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Planet Houston

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  1. 33 minutes ago, Goo Punch said:

    this matchup i'm in is so up and down. gonna come down to the wire.

    Never underestimate the ability of my team to go 2-30 on one of the last few days. As usual, I’m relying on pitching and hoping to steal one or two offensive stats. 

  2. It hit the WSJ.  The boat was going over 30 mph.  I still can't believe nobody was killed.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-investigators-seek-felony-fleeing-the-scene-charge-against-prominent-oil-lawyer-1530187200

    Texas authorities are seeking to charge a prominent oil-patch lawyer with a felony, according to a criminal complaint that alleges he fled the scene of a boat wreck that left three of his partners hospitalized.

    A judge signed a felony arrest warrant last Thursday for Douglas McWilliams, a partner at Houston law firm Vinson & Elkins LLP, but recalled it a day later. Mr. McWilliams’s lawyer said he requested the recall to allow him to persuade prosecutors that charges aren’t justified. The Travis County District Attorney’s office said it was unable to comment on a “pending matter.”

    Detectives from the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department, which filed the complaint and the arrest warrant, say they have been investigating the incident since May 10, when they and several other law-enforcement agencies, paramedics and firefighters were called to a late-night boat crash at Lake Travis, a man-made reservoir on the Colorado River outside Austin.

    Mr. McWilliams and investigators say they agree on several facts: That he had been steering his 23-foot power boat with five of his law partners aboard when it slammed into a rocky peninsula called Graveyard Point, that he wasn’t present at the crash site when rescuers arrived, and that he turned up about five hours later, just before 4 a.m., ringing the gate buzzer at a nearby estate asking for help.

    In a sworn statement that his lawyer said he has shared with prosecutors in hopes of staving off an arrest, Mr. McWilliams said he left the wreckage to find help, became disoriented, fainted from the pain of a shoulder separated when he was thrown from the boat and was menaced by “what sounded like a very vicious sounding dog” before he found the call box. He said he was unaware of how much time had passed since he had set off.

    In their own sworn statements, some of his law partners present at the lake that night said they feared in the moment that he was dead.

    Investigators said in their criminal complaint that they too believed the situation grave, and the helicopter summoned to fly two of the injured lawyers to an Austin hospital was diverted to first look for Mr. McWilliams. Another helicopter, equipped with a spotlight and thermal-imaging gear, joined rescue boats and 16 flashing police cars in the search, investigators said.

    “It’s ridiculous and insulting to me to suggest that I’d run and hide while my colleagues were suffering in an attempt to avoid responsibility for anything,” Mr. McWilliams said.

    “The facts as we understand them do not support this attempt by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to obtain an arrest warrant,” a Vinson & Elkins spokesman said. “We are fully supporting Doug and all of our attorneys involved in this unfortunate accident.”

    Founded in 1917 at the dawn of the oil era in Houston, V&E has become one of the country’s largest and most profitable firms thanks to the U.S. shale boom. Mr. McWilliams, 48, is a top earner at V&E, whose senior lawyers routinely rake in multimillion-dollar paychecks, according to people familiar with the matter.

    He leads a team of lawyers who advise wildcatters, rig owners and others on stock offerings and bond deals. Last year, he worked on two of the oil industry’s biggest mergers, and in 2016 his team had a hand in 10 of 13 U.S. energy IPOs. Mr. McWilliams and the firm especially dominate the field of master limited partnerships, pipeline-owning entities that avoid corporate taxes by paying out profits to shareholders. These entities have proliferated as the country’s energy supply routes have been redrawn.

    State investigators estimate in their crash report that the boat was traveling between 30 and 40 miles an hour when it zipped past the wrong side of a lighted buoy and crashed. The boat, a Nautique Super Air, rolled over at least once as it skipped ashore. All but one of the lawyers were flung from it, according to the lawyers’ affidavits. One woman broke her clavicle, ribs and a tooth, according to the complaint. Another fractured facial bones, ribs and vertebrae. A male partner had a head injury.

    In their sworn statements, Mr. McWilliams’s co-workers described a sedate, catered dinner earlier in the night. Attendees were partners involved in the firm’s capital-markets practice and a few support employees in town for a day of meetings at a resort on the lake. Mr. McWilliams invited everyone to dinner at the waterfront home he and his wife bought last summer. Alcohol was consumed, but modestly, they said. Several of the lawyers were anxious about getting back to their hotel rooms to work a bit before bed. When the hotel shuttle was delayed, Mr. McWilliams offered a ride in his boat. Several swore that Mr. McWilliams didn’t appear drunk.

    Investigators say they never had a chance to test him for intoxication after he turned up because he was whisked away by an ambulance to a nearby medical center for treatment. Mr. McWilliams said in his own affidavit that he told the paramedics who tended him in the early morning that he had had “a couple of drinks much earlier in the evening,” but also that he takes “great offense” to investigators’ suspicions about his sobriety at the time of the crash.

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