Lawyer’s life leads to job with DA
I’m often interested in the paths that bring people together, especially for brief, consequential encounters.
In Wednesday’s paper, I wrote about the happenstance that brought Regina Bethune and Charles Kleinert together on July 26, 2013. Kleinert was the then-Austin cop whose chase of bank-fraud suspect Larry Jackson Jr. ended with Jackson’s death and a pending manslaughter charge against Kleinert.
Bethune is the woman whose SUV Kleinert jumped into during the chase. The two, courtesy of the randomness of the time-space continuum, came together for two crucial minutes on the day Jackson died.
The paths of Bethune and Kleinert and Travis County Assistant District Attorney Ken Ervin crossed in federal court here last week during the three-day hearing of Kleinert’s claim of immunity under federal law. We’re awaiting U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel’s ruling on that claim.
As I’ve mentioned before, Ervin looks a whole lot like actor Neil Patrick Harris. Ervin says he can tell “when someone is thinking it just by the way they’re looking at me.” And he’s taken photos with folks who thought he was Harris.
At last week’s hearing, Ervin, who questioned Kleinert and Bethune, was a key member of the prosecution team trying to make the case that Kleinert is not entitled to immunity.
The path that led to Ervin’s presence at that hearing began in Amarillo, the hometown he left as part of a common immigration wave to Austin: folks convinced they could make a living here playing music. He’s also a cyclist (both motor- and bi-). And he held some peculiar jobs before deciding on a career in law.
We know all of this because Ervin and Sara Yaffe are getting married Thursday on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. And, as these kids today like to do, they have a website about their wedding. (As of Thursday morning, the gift registry
showed they still needed the Fiesta Turquoise Chip and Dip Set at Macy’s, $39.99.)
Ervin tells us on the website that he left Amarillo in 1997 “with some bandmates to make it big in the Austin music scene.”
“That lasted, oh, six months or so. We never played a single show but in our heads we were quite awesome rehearsing in our little rented storage unit. When that fizzled I didn’t have much else going on so I enrolled in college at the University of Texas and held several different part-time jobs along the way, with the Olive Garden being the shortest duration of two weeks (waiting tables is hard!).”
Ervin writes that he also “ran errands for a real estate company, sold long distance phone service (remember MCI?), did Gallup polls, worked the front desk at a shady motel, parked cars and did something else that I can’t remember now. I also sold a LOT of my own plasma.
“After, ahem, five years in college and with a worthless philosophy degree in my hand, I decided to postpone the future a little longer so that I could race motorcycles for a few years,” Ervin wrote. “I got a job at Progressive Insurance to pay the racing bills and absolutely had a blast doing that but knew my little racing dream couldn’t go on forever.”
When he awoke from the dream, Ervin had the fall-back of a UT degree. But that plan also had a hitch.
“And since there is not one single paying job out there for ‘philosopher,’ I knew I needed to go back to school. Being a lawyer didn’t sound so bad so I did that,” he wrote.
Turns out he’s a pretty good lawyer, or at least somebody in the DA’s office thinks so. He started out in 2007 prosecuting misdemeanors and later moved up to the felony division.
“And for the last year I’ve been assigned to handle officer-involved shootings,” he wrote.
There is perhaps no more delicate prosecution nor one that draws more emotional scrutiny.
Yeakel’s ruling could come any day now, which means Ervin has that and his upcoming wedding on his mind.
Seems like a lot to process. If there is a trial, it’s scheduled to start in November, though it could be delayed if there is an appeal of Yeakel’s ruling.
Best wishes to our happy couple. And best wishes to our community as we await a judge’s decision that’s sure to divide us.
An Austin man faces a felony charge of making a terroristic threat for a post he made on the location-based social media application Yik Yak that police said was a threat to officers.
James Wofford, 30, has admitted to posting the message “Bout to put wings on pigs y’all. Bout to put wings on pigs,” on Saturday, which police said was a direct reference to a social media post made by a New York man the day he killed two officers in December, according to an arrest affidavit.
On Thursday, detective Robert Field said “(Wofford) put out that message to cause a fear or panic among a certain population here in Austin, specifically police officers.”
But Wofford told police he made the post to be provocative and that it was no threat. If convicted, Wofford could face up to 10 years in prison. He was not in the Travis County Jail Thursday afternoon, jail records showed.