Man breaks bones, but shows up for jury duty

Most people go to great lengths to avoid jury duty.

Craig Sweet went to extraordinary lengths to make his.

Earlier this month, when Sweet discovered his car battery was dead, the 57-year-old North Richland Hills man decided to walk the half-mile to the middle school where his wife worked, and borrow her car to get to the Tarrant County courthouse.

A 4 1/2-foot fence he encountered while taking a shortcut wasn’t about to slow him down.

“My choice was at that point was either go over the fence … or walk around to the closest exit of that fence, which is about 100 yards away and in the opposite direction of where my wife’s car was,” recalled Sweet, a telecommunications consultant. “I said, ‘I’m late. I’m just going to go over the fence. No big deal. I can do this.’”

That decision, he now realizes, wasn’t his best.

“Your brain thinks you’re one age and your body thinks you’re another,” he quipped.

As Sweet got halfway over the fence, he lost his balance and fell to the other side, his right ankle landing on a slope of a drainage ditch and giving off an audible “pop.” He also injured his right wrist trying to brace himself during the fall.

“I looked around first to see if anybody saw me making an idiot out of myself, got up and dusted myself off,” he said.

Assuming he’d only sprained the two body parts, Sweet went on to the courthouse — arriving about 15 minutes late on the morning of Dec. 2. He sat through voir dire, standing a few times to answer the prosecutor’s questions.

By the first break at 10:30 a.m., Sweet’s wrist and ankle were swelling, the pain had intensified, and he requested to speak to state District Judge Elizabeth Beach.

“You’re going to think this is the most bizarre person making some strange excuse to get out of jury duty,” he recalled telling the judge. “I’ll tell you up front it’s going to sound funny. It’s going to sound weird. I’m not trying to get out of jury duty. In fact, you can reschedule me, but I fell this morning and I may have either broken or sprained my wrist and my ankle.”

He said Beach gave him a “bless your heart” smile and, with no objections from the attorneys, excused him.

Sweet walked about three blocks to a bus stop, took the bus to retrieve his wife car’s at LaGrave Field, and drove himself to a doctor. There, X-rays revealed he had, in fact, broken his wrist and ankle.

Sweet later underwent surgery and now wears a cast on his right arm and boot on his right foot.

“… I’ve been laughing about this from the beginning,” Sweet said. “I think the only day I haven’t laughed is the day after surgery when it hurt like a dickens.”

Beach, for one, wishes others were so dedicated in fulfilling their civic duty.

“I was so impressed that this potential juror showed such good citizenship,” Beach said. “… We need more jurors just like him.”

This story was originally published December 26, 2014 at 3:13 PM with the headline "Man breaks bones, but shows up for jury duty."