Editor’s note: The account of Justin’s murder and the investigation that followed have been reconstructed in witness testimony recorded in the transcripts of The State of Texas vs. Cyrus Lua Gray III. Although Justin Gage and Cyrus Gray’s friends were identified by name during Gray’s trial, we’re choosing to use their initials here in order to protect them from public association with a crime they have not been charged with.

 

Imagine you’re a detective. A college student is shot during a robbery and succumbs to his wounds. As you investigate his murder, acquaintances of his tell you a friend of theirs has been bragging that he’s the one who killed him.

Do you:

1. A) Immediately track this man down to interview him?
2. B) Follow the lead by studying evidence the man’s friends gave you?
3. C) Probe the connections between the man and the victims by interviewing more of their mutual friends?
4. D) Focus instead on other suspects, despite a near total lack of evidence against those suspects – no DNA, no connection to the victims, no murder weapon – and lose track of the lead completely?

In the 2015 murder of Texas State student Justin Gage, San Marcos Police Department Detective Sandra Spriegel inexplicably chose D.

 

The Crime

 

In the early morning hours of Dec. 6, 2015, Justin was leaving a party at The Retreat, an apartment complex near the Texas State campus, with his friend J.E., when he decided he wanted to double back to their friend T.M.’s place to buy some weed (T.M. dealt small amounts to friends and acquaintances). 

J.E. waited in the car while Justin went upstairs. T.M. would later testify that while he was weighing out Justin’s weed, three masked men, one armed with a gun, burst into the unlocked apartment and demanded T.M. hand over his stash. 

“I looked at the gun. It didn’t look real to me. The situation didn’t seem real to me. So I think I said, I can’t.”

The gun was a black powder pistol, or a muzzleloader — an old-fashioned gun one might associate more with “the Wild Wild West,” as T.M. put it, than a modern-day robbery.

T.M. said that after he refused, all five men began to scuffle, and shots were fired. The three robbers fled the apartment. T.M. and Justin chased after them, but Justin had been shot three times and collapsed in the parking lot. His panicked friends held him and called 911. After being taken to the hospital, Justin died of his wounds. He was only 20 years old.

Spriegel, who had been with SMPD since 1998, was the detective on call the night of the shooting. She became the lead detective in the case.

Neither T.M. nor J.E. had gotten a good look at the assailants: J.E. would later testify he thought they were wearing ski masks, while T.M. told investigators they were wearing hoodies and bandanas. But both men, who were Black, agreed that the robbers had been Black as well, and not particularly tall.

At some point during questioning that morning, T.M. realized his phone was missing.

 

The Suspects

 

Texas Ranger Jimmy Schroeder helped SMPD trace T.M.’s missing phone to Northwest Houston, where it had been briefly powered on just a few hours after the shooting. They decided to request phone records to see what other cell phones had been in both locations at the same times. According to investigators, when they began receiving records in February 2016, one number came up — that of a young Black man, Devonte Amerson. They began trying to figure out a connection between him and the victims. 

Viewed in a certain light, the fact of T.M. and Amerson’s phones being in the same place at two very significant times seems pretty damning. What are the odds? But not all cellphones have location data that can be accessed in this way – a fact that would become crucial in the choice to pursue Amerson and his friend Cyrus Gray, and ignore another lead.

In early 2016, two men who knew Justin – C.E. and H.S. – contacted SMPD to tell them that a friend of theirs, C.H., had been bragging about robbing and killing Justin. C.E. had gone to high school with Justin and T.M., as well as the man who was supplying T.M. with marijuana. Another friend of the victims, C.D., identified C.H. as a possible suspect and said that C.H. had robbed him. C.H., his friends, and the victims had all gone to high school in Cibolo. 

At the time, C.E. was in the Comal County Jail, and Spriegel and Sergeant Tommy Villanueva interviewed him there on Feb. 19, 2016. He gave them his phone as evidence – he’d been in contact with C.H. Spriegel and Villanueva interviewed H.S. in the Guadalupe County Jail on March 8, and he also gave them his phone. H.S. showed the detectives rap videos C.H. and a group had made “depicting home-invasion robberies of drug dealers,” as Villanueva described it.

Based on testimony at Cyrus Gray’s 2022 trial, it appears that although SMPD downloaded the contents of C.E. and H.S.’s phones, they never actually reviewed them. In 2016, the SMPD detective who was trained to forensically examine cell phones was Loy Locke, who would later achieve infamy for his racist treatment of families in his new job as park ranger. Locke never wrote the supplemental report that was customary after examining this type of evidence, and the discs containing the phones’ contents weren’t entered into evidence until 2018.  

