The attorney for fired police sergeant Jesse Espinoza made the surprise announcement today that Dr. Glen Hurlston, the embittered Louisiana anesthesiologist who played a key role in the events that culminated in Espinoza’s dismissal, won’t be called as a witness during the rehearing on the legitimacy of the firing, temporarily, at least, erecting a major obstacle in the city’s path to proving its case.
However, after an afternoon that featured a series "in-chamber" private conferences held by hearing examiner Dr. Paula Ann Hughes between Grant Goodwin, Espinoza’s attorney and Bettye Lynn, the attorney representing the city, Hughes announced she would allow Hurlston’s written testimony from the record of the first arbitration hearing to be entered in the record of this current hearing. Hughes had previously upheld Goodwin’s objections to entering the complete testimony into the record, but reversed course just prior to recessing the hearing for the day with Espinoza himself on the witness stand.
At one point Lynn was frustrated trying to demonstrate that part of Espinoza’s testimony today directly contradicted Hurlston’s testimony from the previous hearing, which never came to a conclusion because the hearing examiner in that instance died before he could render a decision. In the first hearing, however, Hurlston had testified before Espinoza took the stand, which gave the city the ability to highlight the differences in their testimony. But after Goodwin announced today he had no intentions of calling Hurlston as a witness this time, the only way Lynn could illustrate those differences would be to introduce Hurlston’s previous testimony, something that, at first, Hughes appeared reluctant to do.
At the heart of the city’s argument is the assertion that Hurlston recruited a willing Espinoza, who had bitterly opposed the hiring of Jeff Barnett as the city’s police chief, in what has been described as Hurlston’s personal vendetta to get Barnett fired as chief. The allegations revolve around the notion that after Hurlston filed a federal lawsuit against Barnett and the City of Kyle, the doctor gave Espinoza money and paid for vacations for Espinoza and his family in return for Espinoza providing Hurlston with damaging information he could use his a lawsuit. Espinoza did, in fact, testify today he told the city council at one point that Hurlston would agree to drop his lawsuit against the city if Barnett was fired.
Earlier in the day, former city council member Samantha Bellows testified she was "devastated" to learn that Espinoza, while a member of the Kyle Police Department, was spreading what she called "a vicious lie" that she was having an extra-marital affair with Mayor Todd Webster. She said when she learned of what Espinoza was doing, she filed a "formal complaint" against Espinoza on Jan. 24, 2015, with interim city manager James Earp.
She said that during one of her regular meeting with constituents she was asked "point blank" by one person "Are you sleeping with the mayor?"
"I laughed," Bellows testified, "because I thought he was joking. But it turned out he wasn’t. The citizen then told me he had been approached by a police officer in uniform who told him I was sleeping with the mayor and that’s the reason why my marriage had failed.
"It was something that was a little more than a hurt to the ego," she said. "It was devastating to me to think that someone was going around the community saying this and intimating that I had voted in certain ways because I was sleeping with someone, which I was not."
She testified that she categorized the rumor in her complaint as "a vicious lie. It’s malicious. It’s inappropriate. It’s unprofessional. Any other unflattering word I could find in the dictionary I would use in this situation."
She said she was especially alarmed by the fact that the rumor was being spread by a uniformed, sworn police officer.
"Kyle’s police officers have a lot of weight," she said.."And this was not just about me. I don’t have children who could also be damaged, but the mayor did. And I was friends with his children and I was a friend with the mayor’s wife and to have to explain to them what was going on was a horrific moment, extremely exasperating."
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