Emmitt Douglas Carroll v. State

CourtCourt of Appeals of Texas
DecidedDecember 15, 2010
Docket10-08-00413-CR
StatusPublished

This text of Emmitt Douglas Carroll v. State (Emmitt Douglas Carroll v. State) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals of Texas primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

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Emmitt Douglas Carroll v. State, (Tex. Ct. App. 2010).

Opinion

IN THE TENTH COURT OF APPEALS

No. 10-08-00413-CR

EMMITT DOUGLAS CARROLL, Appellant v.

THE STATE OF TEXAS, Appellee

From the 361st District Court Brazos County, Texas Trial Court No. 07-05908-CRF-361

MEMORANDUM OPINION

A jury found Appellant Emmitt Douglas Carroll guilty of the offense of

aggravated robbery. The trial court assessed his punishment at fifty-eight years’

imprisonment. In two issues, Carroll appeals. We will affirm.

BACKGROUND

On September 17, 2007, at about 2:00 a.m., Patricia Garcia took her husband to

work and then returned to her apartment complex in Bryan, Texas. She parked her

vehicle in the parking lot, got out, and opened the back door of the vehicle to get her two-year-old daughter out of the backseat. At that time, she heard a rustling in the

bushes, someone say “go, go, go,” and then a gun cocking. She then saw a man with a

silver gun coming out of the darkness toward her. He was wearing a light-colored shirt

that looked like an undershirt, baggy blue jeans or blue jean shorts, white tennis shoes,

and a red bandana around his neck to cover his face. Once the man was standing in

front of her, he said, “I don’t want to hear nothing.” At that point, Garcia’s daughter

saw the man and said, “No.” The man then “kind of backed away a little.” He asked

Garcia for her purse. Garcia pulled the purse out from under the seat, and the man took

it out of her hands. He also asked for her phone. She replied that it was in the purse.

He looked inside the purse and then started to leave.

By about 2:15 or 2:18 a.m., Garcia got back inside of her apartment and sent a

message to her husband on the computer. When she spoke to the police, she described

the man who robbed her as a young, very clean-cut African-American man who was

about five feet two inches tall and weighed about 150 pounds. She also stated that she

is not very good at heights and weights. At trial, she identified Carroll as the man who

had robbed her.

Also in the early morning hours of September 17, 2007, Erik Scheets returned to

his apartment complex in College Station, Texas. Between 2:30 and 3:00 a.m., he pulled

into a parking spot and saw three African-American men standing about twenty to

thirty feet away. When he got out of his car, the men were walking toward him.

Scheets began walking toward his apartment, greeted the men, and continued walking

past them. But just after Scheets passed by the men, he heard the sound of a gun

Carroll v. State Page 2 cocking, and one of the men yelled for him to stop. Scheets stopped and turned around.

The men were standing “kind of in a triangle, two behind one.” The man directly in

front of him was holding a small silver semi-automatic handgun.

The man with the gun told Scheets to give them his wallet and cell phone.

Scheets complied, and the man looked through the wallet. Meanwhile, the other two

men went through Scheets’s car and took a laptop, an ipod, and several other things

from the trunk. When the man with the gun discovered that Scheets did not have any

money in his wallet, he told Scheets to get back into his car so that he could go get the

man some money. Scheets and the man with the gun then got into the car, and the man

told Scheets to drive to the nearest ATM.

As they were leaving the parking lot, a police car passed them, and the man told

Scheets not to try anything and pressed the gun into Scheets’s ribs. Once at the ATM,

Scheets tried several times to get money out of the machine but was unsuccessful

because he did not have much money in his account. The man eventually told Scheets

to go back to his apartment. Once Scheets returned to the apartment complex where the

other two men were waiting, the man with the gun told Scheets that because he could

not give him any money, the three men were going to go with Scheets to his apartment

and “get their money’s worth.”

After Scheets unlocked the door to his apartment, the men told him to sit on the

couch. The man with the gun handed it to one of the other men, who watched Scheets

while the other two men went through the different rooms of the apartment. At some

point, the two men returned to the living room. The man who had originally held the

Carroll v. State Page 3 gun took the gun back, held it to Scheets’s head, and asked Scheets if they had gotten

everything of value. They then told Scheets not to call the police and not to try and

leave because they would be waiting. They then left.

Several minutes later, Scheets left through the sliding glass door because the men

had taken his cell phone, and he was unable to call the police. Scheets flagged down a

passing motorist who helped him. Scheets described to the police that the man holding

the gun was approximately six feet tall, had a muscular build, and was wearing a white

tank top and baggy gray shorts; his hair was cut short, and he was wearing a “do-rag”

on his head. The man who watched him while they were in the apartment had a

slender build and was wearing plaid shorts. Scheets testified that he also described the

third man as wearing a dark shirt, a cross necklace, and a red bandana.

Upon hearing of the robbery, a cashier at a Valero gas station on the same street

as Scheets’s apartment complex informed a friend, who then told the police, that she

had seen three African-American men in the store around 11:30 p.m. on the same night

as the robbery. They had made her nervous because they were acting “crazy,”

laughing, cutting up, and “smelled funny.” She recognized one of the men as Damian,

a regular customer from another store where she had previously worked, and one of the

other men identified himself as “AJ” or “EJ.” The police recovered the in-store video

from that night.

Detective Patrick Massey of the College Station Police Department testified that

he reviewed the video from the store, and the appearances of the three men in the video

were consistent with the descriptions that Scheets had given him on the night of the

Carroll v. State Page 4 robbery. In particular, one of the men who had robbed Scheets wore a red bandana,

and one of the men on the video had a red bandana tucked away in his pocket.

Detective Massey thus contacted Scheets to review the video. After reviewing the

video, Scheets identified the three men as those who had robbed him. The man in the

video who identified himself as “EJ” is Carroll. The other two individuals are Damian

Flowers and Milton McCloud. At trial, Scheets identified Carroll as the man that held

the gun, made him drive to the ATM, and then took him back to his apartment.

Carroll was convicted of the aggravated robbery of Scheets.

ADMISSION OF EXTRANEOUS OFFENSE

In his first issue, Carroll contends that the trial court abused its discretion by

admitting the extraneous offense evidence of the Garcia robbery under the identity

exception of Rule 404(b) of the Texas Rules of Evidence. We will uphold the decision of

the trial court concerning the admissibility of the evidence unless the ruling rests

outside the zone of reasonable disagreement. See Martin v. State, 173 S.W.3d 463, 467

(Tex. Crim. App. 2005).

In Segundo v. State, 270 S.W.3d 79 (Tex. Crim. App. 2008), the Court of Criminal

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