Spriegel and Villanueva both claimed they never interviewed C.H. because they couldn’t find him. Yet at the time of Gray’s trial, C.H. was in the Bexar County Jail on an unrelated charge. 

While C.H. clearly had connections to associates of the victims, investigators never found a link between Gray and Amerson and T.M. and Justin. Gray had been a student at Texas State before dropping out and moving back home to Houston, and several of his friends testified he and Amerson had come up that Saturday night to hang out with them. No one who knew them seemed to also know Justin and T.M.

Lead prosecutor Ralph Guerrero and Villanueva were somewhat dismissive of C.H.’s claims during Gray’s trial. “Are there times when individuals, particularly those who may be involved in criminal activity, take claim for crimes they have no involvement in?” Guerrero asked. Villanueva responded yes, because “street credibility is a real thing in gang membership or drug rip teams.”

Yet other than the locations of Gray’s and Amerson’s phones, the only evidence Hays County offered at Gray’s trial of his guilt were three witnesses who claimed Gray had confessed to them that he took part in the robbery after the fact.

The piece of evidence without which investigators would have never thought to investigate Amerson and Gray was their cell phone location data. So what of C.H.’s phone?

At Gray’s trial, Guerrero asked SMPD’s cell phone expert, Patty Hom, about C.H.: “Were any of those records [associated with C.H.] able to be mapped in any way?” Hom answered, “No, they were not. They did not have any location information associated with them.”

When Guerrero questioned Spriegel, he asked, “Now, at some point, did you stop kind of aggressively pursuing that lead [related to C.H.] once more and more information was linking Cyrus Gray and Devonte Amerson to Justin’s murder?”

She responded, “Yes. We didn’t completely stop, but we weren’t going out — like, Sergeant Villanueva and I had originally gone to multiple addresses looking for C.H. But as time went on, as Patty notified us that phone numbers linked to these individuals didn’t come back on towers, we slowly started to not pursue them as much.”

Gray’s attorney Paul Parash asked Spriegel, “Do you remember writing that: It should be noted that the investigation into [C.H., C.E., and H.S.] was ended at this point after receiving cell tower and telephone records showing possible other suspects being involved?” She responded, “Yes, I did write that,” despite insisting, “We did not turn our focus directly to Amerson and Cyrus Gray. We continued to follow leads even after [receiving the cellphone records]… My report does say — and what it should have indicated is that we stopped physically going looking for [C.H.] at that time.”

 

The Witnesses

 

In his interview immediately after the shooting, J.E. had mentioned that “there were rumors that football players were going around robbing people.” Many of Gray’s friends were on the football team. Spriegel and Schroeder used Gray’s cell phone data to find friends of his he’d contacted on Dec. 5 and 6, 2016. One man, B.G., who Gray had called on the afternoon of Dec. 6, 2015, was first questioned by the pair on April 27, 2016. During that first interview, B.G. denied knowing anything about the murder and didn’t mention that he knew Gray, even though he was asked if he had friends from Houston. 

As the police began to question members of the football team, the team’s coaches apparently became concerned about their players potentially being involved in a murder. B.G., along with two other players, was kicked off the team on April 28. B.G. testified that his coaches had his father come into their office and told his father – rather than him – that he was off the team. After that, B.G.’s father took him to speak with Schroeder and Spriegel again, and urged him to tell them what he knew. During his second interview, B.G. claimed that Gray had called him and confessed taking part in the robbery immediately after it happened. 

Because the investigators had Gray’s phone records, they knew he hadn’t communicated with B.G. at the time B.G. was claiming. Both times B.G. had talked to the police, there were clear instances of dishonesty. Yet they used what he told them in a third interview in June 2016 — that he’d been confused and Gray had actually confessed to the robbery in the afternoon — to obtain warrants for Gray and Amerson’s arrests.

During Gray’s trial, Parash revealed that investigators themselves had had doubts about the validity of B.G.’s claims: “Do you remember the Ranger asking you: What was the purpose of Cyrus calling you and telling you that a robbery just went bad? […] And the Ranger, you know, was telling you: It bothers me. Why would someone just do that?” 

In early March 2018, SMPD traveled to Houston to arrest Amerson and Gray for Justin’s murder, having obtained a warrant based on their phone records and B.G.’s claims. Why the police waited so long after their initial investigation of the two friends to arrest them has never fully been explained. During Gray’s trial Villanueva and Spriegel blamed the delay on Hurricane Harvey, which took place in August and September of 2017. 

