ANATOMY OF A ROADSIDE KILLING LAID BARE BY WITNESSES
Dusty Childress’ Kinfolk cut, shotgun shells litter road where a witness saw Wesley Dale Mason cut him down on Saturday March 5
Abilene – County Road 341 is a lonely thoroughfare through the red dirt country on this city’s rural northeast side. It leads to the landfill.
There, at about 9:40 am on Saturday, March 5, at least one eyewitness saw Wesley Dale Mason, 39, a man cautiously described by newsmen as someone “with ties to the Bandidos,” alight from his pickup truck and with a 12-gauge shotgun blow Dusty Childress off his custom Harley-Davidson, according to court papers used to obtain murder charges against Mason, whose bail is set at a half-million dollars.
Seeing all this take place, the witness put his vehicle in reverse and sped away down the country road.
Lawmen found Childress with multiple wounds to his chest, torso, arms and a pinky finger, dead in a ditch where he fell near his motorcycle, his large caliber handgun flung to a spot in the undergrowth of nearby weeds by the violence of the shotgun blast.
A short time later, they found his alleged killer, bleeding from a wound to his foot, hiding in a nearby house on a neighboring private county road.
The short and intense gunfight took place just across the Jones County line, and, according to Lt. James Torres of the Sheriff’s Office, the killing was ‘biker related.”
As such, it’s part of an ongoing pattern of ultra-violent confrontations that have been going on for years in this near-West Texas Air Force and university town.
Looking at the record, one wonders just how Wesley Dale Mason has managed to stay out of the penitentiary.
He has been involved in a near deadly knife attack against a member of the Cossacks Motorcycle Club in which, according to expert medical testimony, he stabbed the man in the area of his kidney. Had the blade struck a major blood vessel, Timothy Shane Satterwhite would surely have bled out on the parking lot of the Logan’s Steakhouse where he fell on November 2, 2013.
Curiously, after an Abilene jury found the president of the Bandidos’ Abilene Chapter not guilty of cutting Satterwhite, something they could not beyond a reasonable doubt determine since they said the state put on no substantive evidence against Curtis Jackson Lewis, prosecutors dropped the charges against Mason.
Federal authorities in the Southern District of the U.S. District Court at Houston have alleged in a racketeering case that this incident, and many others, constitute a pattern of ongoing criminal enterprise, and furthermore, that it is a proximate cause of the bloody massacre at Twin Peaks Restaurant as a Confederation of Clubs and Independents convened on May 17, 2015.
Mason had made an arrangement to plead guilty to disposing of the body of yet another murder victim and testified in the jury trial of Lewis, who was charged in the attack on Satterwhite under the “law of parties,” in which being present at the scene of a serious and violent crime against a person, is evidence of guilt by association with those who committed the act itself.
Satterwhite was among the 177 arrested at the Twin Peaks debacle on May 17, 2015.
His arrest for the murder of Childress guarantees Mason will do as many as 20 years behind bars for that crime, due to the terms of the probation agreement, which provides that a probationer commit no further offenses, or in the alternative proceed to original sentencing for the suspended sentence.
If all that isn’t complicated enough, there is the blunt and unfolding issue of a confrontation between the Kinfolk Motorcycle Club in the Abilene area, and the leadership of Bandidos U.S. A., whom they blame for multiple ills, chief among them their ouster from the fellowship of the Fat Mexican.
In response to a purported acceptance of cops among their ranks, Juan Aguilar, Jr., commented, “We don’t take cops…and don’t let the Bandidos fool you; they kicked out people that were a threat to their leader…people who refused to be puppets and do dirty work! And the two people shot in Abilene were not both ex-Bandidos. An active Bandido killed my kinfolk brother in cold blood.”
An interlocutor named Tom Ball spoke up, saying, “Why would he do that without provocation?”
Brad Brehm volunteered, saying, “Because Kinfolk Motorcycle Club exists.”
Juan Aguilar, Jr., replied. “Because he’s a piece of shit.”
Amid the scatological badinage, older, more experienced heads are seeking to explain the carnage and vituperation, calling it an angry reaction to a “purge” of the Bandidos’ ranks by Bandidos U.S.A. President Bill Sartelle, who hinted in a press release to these columns that he had to rid his organization of certain bad actors due to their violent proclivities, actions that are keeping the Bandidos tied up in very expensive, very invasive criminal lawsuits in U.S. District Court.
“There’s not much honor in it, this calling the national club out. It’s akin to kicking a man when he’s down,” said a veteran observer of many wars amongst men who have been placed beyond the protection of the law for one reason or another.
“After all, the Bandidos are trying to walk the straight and narrow these days; they don’t need another crisis, another confrontation with guns and knives, now, do they?”
Wesley Dale Mason, 39, has walked between the raindrops for years