HOUSTON - A person of interest in the attack on an Austin judge appeared in a Houston court Wednesday on murder charges from a separate crime he's accused of dating back to May of this year.
Chimene Onyeri appeared in probable cause court to hear the charges against him. Prosecutors claim they have discovered a strange link in this case between Onyeri and the victim that allowed them to make the arrest.
According to the prosecution, shortly before the murder, Onyeri's father was in a car accident that involved the victim, Jacobi Alexander.
The accident allegedly led to a fist fight, where Alexander punched Onyeri's father in the face hard enough that he had to be hospitalized for those injuries.
Prosecutors say that Onyeri later bragged to someone about going to Alexander's apartment complex and killing him, possibly in retaliation for the fight with his father.
Alexander's father told KHOU 11 News his son got involved because he was trying to break up a road rage incident involving Onyeri's father and another driver.
Alexander's father said his son was a good man who was on his way to work when he was killed. He wants to see Onyeri off the streets.
Onyeri is now being held without bond, but this is not his first murder charge in Houston. Earlier in the day Wednesday, KHOU 11 News caught up with the cousin of a man Onyeri was accused of killing back in 2008, but the case was dropped.
Kenneth Brooks is seven years gone but to his cousin, Niecey, the memories of how he died couldn't be any more clear.
"Seeing him laying there," said Niecey. "I tried to revive him, he was already gone, so I grabbed his hat off his head and gave it to his baby mama so she could have something to remember him by and two days later his daughter was born."
Brooks never got to meet his daughter. He was shot down in an apartment complex in June 2008, after Niecey says a game of dice turned sour.
"It was all over money, that's it, it was all over money," said Niecey. "I just don't know what type of person would do that over something so petty, it's not worth it."
At the time, investigators believed Onyeri was the shooter. Niecey was one of their prime witnesses.
Harris County prosecutors decided to drop the case, pursuing a separate aggravated robbery charge against Onyeri instead that they thought stood a better chance of winning. It didn't and Onyeri got off in both cases.
"I was ready to testify, everything," said Niecey. "I had pointed him out in the picture lineup, everything. So I never understood that and I was young at the time and I didn't know what I know now."
What she knows now is that Onyeri is charged with murdering another Houston man, 29-year-old Jacobi Alexander. Plus he's a person of interest in the shooting of state district judge Julie Kocurek of Austin.
Niecey can't help wondering if she could have changed all that by pushing harder in her cousin's case.
"If I would have known that then, maybe I could have saved the person's life that he took now," said Niecey. "But I didn't know."
Prosecutors didn't want to comment any further Wednesday on why they dropped the murder charge, in favor of the aggravated robbery.
