Slain officer’s friend: ‘I still cry about this, 12 years later’

When news broke earlier this month that the man once convicted of killing Houston police officer Charles R. Clark soon would walk out of the Harris County Jail, Alfred Dewayne Brown’s family and friends cried in celebration.

Miles away in Pearland, Donnie Trest boiled with rage.

“You don’t want to know what I felt,” Trest told me this week. “I wanted to be downtown when he walked out that door.”

Trest, who says he was the slain officer’s best friend since boyhood, thought better of confronting Brown. But he was left to confront a fresh wave of grief and pain.

Trest says he attended every day of Brown’s capital murder trial, and although he hadn’t read the series of columns I wrote last year detailing problems with the case, he said nothing could persuade him that Brown was innocent, or that he should be set free.

“It’s just sickening,” Trest said of Brown’s release. “I mean, I never, ever believed that day would come. I was just waiting for the day that I went down to Huntsville and watched them put him to sleep.”

I met Trest on Thursday at a press conference in which the Houston Police Officers Union and Crime Stoppers announced a $105,000 reward for information leading to Clark’s killer. The officer was gunned down, just short of retirement, trying to stop a robbery at a check cashing place on the South Loop in 2003. Brown’s conviction and death sentence were overturned after an appellate court found prosecutors had withheld evidence that may have helped his defense. Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson recently decided after a lengthy investigation that there wasn’t enough evidence to retry Brown. She dismissed all charges.

Trest wasn’t among the family members who stood before reporters and TV cameras at the event.

He lingered in the background, with his faded handle-

bar mustache and a puff of gray hair jutting out the back of his cap. The airline luggage handler with weathered green eyes stood listening to my debate with the police union president about the facts of the case before he spoke up.

He told me who he was and what he’d been through. And I listened to him, even after everyone else left, for more than two hours. What he said was important. When cases are overturned and former inmates walk free, we sometimes forget about the loved ones left to pick up the pieces after a callous murder. ‘It just won’t go away’

“You live with this from the time you wake up ’til the time you go to bed. I still cry about this, 12 years later,” he said. “It’s like someone takes a branding iron like they do with cattle, and they just brand your brain. It just won’t go away.”

He says even the death penalty wouldn’t have brought closure. There’s no such thing. That’s just something reporters and police like to say.

Trest says his best friend’s murder turned a once-devout Baptist into an atheist. He says it was only the love of family, and particularly a nephew, who got him through. That haunting day

Now 59, Trest had known Charlie since he was 10, when his slightly younger friend was growing up in the same neighborhood by Hobby airport. They rode bikes together and, later, both dropped out of high school, Trest said, and got jobs at Brown & Root as riggers and crane operators. After Clark got laid off in the ’80s, he joined the police force, Trest said. He wanted to help people.

Trest said they were so close, they sometimes felt like twins. They loved to travel, and he still remembers their first road trip: 1975. Ohio. To see motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel.

Later, when Trest got a job at a local airline and could fly for free, the two traveled the world. He sent me pictures of their adventures in Cozumel, Tokyo, Australia, at Elvis Presley’s boyhood home. They went snow skiing and jet skiing. Trest would do most of the talking. His friend was quiet, introverted.

Then one day, he was just gone.

And that day haunts Trest.

About a year before, Trest had gotten a traffic ticket, and he said Clark had long offered to go with him to court, not to fix anything, Trest says, but for moral support and to poke fun. Trest says he reset that court date for probably a year. And on that day in April when he finally did go, he didn’t call Clark to go with him.

“The day he could have been with me at court, after 20 years on the police force, he gets murdered,” Trest says.

He remembers asking God: “What’s this? Some kind of game you’re playing me with me?”

Trest hasn’t lost faith in Brown’s guilt. It’s not that he thinks cops are perfect or prosecutors can’t bungle a case: “You’ve got some innocent people in jail, and you’ve got some guilty people that walk out.” Hoping for justice

But Trest was particularly struck by the fact that Brown didn’t take the stand in his own defense. Often, attorneys advise their clients not to for reasons other than innocence or guilt.

But Trest says: “There’s no way you’re going to charge me with capital murder and get me to sit there and say nothing.”

I don’t share Trest’s views about Brown, of course. But I do share his desire for the killer — whoever that may be — to be behind bars. If there is someone out there who can solve this case, please call Crime Stoppers at 713-222-TIPS.

Trest may never know closure. But I pray that some day, he and Clark’s family will know justice.