But Spriegel also testified that she had interviewed T.M. a second time in April 2016, because “we weren’t really getting anywhere in the investigation, any real solid leads. And so we thought maybe he might remember more. He might be willing to say more if he knew more. So we ended up interviewing him again.” 

Guerrero responded, “And I want to clarify something you just said, no ‘solid leads.’ You have identified Amerson and Gray at this point. You connected them in [sic] [T.M.’s] phone. You’ve linked them to and from this crime. What was, then and for — until now — the mystery?” 

“We have no idea how they ended up at [T.M.’s] apartment. We have no idea what the connection is. We never found any phone contact between any of them, friends, whatsoever.”

After arresting the two men, the team from San Marcos stayed in Houston to interview various associates of theirs. On March 6, 2018, Spriegel and SMPD Detective Patrick Aubry went to the apartment of D.M., a friend of Gray’s who had played football at Texas State and lived in Houston at the time.

At first, D.M. told the detectives he didn’t know anything. But as the interview progressed, he felt pressured into implicating Gray. During trial, Parash asked D.M., “I mean when you told Detective Aubry things he didn’t like, he didn’t stop, did he?” “No, he got more aggressive.” “To the point where he said that you could be part of this? Yeah.”

He explained, “I lied because I was afraid. … I just figured if I went in and told them what they wanted to hear that […] they would just let me go, and that would be that.”

D.M. ultimately told Aubry that Gray had confessed to the robbery shortly before he was arrested in 2018. He said that he, his brother R.M., and Gray had been riding in his car together when Gray randomly mentioned he’d been part of a robbery that went bad. 

On the basis of the phone records, and B.G., D.M., and R.M.’s testimony, Gray was indicted for capital murder. Amerson was indicted as well. Both brothers recanted their testimony during Gray’s trial, saying they were scared that D.M. might be charged with something himself if he didn’t implicate Gray. (To be clear, there was no evidence that D.M. actually had anything to do with the robbery.)

The Follow-Up

 

Unable to afford private legal representation, Amerson and Gray were appointed attorneys by the court. Gray, who was denied bond, spent four years and three months in the Hays County Jail before receiving a trial, and remained in jail until November 2022. Amerson has yet to stand trial, but late last year his bond was finally reduced to an amount his friends and family could pay, and he left jail after more than five years, despite having never been convicted of a crime.

While Gray was in jail, his charismatic and caring personality earned him numerous friends, one of whom decided to advocate for Gray’s innocence after he was released. He contacted Mano Amiga asking for their help.

In the spring of 2022, I was contracted by Mano Amiga to look into Gray’s claims of innocence. It made no sense to me to have charged him and Amerson with this crime based on so little. I recommended that we begin a public advocacy campaign for the two friends.

When Gray stood trial that summer, I was shocked by how weak the prosecution’s case was (while I’ve chosen to focus here on the failure to investigate C.H., there are many other troubling aspects I simply can’t detail within the space of one article). Gray was spared a conviction — the jury was hopelessly deadlocked, and the judge declared a mistrial. 

In 2023, Wes Mau, the Republican District Attorney who had been in office since before Justin’s murder, was succeeded by Kelly Higgins. Higgins, a Democrat and former defense attorney, had run as a reformer. 

Last July, Higgins’ office dismissed the case. When asked to reflect upon his decision, Higgins told the Examiner, “I can’t comment on the previous work on the case, but we did find the case in too weak a state to present to a jury in good faith. 

“Sure, we might have done things differently; this is certainly true of many aspects of the work of the office. I cannot be sure because my predecessor chose not to assist in the transition, which left gaps in the institutional knowledge of many cases […] That said, I am glad we are not bound by previous decisions. I believe the Gray case is currently in the correct posture.”

Yet the prosecution against Amerson continues, for reasons that are unclear. If the police decided to finally investigate C.H. and found evidence conclusively clearing him of his friends’ accusations, that hasn’t been announced to the public. 

Nearly everyone who was initially involved in the investigation into Justin’s murder and the decision to charge Amerson has moved on to other jobs — Spriegel, for instance, is now at Texas State.

When Spriegel concluded her testimony on July 8, 2022, Guerrero asked her, “Is it common or uncommon for investigations to continue even after the arrest?” She replied, “You want to make sure that you have all the information you need. Just because you arrest somebody doesn’t mean you have everything. And we still had no idea what the connection was to [T.M.] or how this incident occurred.” 

“Do you think it’s a good thing that the investigation should continue after an arrest?” 

“Yes.” 

“Should the pursuit of justice ever end?” 

“No, it should not.”

BY AMY KAMP