Who are these guys, beyond the names and creepy mugshots? While some are certainly guilty, with surveillance video clearly capturing men in Cossacks colors wielding guns, most of them are seen running for their lives. What’s lost in these dissections of a chaotic event that began and ended in a few minutes are the men who got swept into it. News organizations such as The Associated Press and CNN have diligently fought for the public records Waco police seem loath to release. The Internet is rife with criticism of how Waco police and McLennan County authorities have handled the biker shootout.
Which is why Rocki Hughes and her children, Dyllan Rhyne, 20, and Skyi Rhyne, 19, want you to know that Jake Rhyne, 39 when he died, was a real person, an ordinary guy with a family. The Cossacks don’t consider themselves an outlaw club and prohibit their mostly middle-aged members from wearing the associated “one-percenter” patches, says John Wilson, the outspoken president of the McLennan County Cossacks, but all of that was lost in the scramble to process the biggest and most complex murder crime scene Waco police had ever handled. Though the Bandidos’ top leaders had secretly declared war on the Cossacks, ordering their minions to attack Cossacks on contested turf, Waco authorities prosecuted the Bandidos and Cossacks alike as murderous gangsters, arresting them en masse and slapping them with million-dollar bails and felony charges for engaging in organized crime.
Jake Wilson, the “brother” who was with him, calls his death “a very big injustice.” Ambulances were parked nearby, but Rhyne spent his final moments with a young Cossack who desperately tried to staunch the bleeding with a bandanna. Witnesses say he convulsed and bled for up to 45 minutes, receiving no medical help from police who swarmed all around him. The details are sketchy, and Waco police haven’t done much to answer the lingering questions, but a melee involving an “outlaw” club, the notorious Bandidos, left Jake dying in the parking lot of the Waco Twin Peaks, bleeding from bullet wounds to his neck and torso. That was until May 17, 2015, when a gunfight took his life, along with those of eight other men. Or with his “brothers,” the Cossacks, an obscure, 46-year-old motorcycle club that’s part of the scenery in small, rural East and West Texas towns like Ranger but virtually unknown in Dallas and Houston. On weekends, he rode his Harley, with his teenage daughter Skyi on the back, long, blond hair flowing beneath her helmet. He still hung out with his ex-wife, Rocki Hughes, and he kept the high-school rings they’d exchanged at their wedding tucked away in a box, along with old Father’s Day cards. You couldn’t drag him away from his hometown, Ranger, Texas, a decrepit place that is nearly a century removed from its oil-field heyday.
He worked at the same place for 19 years, pouring iron at a foundry. Rhyne loved his kids and sports and Miller Lite. He could come off gruff, and he didn’t watch his language. His given name was Jacob Lee Rhyne, though most people called him Jake. He was a “big ol’ bear” of a man, tall and strong and slightly rotund, with a long, ginger beard hiding a strong-jawed, handsome face.
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