Man accused of killing Richardson cop during ambush faces death penalty trial next week

A jury will hear testimony next week in the death penalty trial of a man accused of ambushing Richardson police with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, killing one officer.

“I wanted to go to war with the police,” Brandon McCall, 28, said from jail in February 2018.

McCall is accused of shooting Richardson police Officer David Sherrard and one of his own friends in February 2018. Both Sherrard and Rene Gamez, who was allowing McCall to stay at his apartment, died from their injuries.

CRIME

Death penalty sought for man accused of killing Richardson police officer, another man

Death penalty sought for man accused of killing Richardson police officer, another man

BY VALERIE WIGGLESWORTH

The last time Collin County tried a death penalty case was in February 2009, when Raul Cortez was sentenced to death for a quadruple homicide in McKinney. Four men convicted in Collin County have been executed since, and five current death row inmates are from Collin County.

McCall has been indicted on two counts of capital murder and seven counts of aggravated assault on a public servant. Shortly after a grand jury handed down the indictments last April, Collin County District Attorney Greg Willis filed a notice that his office would seek the death penalty in the slayings.

On Feb. 7, 2018, Richardson police were called just after 7 p.m. to an apartment complex in the 4200 block of East Renner Road, near North Star Road, to investigate possible gunfire. Officers found Gamez on a landing outside his third-story apartment, bleeding badly from a gunshot wound.

Police decided to break into the apartment to check for more potential victims. McCall was inside, waiting with an AR-15 with a scope and two shotguns, police said.

Sherrard was the first through the door and was shot twice in the upper torso within six seconds, before he was able to fire his own weapon. He managed to get out of the apartment on his own and was taken to a nearby hospital, where he died that night.

“It looked like he was hunting us,” police Sgt. Brian Lee Alcorn said of McCall in a police affidavit.

Another officer hid near a bed while bullets whizzed by, according to the affidavits. Six officers trapped in the kitchen tried talking to McCall, but only heard moans. When the officers peeked out, he fired more shots at them.

“Every time the suspect would moan as if he had been injured, we would try and look towards the room, and he would fire more rounds at us as if [he] was baiting us,” Officer Jose Rafael Perez stated in the affidavit.

The police shootout and standoff with McCall continued for hours until he surrendered around midnight. Video showed him struggling with officers as they loaded him into an ambulance for a checkup and treatment for exposure to tear gas.

At the hospital, McCall told a Plano police detective that Gamez’s shooting was accidental. The detective asked why he shot at the officers.

“Because I wanted to,” McCall said, according to an affidavit.