Prosecutors rest in Hollis Daniels capital murder trial
Carmen East had never driven faster in her life as she did five years ago in Ireland, barreling from Letterkenny to Dublin to get to the airport after getting the phone call every police officer's spouse dreaded.
Her husband, Floyd East Jr., a Texas Tech police officer was shot and killed on Oct. 9, 2017, by a sophomore student he arrested for a drug charge.
East's killer, 24-year-old Hollis Daniels, pleaded guilty last week to a count of capital murder and now faces life in prison without parole or the death penalty.
Carmen, who was the final witness prosecutors called on before resting their case, told jurors on Monday that it was morning in Lubbock when her husband called her as she was turning in for bed in Letterkenny, Ireland where she had been for two weeks for work.
The couple lived in El Paso, but Floyd, 48, joined the Texas Tech Police Department five months before and drove back and forth from El Paso to Lubbock for training after which he planned to work at Tech's El Paso campus.
That night, Carmen talked to her husband about her day and the challenges of her work as a software developer. He offered encouragement as he always did, wished her good night, told her he loved her and that they'd talk the next day.
She went to bed and placed her cellphone, set to vibrate, on a dresser across her room.
Around 3 a.m., her phone woke her up. It was friend who was watching the couple's then teenage daughters, calling to ask if she'd heard from her husband.
They'd heard news about a shooting on the Tech campus in Lubbock and they couldn't reach him.
Carmen told jurors she told her friend not to worry, saying she'd spoken to her husband about this scenario before.
No news is good news, she said. If they couldn't reach him, it meant he couldn't be on the phone because he was busy responding to what was happening.
Almost immediately, her hotel phone rang.
"That's when I knew something had gone down," she said.
She recounted to jurors that she never hung up on her friend when the person on her hotel phone told her that her husband was dead.
She said on her cellphone she could hear that the news also reached her daughters.
"So you can hear them yelling and screaming on the phone at the same time," she said.
Carmen and Floyd
Carmen described her husband as a loving father and a caring man
"Floyd would never let someone be in despair ... without doing something," she said.
The two grew up together and were high school sweethearts. They broke up after high school and Carmen married a man with whom she had two daughters. Floyd moved to Seattle.
However, Floyd remained a part of her life because of how close their families were. She said her first marriage ended after the birth of her youngest daughter.
In 2012, Carmen married Floyd, who became her daughters' father.
"They are who they are because of him," she said.
She said her husband was an avid diver who loved the ocean so much that his ashes were incorporated into a 3,800-pound reef ball in St. Augustine, Florida. [https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/crime/2018/04/16/slain-texas-officer-who-loved-sea-now-part-of-it-off-st-augustine/12677941007/]
But one of his biggest passions serving as a police officer, career he took on later in life, she said.
Floyd East was a native of El Paso who began working in 2014 as a guard at Texas Tech’s University Health Sciences Center while attending El Paso Community College Law Enforcement Academy to obtain his basic peace officer license.
He had been a certified police officer for about five months, traveling from El Paso to Lubbock every week, before he was killed.
Carmen said her husband loved the job and cared deeply about the students at Tech.
"He had a very wonderful knack of being able to talk to the youth," she said.
She said their home in El Paso was a safe haven for her children because of her husband's compassion.
"He was always able to talk to them," she said.
She said her husband would recount how he was able to calm down students who, in his words, were "going ape."
"He was very proud of what he did," she said.
In honor of her husband, Carmen set up a charity called Texas 635, a reference to Floyd's badge number. The charity offers a $635 check to the families of slain police officers.
"I made it my life's work ... to show that essence of Floyd to other officers and to whoever I can," she said.
She said her group recently added another line to their mission, offering mental wellness retreats for police officers.
"To take care of officers on the brink of suicide," she said.
Hollis Daniels' history
Jurors also heard testimony about an armed robbery investigators believe Daniels committed hours before the shooting.
The alleged victim of the robbery told jurors that hours before the shooting, he agreed to meet Daniels to sell him Xanax pills.
However, the drug deal turned into a drug rip when he entered Daniels' vehicle and stared down the barrel of a .45 caliber pistol, the same weapon Daniels stole from a friend the night before and the gun he would use to execute East that night.
The man told jurors he was seething about losing about $400 worth of drugs to Daniels and texted the Seguin native that he knew his license plate number.
The next day, after seeing news that Daniels was arrested in connection with Floyd East's shooting death, the man called the police telling them that Daniels also robbed him at gunpoint hours before.
Prosecutors also read a note Daniels' wrote a few days after he was booked into the Lubbock County Detention Center, where he'd been held since his arrest.
"I hate what I've done," Daniels' wrote, adding that he'd been unable to sleep soundly because the thoughts of East's family and friends were keeping him up.
"I want to live," Daniels wrote. "I want to take it back, but just can't. I'm not sure how this will turn out."
He wrote that he believed he was facing between 25 years to life in prison.
"To me that's scarier than the death sentence," he wrote.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in this case and will have to prove to jurors that there was a probability that while in prison Daniels would commit criminal acts of violence that would constitute a continuing threat to society. The criminal acts of violence range from a terroristic threat to assault to murder.
Life in prison
Garth Parker, the Region II director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Correctional Institutions Division, was brought in to tell jurors about prison conditions in Texas.
He said prisoners sentenced to life without parole can be put with general population inmates, who are on looser supervision compared to death row inmates who are heavily guarded and are escorted everywhere they go.
General population areas often have 50-100 inmates overseen by a handful of guards. In some prisons, hundreds of prisoners spent time in a recreational yard with one prison guard directly supervising them, he said.
Parker told jurors that despite their best efforts, prisoners are still able to access contraband such as drugs and weapons while in prison. Prisoners are also able to fashion items in the prison into weapons.
"Inmates are crafty, they 've got time on their hands to sit around and think about how to do things," he said.
He said assaults and violence are also common in prison. Parker said he's seen prisoners with clean behavioral records at county jails become violent when they go to prison as well as the opposite.
To hand down a punishment of life without parole, jurors must believe there are sufficient mitigating factors to spare Daniels the death sentence.
Before ending for the day, defense attorneys called on three people to the witness stand to present their case that a sentence of life without parole satisfied the ends of justice in the case.
Witness testimony
Defense attorneys told jurors in their opening statement last week that their client was plagued by a combination of depression and drug addiction that fueled his actions in the days leading to the shooting.
One of Daniels' roommates described Daniels to jurors as an unserious college student who smoked marijuana on an almost daily basis.
Andrew Ortiz told jurors that Daniels also abused Xanax pills.
Jurors also heard from Tech officials who testified that Daniels' mother had reached out to them to find help for her son who was enrolled at the school on a probationary basis.
Earlier in the trial, jurors heard from Guadalupe County probation officials who testified about Daniels' juvenile criminal history.
The trial resumes Wednesday.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Widow of slain officer testifies in Hollis Daniels capital murder trial
