What was supposed to be just another night out on the town ended with a man’s guts spilling from his side on Water Street, according to the transcript of the city General District Court preliminary hearing for Joseph Ray Wells, Jr., who is charged with felonies for mob assault and malicious wounding.
One night last March, Jerald Lee Gibson, Jr. and his friend Joseph Eddy piled into Gibson’s truck and went to Rivals off Rio Road, according to Gibson’s testimony in June, from which the rest of this account is drawn.
 After a brawl here, Jerald Lee Gibson, Jr. discovered a ball of his guts hanging out of his side because of a knife wound. |
There they found girls, three of them, with names straight out of a Terry Southern novel. They left with Sunshine, Big Mama and Candy to travel to the Downtown Mall in a convoy of vehicles, bringing along a man they met at Rivals, Sergio Tello, repeatedly described by Gibson as “the Mexican.”
When the caravan got Downtown, they parked in the city parking lot on Water Street and went to Atomic Burrito before hiking over to Miller’s to play pool. Eddy and Candy stayed behind in a vehicle, but Eddy eventually showed up alone at Miller’s and Big Mama went to check on Candy, who was passed out in her car.
According to Gibson, around 1 or 2am, Sunshine and the boys decided to go back to their vehicles with a new person, Wells, who had joined them at Miller’s. He would soon get into a jawing match with a visibly intoxicated Eddy as they walked back.
“I was avoiding the conflict with all due diligence,” Gibson said in court, describing the incident to Wells’ attorney, Valerie L’Herrou.
When they got back to their vehicles, Gibson said he grabbed his friend and shoved him in the truck. By the time he got to the other side, Eddy was being pulled out.
“As I was going in, he was going out,” said Gibson. Racing to the passenger side of his truck, he found Eddy in a fetal position getting “a whoopin” by Wells and Tello. “If you know someone was a friend of yours, you just ain’t going to let them get whooped up on without giving them some help.”
After grabbing Wells, Gibson dragged him over to a nearby car and threw him on the hood. “As far as I know, I think I might have dropped an elbow…to his face,” he recalled.
He then turned his attention to Tello, who was still “whipping” Eddy, but Gibson was hit in the side. Gibson gathered himself enough to shove “the Mexican” off Eddy and the two jumped in his pick-up.
That’s when he noticed a “ball of guts hanging” out of his side. “As I got into my truck and I pulled my shirt up, I felt the blood running down my side and I could not put my hands around that ball of guts,” Gibson said. When they got out of the parking lot, the two switched sides so Eddy could rush his friend to the hospital. “I could feel my blood pressure just dropping off to nothing,” he said.
In court, Gibson showed his scar. “I got stabbed right there and they had to go in and pull all my internals out and fix my insides.”
Wells’ trial is scheduled for April.
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