Voices It was a quiet night in January 2017
in Big Bend, Texas when Walker Daugherty heard voices outside of his bedroom window.
He sat up from bed, woke up his wife, and told her that he needed to check out the noise outside.
According to Texas Monthly’s investigative journalism, Walker grabbed a double-barrel
shotgun from his nightstand and loaded it. He walked to the front of the ranch house
and cracked the door open. He walked out onto his front porch and stood there for
a few seconds in his pajamas. It was quiet. Until he heard screams coming from the woods.
His fianceé, Ashley Boggs, got out of bed and yelled after him, telling Walker to wait before
walking out there alone. But he was already on his way into the woods to find out what was happening.
Ashley was frantically loading her pistol when she heard Walker yelling into the darkness,
asking what people were doing on his property.
She ran to wake Walker’s sister, Morgan, and her husband, Michael. Ashley assumed Mexicans were
outside who were trying to cross the border into the United States and she feared for their safety.
The night progressed to car crashes, violence, and injury.
The story of this so-called border ambush rippled
across Texas, and fueled a political firestorm about illegal immigration.
Family Business
At the time, Walker was working as a guide for his family’s hunting business,
Big Rim Outfitters. He stayed at the family’s Circle Dug Ranch, a 15,000 acre property in the
Big Bend, about two hundred miles from El Paso, Texas and five miles east of the Rio Grande river.
Morgan and Michael also lived at the family’s ranch and slept in a separate bedroom.
Walker, standing tall at 6 foot 3, was a force to be reckoned with. He had years
of hunting experience under his belt, and guided clients every week through everything
involved in hunting –from loading a gun to firing the perfect shot.
Client Expedition That first week of
January when Walker was shot, two clients, Edwin and Carol Roberts, both in their 50s,
were staying in an RV on the Circle Dug ranch. Edwin was a former college football
player and chiropractor and Carol was a registered nurse from Pensacola, Florida.
On the first day of their expedition at Circle Dug, Carol shot an aoudad,
a type of wild sheep with curved horns and a long beard that’s now considered an invasive species in
Big Bend. But the next day was uneventful–Edwin and Carol didn’t get any hits. They went back
to Walker’s ranch at 4pm, where they had a big dinner of steak, shrimp, and potatoes.
At the end of the night, the couple went to their RV, watched a movie, and went to bed.
Circle Dug Less than three
weeks before Walker was shot, people burglarized Circle Dug. Some strangers stole hunting knives,
a flashlight, frozen pizzas, soft drinks, camouflage hunting jackets, and a $600
sleeping bag. The morning after the burglary, Morgan looked out into the distance and saw
a group of people hiking up the Sierra Vieja, and believed these people to be the culprits.
Many border crossers from Mexico travel through Circle Dug on their way to safety. Hunters at the
ranch often found empty water bottles and old sleeping bags left behind by the undocumented
migrants before their hike. Several migrants came to the ranch in December 2016 asking for help.
Morgan called Border Patrol to report the burglary. Agents found the migrants halfway
up the Sierra Vieja and collected some of the stolen property.
So when Edwin and Carol arrived at Circle Dug for their week-long hunting excursion,
Walker told them to be on guard and to arm themselves, especially at night.
Conflicting Stories The night of the shot,
Edwin and Carol were sleeping in their RV when they woke up to a rattling noise outside. Edwin
yelled out that he had a gun. A man outside yelled back that he wanted the RV. He didn’t
have an accent. The man rattled the door again and Edwin shot a single bullet through it.
As this was happening, Ashley ran onto the front porch and down the stairs where she
saw Walker hiding behind Edwin and Carol’s RV. But he didn’t see anyone else. Walker shouted
at her to go back inside. He assumed that the trespassers, not Edwin, took the shot.
Inside the house, Morgan and Michael were readying themselves to go outside.
Morgan grabbed her revolver. Michael grabbed his rifle, a Bushmaster AR-15.
They ran to the front door and heard Edwin and Carol yelling. They saw Walker hiding
behind the RV. Morgan stayed on the porch as Michael ran to join Walker.
Michael didn’t hear Edwin’s shot, but he saw that Walker was very on edge. Walker said that someone
tried to shoot him, and Edwin and Carol were being held hostage in the RV. The reverse lights
switched on and the RV started reversing. Edwin was in the driver seat, but Walker,
from the back of the vehicle, assumed that the hijackers were trying to steal it. He shot the
tires and Michael followed, deflating the rear tire. Then, he ran to the driver’s side window and
shot through it. Walker couldn’t see that it was really Edwin in the front seat since it was the
middle of the night. AND there were curtains in the RV windows. Michael fired another two shots.
They took a step back and waited for someone to exit the vehicle.
The Shot Just after Edwin shot through the RV door,
Carol looked out the back window and saw the barrels of two guns but didn’t know that they
belonged to Michael and Walker. Edwin told Carol to get down to the floor while he
threw their RV in reverse, hoping to take out the trespassers lurking behind the vehicle.
That’s when Walker ran up the side and shot Edwin. The bullet went through the
driver’s side and passenger’s side windows and grazed Edwin’s arm. The car spun out
of control and veered into a cedar post that was holding up the roof of the hunting lodge.
Walker’s gun was empty, so he ran back to the house to reload it. Morgan was inside with her
revolver, ready to fire at any moment. Then, she heard another shot. A bullet hit Walker
in the ribcage. It went straight through his abdomen, destroyed part of his liver,
and lodged itself in the bottom of his left lung, dangerously close to his heart.
He was hurt and could hardly stand. Morgan helped him into the house where he collapsed in a chair.
Morgan tried to put down her gun but accidentally pulled the trigger and shot through her backpack
and into the wall. She grabbed blankets and used them to put pressure on Walker’s wound.
