A 132nd District Court jury found Andres Gutierrez III, 34, of Snyder guilty of burglary of a building and sentenced him to 10 years in prison and a $5,000 fine Tuesday afternoon.
“It was the maximum amount of penitentiary time,” District Attorney Ben Smith said after the trial. “I’m pleased with the verdict.”
Gutierrez was accused of entering Snyder’s A&W Motors on Sept. 15, 2019, without consent of the owner to commit theft.
The trial, which started with jury selection Monday, was the first to be held in Snyder High School’s Worsham Auditorium as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic.
“From my perspective it went very well,” Smith said. “There were a few very, very small snafus on the end of moving people around, really only in the jury selection. We worked through all those things, and it really went very well.”
Smith said the trial was very similar to a normal trial, despite the change in venue.
“Our job was still the same, it’s just that we were doing it in a different place,” Smith said.
The trial itself was fairly routine, he said.
“I would say so,” he said. “We didn’t have a lot of evidence, a lot of witnesses, and so it was basically a day and a half. Maybe not even a full day’s worth of witnesses that we presented. It was a fairly simple burglary of a building case.”
Witnesses in the case included Huey Jackson, an employee of A&W Motors; Snyder police officers who responded to the report of the burglary, Marcus Tipton, Ryan Reeves and Steven Roach; and the owner of A&W Motors, Anthony Wells.
Smith said the jury deliberated about 30 minutes before returning the guilty verdict. The jury also deliberated for about 45 minutes in determining Gutierrez’s sentence.