Rashad Owens guilty of capital murder in 2014 SXSW tragedy
After a little more than three hours of deliberations, a Travis County jury Friday found Rashad Owens guilty of capital murder, handing him an automatic sentence of life in prison in the deadly South By Southwest Music Festival wreck that shook the city.
Over four days this week, jurors heard vivid recollections from witnesses who saw him speed a Honda Civic into throngs of people, as bodies hit its windshield and were thrown high into the air. They watched chilling footage of Owens, a father of six and once an aspiring rapper living in Killeen, go through stages of shock in the hours that came later.
And some shed tears with the loved ones of the four people whose lives he took.
But as jurors weighed Owens’ fate in his capital murder trial, they had to set emotions aside and consider two main elements if they were to convict him on the highest offense ever dealt to anyone arrested in a fatal drunken driving collision in Austin: Did he intentionally mean to cause others harm or did he know his actions could be lethal?
Read more: http://specials.mystatesman.com/rashad-owens-guilty/