Ashley was inside the house when Morgan and Walker came inside. Then,
she saw Edwin and Carol’s RV try to zoom off but accidentally ram into a boulder.
Ashley found a phone and called 9-1-1. Michael was still outside looking for Walker,
and had no idea that he had been shot. Then Edwin appeared, yelling that he was shot, where
they had a brief moment trying to figure out who each other was. Then Michael helped him inside.
Then he went back out to find Carol, who was still lying on the floor of the RV.
Carol and Edwin went into a separate room where she put her years of Intensive Care nursing
to use. She put pressure on his wounds and waited for the ambulance to arrive.
As soon as the 9-1-1 call came in from Circle Dug, chief deputy of the Presidio
County Sheriff’s Office, Joel Nuñez sped over to the ranch. He got out of the car and saw nothing
out of the ordinary. He had his rifle drawn and walked up to the front porch and knocked.
As soon as the door opened, he saw Walker on the floor. He asked the dispatcher to send
backup. He stood near the front door bracing himself for another attack.
After 40 minutes, a medic finally arrived to help
Walker. He was airlifted to the hospital and remained unconscious for several days.
Border Patrol agents went out to look for the assailants but Officer Nuñez
was convinced that Walker shot Edwin. But he wasn’t sure who shot Walker.
Investigation Edwin told reporters that the voice
he heard from inside the RV didn’t have an accent. In Nuñez’s experience, all of the border crossers
had accents. He also wondered why migrants would want to steal a huge RV that wasn’t exactly the
best thing to drive up the Sierra Vieja. He also doubted that it was drug smugglers who attacked,
because they usually try to sneak by without drawing attention to themselves.
The Presidio County Sheriff’s office received multiple phone calls from
people ready to start shooting any border crossers
on the property. Nuñez insisted that there was no evidence of an attack.
Less than two weeks after the incident, the sheriff’s office concluded their
investigation and recommended that both Michael and Walker both be charged with deadly
conduct, a third degree felony. When they were indicted, district attorney Sandy Wilson added
another charge, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a second degree felony. Wilson and Nuñez
believed that the voice Edwin heard outside the RV was actually just Walker trying to play a prank.
Mexico Ambush The story immediately spread
that the ranch was attacked by undocumented migrants. Ashley even set up a GoFundMe for
Walker since he didn’t have medical insurance. They raised more than $18,000 in two days.
A few days after the shoot-out, the Gila Growers Association in New Mexico released a statement
saying that what happened at Circle Dug was an organized attempt to ambush and kill the family.
With Donald Trump’s inauguration less than two weeks away,
the events at Circle Dug polarized the country even more. Agriculture
commissioner took to Facebook to declare his support for Walker, declaring him a hero
and a man of God, furthering Trump’s argument to create a wall at the U.S-Mexico border.
Derision Across party lines,
many Democrats claimed that Walker and Edwin blamed Mexican migrants for a prank gone wrong.
Even Stephen Colbert made a jab at Walker on CBS’s Late Show.
For the most part, Walker was oblivious to the media attention he was getting. His family
didn’t even tell him about the criminal charges for fear of harming his recovery.
When he was finally healthy enough to take the news, Walker was shocked, wondering why the
police thought he did anything wrong. On April 11, 2017, he turned himself into police and was
released on $10,000 bond. After being charged with deadly conduct and aggravated assault,
Wilson offered them a deal of ten years probation in exchange for a guilty plea.
Walker accepted that he shot Edwin by accident, but the brother-in-laws remained unconvinced
that Michael shot Walker, so they decided to fight the charges. After all, if they were convicted,
they would lose their ability to carry a firearm and therefore end their careers as hunting guides.
In March 2018, Wilson withdrew her offer of probation and sentenced both Walker and Michael
to ten years behind bars. The same month, Edwin and Carol filed a $1 million lawsuit
against Walker and his entire family, including his parents who weren’t even there that night.
Defense The family was shocked. Edwin was
a close friend and a client of the Daugherty’s for over 20 years. Just a few weeks after they filed
their lawsuit, Michael and Walker’s attorneys hired a ballistics expert, Richard Ernest,
to study the x-ray of the bullet in Walker’s lung. Ernest discovered that the bullet in Walker’s lung
was twice the size of the bullets in Michael’s gun. But Wilson doubted Ernest’s assessment.
But other ballistics experts backed up Ernest’s claims that the bullet lodged in Walker’s lung was
way too large to come from Michael’s gun. And it didn’t come from Edwin’s either. So, while
the ballistics report exonerated Michael, it also opened up the question of, who really shot Walker?
Morgan and Ashley’s witness statements didn’t line up, Border Patrol didn’t find any footsteps where
Walker claimed the trespassers were standing when he was shot. There were a lot of inconsistencies
in the case. Edwin claimed he only shot his gun once, but officers found two empty cartridges.
Walker’s Thoughts Walker knew that there
was no chance Edwin was the one who shot him. That would mean that he was driving
the RV with his injured arm and aiming his gun perfectly out the window with the other.
Walker says that most of the time, he forgets about the incident and the bullet is
still lodged in his chest. But he has become suspicious of the media for taking
his story and turning it into a political statement. He says that if the incident
hadn’t occurred on the U.S-Mexico border, the news might not have even picked up the story.
Aftermath That October,
the district attorney dropped all of the charges against Walker and Michael. The next Spring,
Edwin and Carol settled their civil suit against the family. It was finally over.
But Nuñez wasn’t satisfied. He believed he built a strong case against Michael
and Walker and didn’t forgive them for immediately blaming Mexican migrants.
And still, the question of who shot Walker remains unsolved. The only evidence of possible intruders
is the bullet lodged in his chest that doesn’t match the bullets in Edwin or Michael’s guns.
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