Barney Fife gets demoted following one-man shoot-out

Mclennan County District Attorney Abel Reyna has demoted his First Assistant, Michael Jarrett, after he fired a pistol in his office, shooting out a window. Though it's a Class A misdemeanor to fire a handgun within the city limits of a town the size of Waco, no one should be surprised that Reyna declined to prosecute one of his own. The most pathetic part of the story, though, was that the DA launched an aggressive investigation to discover who leaked a photo of the shot-out window to the Waco Tribune Herald. The paper reported:

After the shooting incident, an internal office investigation was launched to try to determine who sent a photograph of the shattered window to the Tribune-Herald, courthouse sources said.

Prosecutors’ phones have been examined and prosecutors have been interviewed by Reyna’s staff in an effort to uncover who sent the photo to the newspaper.

Reyna said Monday the investigation was not conducted because the photo appeared in the newspaper. He said it was conducted because the photograph “jeopardized the security of this entire office and was a huge security issue.”

Grits calls "bullshit." The notion that it created a "huge security issue" is nonsensical. (See the picture in question above.) What it created was a huge embarrassment. Or maybe it was McLennan County voters who did that when they installed Reyna and Co. in the first place.

RELATED: Time to implement the Barney Fife rule at McLennan DA's office.