Cossacks member alleges Waco cops let Twin Peaks wounded die

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Wilson begins by telling how Jake Rhyne, one of seven Cossacks killed that day, lay bleeding for 30 to 45 minutes without receiving medical attention. Wilson wanted to help, and he recounts his conversation with a Waco police officer:

John Wilson: … I ask him if several of us couldn’t pick up Jake along with some other ones that were wounded and carry them to the ambulances, and he basically told me that if I didn’t want to get shot, I wouldn’t.

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[So the police] made no attempt during that time to give first aid or any kind of aid to Jake.

No. Absolutely not. Every one of those cop cars had some kind of first aid kit in ‘em. And not a single one at any time walked over, brought us a first aid kit, offered to tie a tourniquet on anybody, patch a hole, anything. Our guys were sitting there with nothing but bandannas in their hands trying to stuff bullet holes.

Could you tell from your vantage point looking at Jake [Rhyne] if there was a lot of blood loss?

Yes.

So it’s possible — I’m not a doctor, of course, and neither are you — that he bled out.

Well, I have to assume that those guys that were alive 30 minutes after the fact that died without medical care, you know, we can only make assumptions, but their odds of survival would have been better if they’d had medical care. Would they have died anyway? Maybe. As you say, I’m not a doctor. But they certainly deserved the opportunity to try to live. And to try to recover from it. And the opportunity was sitting right there in an ambulance 50 yards away that they weren’t allowed access to.

At that point, after he was shot, the shooting had stopped when your son began to render aid, right?

Right.

So the scene was secure in that sense.

Yeah, yeah. They had unarmed civilian employees walking around marking shell casings and stuff. It was not a hot area anymore…

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Wow. What was going through your mind when you’re watching these guys just lying there?

You know, disbelief. And some anger at the callousness of the officers there — I mean, if they were over there trying to help out and saying they won’t let us bring the ambulances in because it’s not being called secure yet, but they’re over there trying to help, I would feel differently about it. But just standing there watching those guys bleed until they start convulsing and die, standing there with a gun pointing at ‘em … and then not lifting a single finger to do anything to help those guys, I was angry. At that point, I didn’t know who shot who. To this day, I don’t know who shot who. I never have been one of these guys saying, 'Oh, the cops shot everybody.' I never did say that — I don’t know who shot who. Other than I didn’t shoot anybody. All I was trying to do was keep from getting shot.

So the cops actually had guns pointed at the ones who were down?

Oh, yeah. At all of us. They were just standing around — you know, I’m not saying that they were trained on those guys that were wounded — they were covering us all.

But guns out.

Oh, yeah.

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What do you expect is going to be the outcome here, talking to your attorney? Do the authorities even have specific information on each of those defendants?

No. No — that’s why the grand jury indicted 106 people in a day. They obviously didn’t review 106 cases. The DA says, “Here’s a list, and this is what we allege they do, and indict ‘em for these murders.” And one of the guys — shows you how much the grand jury looked at this case — there were nine people killed out there; they had 10 people listed. They had a guy that wasn’t even out there shot listed as one of the killed, yet they were able to indict 106 people for that person who wasn’t even shot there. A completely different person. That shows you how much burden of proof there is for the grand jury — how little the grand jury looks at anything … The grand jury indictments are a complete joke. They don’t mean anything. All it does is let the DA go to the next step, where he’ll sit there and try to make plea bargains with people so they can’t sue him for false arrest. If they plead anything, they had reason to arrest you. I did nothing illegal. As far as I know, I’ve seen no evidence that they have saying that I did. If they come up with something, it’s wrong, because I didn’t.

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