Jury: White Settlement man who shot roommate dead, rolled body in rug guilty of murder

Through a window in a police interview room door, Jeffery Cory motioned with his hand to get the attention of a detective.

He was ready to offer a new installment in an evolving account of the circumstances of his roommate’s death in White Settlement.

The night before, Cory had reported to the police that he had found Erik Fernandez’s body rolled up in a rug inside their apartment. Fernandez’s hand stuck out from the wrap that was bound with a tarp and a string of Christmas lights.

Cory first told a police officer that he discovered the body upon returning from work. He said that his dead roommate was revealed when he opened Fernandez’s bedroom door. He called 911.

In the hours after the call, police officers collected Cory’s clothes. Asked him to again go over the timeline. Gently suggested that he may have inadvertently left something out.

They gave him a hash brown. As an officer prepared to swab his hand for use in testing for gunshot residue, she asked whether Cory recently held a firearm. Soon after, he vomited into a trash can.

Cory was concerned about his two cats. When a detective said that he would make certain that the animals would be cared for, Cory was ready to move away from lies he had told since the night before, when he insisted he did not how and why Fernandez died, according to video of the interview.

As Cory waited in the interview room on March 2, 2019, police crime scene officers sprayed luminol in the apartment, revealing blood in paw prints left on the floor by the cats or dogs that also lived there. They also found two bullets in Cory’s bedroom. A forensic pathologist would conclude that a gunshot wound at the base of Fernandez’s skull caused his death.

Alone in the room, Cory stared at the blue carpet, touched his shaved head, bit his fingernails and prepared to confess.

He told White Settlement Police Detective Brad Bukowski and Sgt. Denise Callahan that he shot Fernandez in their apartment after his roommate confronted him about being loud in the middle of the night. He shifted the victim’s legs on to a rug in the living room and rolled him up within it. Later, he pulled the rug down the hall and into Fernandez’s bedroom, closing the door. Cory drove about 15 miles to Lake Weatherford in Parker County and tossed the gun as far as he could into the water, he said.

In 213th District Court in Tarrant County, a jury on Thursday found Cory guilty of murder. The panel of 10 men and two women will consider a prison term of five to 99 years and were hearing witness testimony in the trial’s punishment phase late Thursday afternoon. Prosecutors previously offered Cory 40 years in a plea agreement. The jury deliberated for about two hours and 45 minutes before reaching the verdict.

Cory had offered from the witness stand an account of his final encounter with Fernandez that contained several significant departures from answers he gave in his interview with police and, after his arrest, a television reporter. For the first time, he suggested from the stand that Fernandez presented a threat and that the killing was justified because he was defending himself.

Fernandez, who was 43, was asleep on the couch in the living room when Cory, then 40, returned home. The sound of the defendant’s shoes, or perhaps dealing with litter boxes, stirred Fernandez, who was asleep on the living room couch.

Fernandez stepped into Cory’s bedroom, grabbed his shoulder and said he had to be up early for work, Cory testified. Cory reached to a plastic container above his bed and gripped his gun.

In the hall, he said, they began to struggle.

“He grabbed the gun out of my hand,” the defendant testified. The gun was pointed at Cory, he testified.

“Were you in fear for your life at this point?” defense lawyer Brian Salvant asked.

“Absolutely,” Cory testified.

The gun discharged during the struggle, he said.

Cory said that, bound for the lake, he left the apartment in the 1200 block of Kimbrough Street where the defendant had lived for six months. He and Fernandez had known each other for about five years and were friends.

Cory visited and spent the night with a friend. Went to a job interview and returned later to the apartment to roll Fernandez into the rug.

He said he did not know what to do with the corpse at his home.

At some point he set about cleaning the floor with Mr. Clean and rinsed out blood in the kitchen sink.

“How long did that take, to mop up your friend’s blood?” prosecutor William Knight asked Cory on cross examination.

The task was rather quick, the defendant testified, because most of the liquid had been absorbed by the rug.

“Oh, that’s convenient,” Knight retorted, drawing from Salvant an objection to the facetious aside, known legally as a sidebar. Judge Chris Wolfe sustained it.

In his closing argument on Thursday morning, Knight recounted flaws in Cory’s testimony and told jurors that the defendant was a cold-blooded killer.

“How do you shoot someone twice in the back of the head in self-defense?” Knight said.

Salvant, who declined to offer an opening statement immediately following the state’s opening, instead previewed for jurors his case’s only witness, the defendant, just before he testified.

The threatening encounter began with Fernandez grabbing Cory and continued as Cory tried to leave, Salvant said. The gun went off.

The jury received instructions that included guidance to consider the self-defense argument through the lens of a reasonable person, and the panel was permitted to weigh whether the death was instead manslaughter, a killing committed with recklessness.

In total, Cory was in the police interview room for about 14 hours, and portions of a video recording of his time there and his interview with officers were shown to jurors, who also asked for the recording during deliberation.

Earlier in the trial, Knight asked Bukowski what the suspect’s vomiting suggested.

“Is his puking something that could be evidence of nervousness?” asked Knight, who prosecuted the case with Tarrant County Assistant Criminal District Attorney Madeline Jones.

“Yes,” Bukowski testified.

As a medical examiner’s office employee unrolled Fernandez from the rug, a .40-caliber shell casing and projectile were revealed, testified Laura Simmons, a retired White Settlement police crime scene officer.

The caliber matched two bullets found in Cory’s bedroom, one found on the edge of a sheet and the other that fell from a robe, Simmons said

Crime scene officers sprayed luminol, a liquid that lights up when it reacts with blood, throughout the apartment and found drag marks on the floor.

Under cross examination from Salvant, Simmons said that luminol does not give an indication of how long the blood it illuminates has been present and that it may also indicate a chemical such as bleach, although typically with a somewhat different reaction.

Jurors were shown photographs that Simmons took of Fernandez’s body on his bedroom floor. He wore a blue short sleeved T-shirt and basketball shorts, and broken glasses were beside him.

Fernandez’s former wife, Gayla Fernandez, testified that she had discussed with him the difficulty he had in getting Cory to pay his portion of the rent, and that on two or three occasions she gave money to her former husband to replace funds that Cory was supposed to have paid.

Rent was a source of frustration between the roommates, and Erik Fernandez struggled with how to resolve it.

“He was concerned. He didn’t want to have a difficult conversation,” his ex-wife testified.

Beyond discord about rent payments, Fernandez told his former wife that Cory was at times disruptive, and thought that it would be best if Cory did not live with him.

Dr. Tasha Greenberg, the deputy chief Tarrant County medical examiner, performed an autopsy on Fernandez and testified that he suffered a gunshot wound that entered the back of his neck and exited his left cheek. A second gunshot wound tore through his ear from back to front. He also suffered blunt force injures, Greenberg said.

Blood and urine testing determined that Fernandez had ingested cocaine, but the substance was not active at the time of his death, Greenberg said.

Greenberg guided jurors through a presentation of photographs of his body taken during the autopsy. They included one of a tattoo of the name of his daughter, Zoe, who will turn 16 next week.

As he walked through the court well and past a collection of physical evidence on Wednesday afternoon, Knight bumped into the mop that Cory said he used to clean the scene. It fell toward the prosecutor.

“The mop,” Knight said, “will get you.”