Just two weeks before, on March24, Gravell had signed an order banning Williamson County taxpayers from doing exactly what he was about to do. The order made it a crime for anyone in the county to leave home for anything that wasn’t considered “essential business.” Violating the order carried a of a $1,000 fine or up to six months in the county jail. The day of the party, Gravell had extended his March 24 “Stay Home Stay Safe” order through April 30, 2020. The birthday party did not meet any of the county’s definitions for an “essential business” trip.
When Gravell stepped out of the pickup truck at his grandson’s house, someone photographed him dressed in a fireman’s bunker gear, wearing an oxygen tank and a full-face mask, holding a green fabric shopping bag with something inside it. Additional photographs show members of Gravell’s family standing on the porch while a woman appears to take pictures with her cell phone. The photos were sent to a Twitter account known as “Buddy Falcon,” which posted the pictures at 2:52 p.m. on April 7. At 4:02 p.m., Gravell sent the account a private message asking for the post to be taken down, “That is a picture of my daughter’s home and my grandson. Please remove it from your page. You can come after me but this picture is out of line!”
When asked about the reason for posting the pictures, the source who owns “Buddy Falcon” said the photos exposed an elected official breaking the law. “The county judge is abusing his power. . . . doing things that he’s telling other people that they will be arrested for or fined,” the account owner told KXAN. “And yet, he felt that it was OK for him to go to his grandchild’s birthday party dressed up in a fireman’s suit that he borrowed.” “When you’re given an order and you’re following that order and you see the very person that gave you that order — and is part of the system that says if you violate that order you will be fined, you will be jailed — violate that order, then it angers you and that’s what happened.”
Within minutes of Gravell finding the Buddy Falcon Twitter post of his trip to that birthday party, he telephoned Williamson County District Attorney Shawn Dick, demanding to speak with local defense attorney Robert McCabe.
“I got a . . . frantic call from Shawn Dick indicating that it was an emergency that Bill Gravell reach me,” McCabe told KXAN. “The emergency was that Bill Gravell needed to reach me about was these Twitter photos,” McCabe said. The three spent a few minutes on the phone, according to McCabe, and in the call Gravell asked McCabe to have the photographs removed from the Buddy Falcon social media accounts.
“I think he believed that I had some influence over the Buddy Falcon account or whoever those people are that run those accounts and that I could have them taken down. And, I immediately made it clear that I have no control over those photographs, . . .” McCabe said. McCabe said he found out that Gravell had planned to have firefighters from the Jarrell fire station drive by his grandson’s house at 11 a.m. with Gravell on the back of one of the trucks dressed as a fireman. McCabe planned to have someone go by to photograph Gravell because McCabe believed the county judge was about to commit a crime.
Plans to use the fire trucks did not go through, according to Chief McAdams. McCabe said McAdams was put into a “tough position” by his boss, Judge Gravell. McCabe said his concern wasn’t only that Gravell violated his own order but that he was abusing his position of power. “It goes beyond that (the order) because when . . . he uses his position as a public servant to obtain a benefit fraudulently, which is what he did, that is abuse of official capacity,” McCabe said.
McCabe also believed Gravell committed the crime of official oppression by having a deputy drive him to Jarrell, exposing the deputy to the health dangers outlined in Gravell’s “Stay Home Safe” order. McCabe told KXAN that Gravell confessed to the crimes in their phone call, “Knowing that DA Shawn Dick and I were both on the call — he said that he wanted his daughter and his daughter’s family left out of this and that he knew the DA was on the call and that he was admitting that he had a Williamson County Sheriff’s Deputy drive him and his wife to Jarrell to the fire department, borrowed the fire department equipment — including the respirator and the bunker gear. Had [the deputy] then drive him to his grandson’s birthday party at his daughter’s house in Jarrell so that he could visit with his grandson because he had not seen him in two or three weeks.”
“And he did that knowing — and even saying he knew he was confessing to these things knowing the district attorney was on the phone and that he could be prosecuted for these offenses,” McCabe said. District Attorney Dick told KXAN he couldn’t discuss the details of the case because he’s now “A potential witness in this conduct.” He said that he filed a criminal referral with Williamson County’s County Attorney, Dee Hobbs. Hobbs could be forced to hand the case over to another prosecutor since Hobbs performs legal work for Gravell and the Commissioners Court.