Fort Worth man who shot state trooper won’t face charges, says he feared for his life
Since Fort Worth resident Russell King shot a plainclothes state trooper who followed him to his house on April 23, the uncertainty of whether he would be indicted weighed heavily on his and his wife’s minds, he said.
With the recent decision of a Denton County grand jury declining to charge him with a crime, the Kings are ready to move on with their lives, he told the Star-Telegram on Wednesday.
The ordeal started with a car chase, Russell King said.
King and his wife, Myra, were driving back from Kroger and Chick-fil-A around 2 p.m., heading north on U.S. 287 in the middle of traffic on a rainy day. As King was about to switch lanes, the driver of a gray pickup truck in front of him shook his head back at King through the rearview mirror, King said.
When King switched back into that lane, he said, the truck brake-checked him. Thinking the situation was road rage, King picked up speed to get away from the truck.
After exiting the highway, he looked in his rearview mirror and saw the truck behind him, he said.
“I had seen him dancing around in traffic prior and I thought to myself, ‘Oh, is he trying to catch up?’” King said.
The truck had small LED lights in the grill that were flashing, but King said he didn’t see them clearly through the mist of the rain. As King was trying to lose the truck, he saw it cutting through lanes, making a school bus swerve, he said. King said the truck chased the couple for 13 miles, all the way back to their home near Haslet in far north Fort Worth.
When they got home, the couple called 911 to report the man following them.
Video surveillance footage shows the gray truck parking in front of the Kings’ house and a man in a brown shirt, jeans and baseball hat getting out.
Using their Nest security cameras, King and his wife, who took refuge in the upstairs bedroom closet, saw the man grab something from the back of his truck and tuck it behind him. King said in the heat of the moment the object looked like a gun to him, and he was afraid the man planned to harm him and his wife.
Video from the home security cameras shows the trooper knocking on the door and announcing himself as “state police,” but King said he didn’t hear the man’s words. He said he feared for his life and all he could hear was the beating of his heart.
The Nest footage shows King shooting the state trooper through the door from the inside of the house and the trooper running away. Shortly afterward, marked police cars came to the house and officers handcuffed King and his wife. When King asked why they were being detained, an officer informed him that he had shot a state trooper.
“When they had me in handcuffs and they told me that I had shot a state trooper, that was the very first thing I thought of was, this is not possible after what I saw him do on Avondale Haslet [Road],” King said.
King thought, “there’s no way this could have been a state trooper, the way he was acting in traffic,” he said. “He was swerving in between cars, driving at a very high rate of speed.”
King said he would have stopped if he had known the driver was an officer.
“Beyond confusion, I felt heartache for my wife because she was in the car the entire time and had to experience that,” King said, adding that he later had to watch his wife be detained by police.
King’s attorney, Robert Huseman, said in order to be charged for evading or assaulting a police officer, King would have had to have known the man was a law enforcement officer. The state trooper was in plainclothes, the truck was not marked and the trooper did not show any police identification, King said.
After the shooting, the Texas Rangers sent out a statement that said a trooper with the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Criminal Investigations Division was conducting an investigation in the Haslet area, according to the Star-Telegram’s archives.
The public safety department has not described the nature of the investigation.
“During the course of the investigation, the special agent encountered a suspect at a residence in the 14,000 block of Mainstay Way,” the DPS statement said. “The suspect discharged a firearm and struck the special agent. The special agent did not return fire.”
In another statement four days after the shooting, DPS said the investigation indicated King did not know the man at his door was a law enforcement officer when he fired his gun.
DPS identified the injured trooper as William Wallace, who has been employed by DPS since 2009. He was treated and released from a hospital by the next day.
In an email Friday, a DPS spokesperson said, “The Texas Ranger investigation into the April shooting of DPS Special Agent William Wallace remains active as evidence is pending disposition.”
Wallace is still recovering from his injuries and hasn’t returned to active duty, according to the email.
The department did not respond to a question about whether Wallace was disciplined in connection with the incident.
This story was originally published September 8, 2021 at 6:32 PM.
