AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Travis County officials are considering whether to pay $500,000 to a state district judge to avoid a potential lawsuit claiming authorities didn’t do enough to prevent a shooting that left her seriously wounded.
Judge Julie Kocurek has said publicly that she doesn’t believe authorities appropriately handled a threat received by the Travis County district attorney’s office from an informant in the weeks before a gunman fired on her outside her Austin home in November 2015. Kocurek suffered several shrapnel wounds and didn’t return to the bench until February last year.
County commissioners will review Kocurek’s claim next week, the Austin American-Statesman and KVUE-TV report.
The informant said Chimene Onyeri had threatened to kill an unidentified judge, but investigators determined that any threat against a Travis County judge wasn’t credible and they never notified Kocurek about it. Investigators believed Onyeri’s target was a male judge involved in a recent hearing in a different county.
In September, federal officials charged three men in the shooting, including Onyeri, of Houston. Onyeri and the others were involved in various fraudulent financial schemes, federal prosecutors said at the time, and the trio believed those schemes would be disrupted by an upcoming hearing before Kocurek where Onyeri’s probation in a separate case was to be revoked and he faced imprisonment.
He has denied having any involvement in the shooting.
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