendant seemed to offer their only way out from under the thumb of the system. Indeed, two of the state’s key witnesses recanted their grand jury testimony on the stand during the trial, saying they had been “shaken down” to the point of giving false statements against Cyrus. When they disavowed their earlier testimony, the atmosphere in the courtroom became tense, with the prosecutor digging in his heels, grilling them mercilessly and casting them as “hostile.” We also learned that recordings of important witness interviews had been lost by detectives, and stored improperly without backup. People’s lives were irrevocably ruined, including several members of the Texas State University football team with potentially promising NFL careers, by their unfortunate proximity to this case and by simply being Black in the wrong place at the wrong time.”