Father says authorities ?pushed? sons accused in double slaying
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“They pushed them as far as they could,” Clyde Houston told The Knoxville News Sentinel on Friday. “They pushed them over the bank. You kick a dog so long, he’ll bite you.”
Leon Houston, 47, and his brother, Rocky Houston, 46, are accused of shooting to death Deputy Bill Jones and his friend, Mike Brown, as they pulled up to Leon Houston’s home Thursday to serve a felony warrant on the two brothers. It was not clear what the warrants were for.
The deputy returned fire, but Brown wasn’t armed.
Rocky Houston was shot in the hip and wrist. He was arrested at a hospital and transferred to University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville, where he was in stable condition and under guard.
Leon Houston was apprehended Friday after a full day on the run.
The brothers were well known in the area for their repeated scrapes with law enforcement and claims of government conspiracies against them.
A former security guard at the Department of Energy’s research and weapons installations in Oak Ridge, Rocky Houston was fired in 2003 for a “pattern of behavior, including threatening a judge, disorderly conduct, failure to appear in court on multiple occasions, attempts to intimidate and ‘arrest’ another judge” and barricading himself in his home for four days in 2003 before a SWAT team was called in to bring him out.
According to an affidavit, Rocky Houston became enraged during a hearing over a traffic ticket in 2001 and warned the judge, “Watch yourself and watch your family. If you thought Waco was something then you haven’t seen (expletive) yet.”
But Clyde Houston, a former county commissioner who ran unsuccessfully for sheriff in 1986, said Friday that his son didn’t threaten the judge and contends that authorities embarked on a campaign of harassment.
He alleges that an officer even harassed Rocky Houston’s son, Cody, at a Boy Scouts meeting several years ago.
“We’ve got some sorry, corrupt people up here,” he said.
Roane County Sheriff David Haggard dismissed the allegations of harassment, saying Jones was doing his duty as a police officer at the time of the shooting.
“We were just out to enforce the law,” he said, “and serve the warrants that were taken out on them.”