Jury settles on 60-year term for son in father’s Crowley murder, acquits in mother’s death

Long stretches of silence came ahead of most of Carl Brewer’s answers from the witness stand. With each query, the defendant on trial for capital murder of his parents appeared as if he was mulling the question. When he finally responded, it was with calm, halting speech.

His sparring partner in cross-examination was Lloyd Whelchel, a 54-year-old former Division I college football player and longtime Tarrant County homicide prosecutor who six weeks ago handled a case in which a jury sent the defendant to death row.

Slender and with hair pulled into a ponytail, Brewer, 25, went back and forth with Whelchel over the accuracy of a diagram of the house in Crowley where the defendant and his family lived and whether undisturbed items shown in photographs of the interior belied the defendant’s account that he and his adoptive father wrestled over a Glock.

Brewer and Whelchel discussed whether the latex gloves that Brewer burned on a stove and wore as he stuffed his adoptive mother’s body into a sleeping bag cover and rolled his father’s body on dolly platforms to a shower suggested he did not want his fingerprints connected to the case and considered himself guilty of a crime.

“Don’t look over there,” the prosecutor directed earlier in the examination as Brewer gazed toward the defense table.

Under direct examination from defense attorney Jack Strickland, Carl Brewer testified that his mother, Mary Brewer, was accidentally shot as the defendant and his father, Troy Brewer, struggled inside the house over a handgun. The defendant told the jury he shot and killed Troy because he feared his father may have been able to retrieve another gun from the master bedroom.

On the fifth day of trial the jury in the 485th District Court on Monday found Carl Brewer guilty of murder in Troy Brewer’s death and acquitted him in the death of Mary Brewer. Judge Steven Jumes permitted the panel to consider murder as a lesser included offense beyond the indicted charge of capital murder. The verdict meant that the panel rejected the prosecutors’ allegation that the defendant intentionally or knowingly killed Mary Brewer at the same time that he killed his father.

The jury was permitted to consider whether Troy Brewer’s killing was justified by self-defense and found in its verdict that it was not.

After about an hour of deliberation in the punishment phase Tuesday, the jury assessed his punishment at 60 years in prison.

Carl was 17 at the time of the killings. Before the shooting, his mother arrived home and found he had not gone to school. The house smelled of marijuana. Mary Brewer told Carl she intended to share the transgressions with his father.

When he returned to the house, Troy Brewer, an American Airlines pilot and retired U.S. Marine, pointed a gun at Carl and lifted and slammed the teenager to the floor, the defendant told the jury.

Carl pushed the gun away, the defendant testified, and Mary was shot.

“Who pulled the trigger? He or you?” Strickland asked.

“I honestly cannot say,” the defendant testified.

In an interview with detectives in the hours after his arrest, Carl said that his finger was on the gun’s trigger.

Whelchel noted that in an interview with Crowley Police Detective Joshua White, Brewer said he had put a plastic garbage bag over his mother’s head because he did not want her wound to bleed further on the carpet.

Inside the house with the bodies for two nights, Carl Brewer covered the windows with fabric. He lowered the temperature inside.

“You did that, right?” Whelchel asked.

“I do not recall,” Brewer said.

Whether Carl Brewer knew then whether there were other guns in the master bedroom available to Troy Brewer is in dispute.

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The couple adopted Carl Brewer from a orphanage in Russia when he was 5. Two older brothers, who also were adopted, were no longer living at the family’s house at the time of the killings in November 2016.

His parents paid for Carl’s tuition at two private schools and for him to live at a drug rehabilitation facility. He was a Southwest Christian School junior at the time of the killings.

Troy Brewer was 6’2 and 260 pounds; Carl then was about 5’7 and 122 pounds.

Whelchel argued that physical evidence, including the angle of the gunshots and the intermediate distance between barrel and target suggested by gunpowder stippling left on Mary Brewer’s hand, showed the couple was executed. Troy Brewer was on his knees begging for his life when he was fired upon, according to the prosecution’s theory. Mary was sitting on a couch. The rounds that killed them first struck their hands.

The defense said it planned to demonstrate “Troy Brewer was a child abuser. He was a bully. He was a sadist,” Strickland said in his opening statement.

Troy Brewer held a knife to Carl’s tongue and separately to his throat, forced Carl to drink the boy’s urine and made his sons swim laps in a community swimming pool, the defendant testified. Troy Brewer was arrested for breaking the nose of one of Carl’s brothers. The assault charge was later dismissed.

Their father took group nude photographs of his sons for an unknown purpose, Carl Brewer and a brother, Christopher, testified.

Christopher Brewer found some of the photos at a storage unit, and defense attorney Steve Gephardt, who also represents the defendant, showed some of the photos to the jury.

“The sins of the father [do] not absolve his sins,” Anthony Salinas, who prosecuted the case with Whelchel, said of the defendant in his closing argument in the trial’s first phase.

If he had been convicted of capital murder, Brewer would have automatically been sentenced to life in prison and become eligible for parole consideration after serving 40 years.

After the guilty verdict on murder, the state and defense began on Monday evening to discuss a plea bargain under which Judge Jumes would have sentenced Brewer to 25 years with parole eligibility after 12 years and six months. Brewer declined the offer.

After smoking marijuana, Carl Brewer told a friend that he had killed Brewer’s parents, and the friend telephoned 911 to report Brewer’s statement, according to a recording of the call that prosecutors played for the jury. Smelling the odor of death at the front door of the house in the 800 block of Buffalo Court, police officers broke a glass back door, found the bodies and heard movement on the second floor. After an hourslong SWAT encounter in which officers launched gas canisters, Carl Brewer was arrested.

Troy and Mary Brewer each had arteries that were penetrated by a bullet, and they died within a few minutes of extensive blood loss, testified Dr. Mark Shelly, a forensic pathologist.

Troy Brewer, 60, was on his knees with his hands in front of his face when he was shot, according to the theory developed by prosecutors.

Mary Brewer, who was 64, lay in a living room.

A magistrate found in April 2019 that the defendant was incompetent to stand trial, and he was taken to a state mental health facility for treatment. A psychologist in March 2020 concluded Brewer was competent to stand trial, a determination that was also made earlier this year.

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