SALINE CO. – While no charges have yet been filed in the case of an alleged attack on a rural Saline County road in February, plenty of Stalking/No-Contact Orders have been presented and either granted or denied depending on the person in question.
What could have been a very serious case of potential manslaughter or at the very least, aggravated battery, has been diluted down to the trailer trash of court filings (Stalking/No-Contact Orders or, OPs) and what the ordering of those boiled down to is who had two incidents of “stalking” as opposed to who had only one (the qualifying standard for the legal definition of stalking).
And as it turned out, a local felon was the more believable of the two parties, not because he was stabbed many times, but because there were two incidents of “harassment/stalking” he was able to recount for Judge Todd Lambert in mid-March.
Stabber/stabbee
Zane Horton, 35, the felon who was the stabbee, filed the OP against his alleged attacker, Brandon Gibbons, the alleged stabber, this after the Feb. 19 incident that occurred on Walnut Grove road east of Carrier Mills.
Horton (or, at least according to the handwriting, his wife Ashley Tolley-Horton) outlined the Horton version of events in their Feb. 29 filing as such:
On Feb. 19 at 6:30 p.m. in Walnut Grove, Carrier Mills, about one mile from their house, the Hortons say “Brandon Gibbons tried running me, my fiancé and son off the road. He stopped his vehicle got out I stopped mine got out as well, we began fighting, Brandon Gibbon pulled out a 8-9 in knife while my 13-year-old son was watching and began stabbing me repeatedly stabbing my heart, lung causing me to be lifeflighted to Evansville for emergency trauma open heart surgery which lasted four and a half hours. Then I was in ICU for three days and hospital a total of 6 days.”
In the “second,” qualifying-for-stalking incident, Horton added as an afterthought, “Around beginning of Feb. 2016 my family and I was at Walmart we had checked out at the center when we came out Brandon Gibbons was parked close to my vehicle he began yelling and screaming threatening all of us that when he caught us out somewhere he was going to beat us and it wouldn’t be good for any of us. He continued yelling, screaming, cursing and giving us the middle finger we got in our vehicle and left.”
Had it not been for the “second” account, likely the OP wouldn’t have been granted…but it was.
Dueling OPs
This prompted Gibbons, 29, to turn around and file his own Stalking/No-Contact Order just a few days later, since apparently no law enforcement was inclined to take steps to sort out the mess any further than what they’d already tried (more on that momentarily), and he apparently felt he needed to get his version of events out there.
It did fill in some gaps, but it also left more than it explained.
Gibbons named the same place (between Walnut Grove Road and Battleford Road, Carrier Mills) and time (Feb. 19 about 6:30 p.m.), but stated “A friend and I were traveling down a gravel Road, road name unsure, when I was coming around a corner and met by approaching vehicle belonging to Ashley Tolley and Zane Horton. They attempted to run me off the road, I was able to dodge them and continued driving in my same direction of travel, I then noticed they had turned around and were speeding up behind me. I came to a stop and remained in my vehicle while my passenger got out, standing beside my vehicle announcing his name trying to de-escalate. I then heard Zane Horton yell he was going to kill us both. I noticed Zane Horton, Ashley Tolley, and their son, Karson Horton, were all three approaching my vehicle wielding beer bottles held in a manner to be used as a weapon. I got out to assess the situation and was immediately jumped by Zane and Ashley. I protected myself by covering up until having to use further force in self-defense out of fear for my life.”
Gibbons, an Army vet who weighs about 100 pounds less than Horton, also filed a no-contact order against Tolley.
However, the judge didn’t order those…because there was only one incident which could be considered, as he noted in the record sheet, thus the Horton order stood.
Pleading her case…but not to the cops
Tolley made a very big deal out of the surgery Horton had to have in order to stitch him up from the stab wounds, which, Gibbons told authorities, he inflicted when he found that a knife he had with him was the only way he could think of to protect himself against the attacking Hortons.
Authorities seemed to agree with him, and he wasn’t charged.
Tolley was outraged and expressed as such on social networking. What she failed to mention was her less-than-forthcoming demeanor when authorities arrived to speak with her about the incident.
While she refused to speak with investigators about it, she spewed all over social networking about how the incident “really” began on their property, where Gibbons, she alleged, came out with a friend and began harassing her and Horton, then took off, prompting the Tolley-Horton combine to take off after them…thus resulting in what county officials were later calling an incident of “road rage” between the two drivers on the Walnut Grove Road.
Whatever the case, Horton is healing and no one is in jail, because no one – yet – is charged.
Yes…he’s violent
Social media marchers were griping over that, as well as griping over the fact that Horton’s arrest mug from 2015 (for a felony conviction of Failure to Report; as a “violent offender against youth,” in the state of Illinois, Horton must report to authorities annually his whereabouts, as well as employment status and other details) was what appeared in the post at Disclosure’s website about the “road rage” incident…not realizing that because Gibbons wasn’t a convicted felon nor that he hadn’t been arrested, there wasn’t going to be a mugshot of Gibbons.
Attempts by social media marchers to smear Gibbons as a meth slinger fell short; he has no such record of arrest or charges anywhere.
Horton, however, might find himself the recipient of a petition to revoke the probation he was placed on last August as a sentence for the guilty plea in the Failure to Report felony.
He was still under the terms of that probation when he got into the scuffle with Gibbons; depending on how fast he heals and what the investigation shakes out, that’s a distinct possibility.