John P. Bender , an Austin attorney, will have to wait until July 29 to learn his sentence. On June 23, a 331st District Court jury convicted Bender of aggregated theft and aggregated misapplication of fiduciary property, both first-degree felonies, according to Patty Robertson , the Travis County assistant district attorney who prosecuted State v. Bender . On Nov. 12, 2008, a Travis County grand jury indicted Bender on the theft and misapplication of fiduciary property charges in connection with his alleged personal use of P.E.T. Imaging Ltd. funds between Aug. 1, 2000, and Feb. 1, 2003. Robertson says Bender withdrew more than $930,000 of the company’s funds; P.E.T. Imaging conducted positron emission tomography scans of patients to detect cancer and other medical problems. Sam Bassett , Bender’s attorney and a partner in Austin’s Minton Burton Foster & Collins , says, “Our position at the trial was he was authorized to take those distributions.” Bassett says Bender set up the company and invested more than $300,000 in it. Robertson says former Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Chuck Miller , who presided over Bender’s trial, will sentence him. Bender is eligible for probation, but Miller could assess a sentence of five years to life in prison for a first-degree felony, Robertson says. Bassett says Bender went bankrupt when P.E.T. Imaging failed. “He has suffered a lot,” Bassett says.
Wild Kingdom
Imagine paddling an 18-foot canoe almost nonstop for 97 hours. Then add Texas summer heat, getting knocked out of the canoe by an overhanging tree and almost no sleep. What have you got? The Texas Water Safari canoe race, recently completed by two Dallas lawyers: Nick Hofman , a senior attorney with Atmos Energy Corp., and Edgar McQueen , a shareholder in Munsch Hardt Kopf & Harr . The race started June 13 in San Marcos. Participating paddlers had 100 hours, or until mid-day June 17, to complete the 260-mile course down the San Marcos and Guadalupe Rivers and across San Antonio Bay to Seadrift. Hofman and McQueen completed the adventure — just three-hours shy of the 100-hour limit — to each earn one of the Texas Water Safari patches given to race finishers. “Nick had one of the best quotes of the whole adventure: ‘Never have I done so much for so little,’ ” says McQueen. The two lawyers have been friends since they both were Munsch Hardt associates in 2002. They’ve trained for and completed other endurance events together, such as the Dallas White Rock Marathon. But the Texas Water Safari required extraordinary endurance from the two amateur paddlers. “ Nick and I were both surprised at how quickly we were able to adapt to the heat and to managing through the pain of hand blisters,” McQueen says. “But it was hard.” The two slept less than four hours, in about one-hour segments, during the four-night, four-and-a-half-day experience. “The first night we slept on stone picnic tables,” Hofman says. “The second night we slept under an overpass. As the cars rolled by, we could hear the roar.” After paddling 20 or so hours, they would grab their rain slickers and stretch out. They didn’t have a tent or other sleeping accoutrements because race rules require participants to carry all provisions in their canoes, except water and ice, which was provided by a team captain who followed their progress from land — in their case McQueen’s brother, Jeff McQueen. Since the route included areas where the two had to carry or drag the canoe over logs or up river banks, they didn’t want to lug anything more than the clothes on their backs and basic provisions such as vacuum-sealed meals, powder to mix with water for energy drinks, emergency flares and life vests. “We had to carry everything we were going to use on the boat, so we always had to make the decision of something’s potential utility down the river versus the weight of carrying it,” Hofman says. There were 18-hour periods where the two did not see any other boats. At night, they would try to stay close to other boats they might come across to take advantage of the extra light from the additional canoe. “When you get to the lower sections of the river, in the brackish water, as you shine your headlight over on the banks, you see orange and red eyes peering back at you and then disappearing into the water, which may explain why we didn’t sleep,” Hofman says. During the second or third day, a family swimming in the Guadalupe River warned the paddlers to duck their heads. “I don’t know what I was focused on. I didn’t duck, and a tree smashed me in the head and knocked me out of the boat,” McQueen says. “Nick had to jump out of the boat to keep it from capsizing.” Other excitement was provided by an alligator gar jumping into the boat, a log punching a hole in the canoe (fortunately above water level), and a frightening night episode with a large animal that turned out to be a dog. The final leg of the journey was a five to seven mile crossing of San Antonio Bay. At about 3 a.m. on the final day, the two reached a spot where the route turned from the Guadalupe River into San Antonio Bay. The winds were high, and experienced race participants worried about crossing the bay at night. So Hofman and McQueen decided to wait until dawn before attempting to cross. “That last part, waiting for the sun to come up, not sure whether we were going to make it or not, that was probably one of the most intense moments,” Hofman says. “We decided we were not going to fail for lack of trying.” Waiting until dawn was nerve-racking because the 100-hour time period allotted for completing the course was running out. “If we had slept more, just one more hour every night like we would really have liked to, or taken more rest breaks delaying three hours, we would not have made it,” Hofman says. With morning light, they paddled on to finish the race in 97 hours. “It was an adventure, and we finished it, and we did it together,” McQueen says. Hofman echoes McQueen’s sentiment and adds, “Overall, it gives you a tremendous sense of accomplishment, but it’s also one of those things I don’t think I’ll ever do again.”
