McKINNEY, Texas -(CBSDFW.COM) – After eight hours of deliberations a Collin County jury sentenced convicted capital murderer Brandon McCall to death.
McCall shot and killed Richardson Police Officer David Sherrard in February 2018.
Earlier in the day, the prosecution and defense teams made stirring closing arguments.
One side pleaded for mercy on a young man raised in cruel conditions.
The other called McCall the worst of the worst.
“When you go to war with police those are death penalty cases in Collin County,” prosecutor Bill Wirskye told the jury. “The man is a cold-blooded calculated cop killer. He deserves the death penalty”
Defense attorneys asked the jury to think about McCall’s upbringing with an alcoholic father which led to homelessness and neglect.
“If you grew up in a car and had to shower with a hose behind a church would you be the person you are today,” asked Defense Attorney Bubba King who pleaded for a life sentence. “He’ll always be behind bars. He’ll always be behind doors.”
But prosecutors pointed out Sherrard’s family and the dozens of Richardson officers who deserve justice after McCall ambushed police when they entered the apartment where he had just killed his roommate.
“They may have wanted to kill him that night but they didn’t, because they believe in the system,” argued Wirskye. “There’s a darkness inside him, a void, there’s no empathy, there’s an emptiness and that will always make him dangerous.”
Childhood Neglect
Defense attorneys for Brandon McCall portrayed him as a victim during the punishment phase of his capital murder trial.
They brought Brandon McCall’s brother, Michael McCall, over from jail to tell them their family’s dark past of homeless and neglect to get the jury to try to spare the defendant’s life.
Michael McCall is a habitual offender who told the jury he started shoplifting to feed his family at age 6.
The 32-year-old appeared in shackles and a jail uniform to testify in the sentencing phase of his younger brother’s capital murder trial.
McCall says he hated life when he recalled growing up living in a car with his brother and their parents because their father was an alcoholic.
The defendant’s brother says it led to drug abuse, unemployment by both brothers as well as run ins with police.
“If you knew we were going to live like this, why the heck would you have us? We might as well be dead.”
Karen Revels knows Brandon McCall and provided character witness testimony along with his childhood friends and former employers.
She says he was a good person until he briefly lived with his drug addicted brother.
“Never felt threatened in any way at all and I don’t know what happened when he went to Waxahachie with his brother,” said Revels. “Something changed him.”
But Revels and others could not explain and would not excuse McCall’s decision to kill his roommate inside their Richardson apartment and then opened fire on responding officers killing Officer David Sherrard.
One of them told the jury, “I feel what he did, I’m very disappointed, but I can’t let him go.”
Source: dfw.cbslocal.com, J. D. Miles, February 26-27, 2020
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde