Waco – Toby Gager, 25, was sitting on the couch at his mother’s house in Hewitt on December 1, 2015 when he suddenly remarked he had touched her grand daughter in an inappropriate way.
Disgusted, Trish Gager told him that if he didn’t phone the police, she would.
She had found him crying, not an unusual thing for her son, who is autistic, and was just diagnosed after 14 months incarceration in the Jack Harwell Detention Center with Asperger’s Syndrome, a rarefied form of autism.
Following an extended phone conversation with an officer, other police came and took him away, and that was the last his family has seen of him outside of brief 15-minute video visits since then.
It took three years of dealing with MH-MR officials to get a diagnosis that points to why her son has been unable to keep a stable address, a job, or a relationship throughout his young life.
Now, she says her reaction to his outburst – in hindsight – is that she acted with too much haste. She has little faith in the charge of indecency with a child with contact. When her grand daughter and her daughter were examined by mental health workers, neither displayed any sign of sexual trauma.
She stood on the steps of the McLennan County Courthouse on Thursday, protesting the fact that she is unable to communicate with his court-appointed attorney, Jonathan Sibley, who, she says, never returns phone calls and has told her that since it’s an open case and hasn’t been adjudicated as yet, it is impossible to obtain the charging instrument, the affidavit of probable cause that accompanied the officer’s warrant of arrest, or any other detail regarding the alleged offense.
He has said only that the prosecution staff is offering a sentence of twelve years behind bars in return for a plea of guilty.
On a visit to the Hewitt Police Department, the staff said the same thing. They furnished only a bare bones report that an offense had taken place and that Toby Gager made the trip to jail in handcuffs to answer to the charge. Period.
According to the public face of the system, no further information is available.
In a lengthy interview, she aired her frustrations with the handling of the case, which, she says, the criminal justice system is inadequate to handle.