Monday was the first day of the capital murder trial for one of two suspects in connection to the 2018 killing of Fort Worth police officer Garrett Hull.
Testimony began Monday against defendant Timothy Huff, nearly one week after he was hospitalized after saying he accidentally swallowed a razor blade.
Huff is charged with capital murder in the death of Fort Worth officer Garrett Hull who was killed during a gun battle in 2018 during an investigation into a string of robberies.
Huff complained of chest pains last Tuesday, according to the Tarrant County Sheriff's Office, and was taken to JPS for evaluation. It was there that he admitted to staff that he, "accidentally swallowed a razor blade."
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The sheriff's office said inmates in the general population are allowed safety razors for shaving but offered no further information about how the blade ended up inside the defendant's mouth where it was then swallowed.
Investigators suspect Huff, Dacion Steptoe and Samuel Mayfield were responsible for at least 17 robberies in the area and that they had been targeting Latino bars in and around Fort Worth under the belief that Latino victims would be less likely to report a robbery to authorities.
Joel Fitzgerald, who was chief of police in Fort Worth at the time, said a group of undercover and uniformed officers identified the three men as suspects and were watching them as they entered Los Vaqueros Sports Bar on Sept. 13, 2018.
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Fitzgerald added then that the officers were wary of endangering bystanders and waited for the three men to leave the bar before confronting them. When the men were outside and around the corner police tried to arrest them and that's when the gun battle began.
Hull was shot in the head in the exchange. Instead of waiting for an ambulance, officers decided to rush Hull to the hospital in a police car.
Steptoe, the man believed to have fired the shot that killed Hull, was killed in the shootout with police. In the days after the shooting NBC 5 learned Steptoe had been released from prison early and wasn’t sent back when he was arrested twice earlier in the year -- even though he was on parole, according to Tarrant County court records.
Mayfield is also charged with capital murder but has not yet gone to trial.
