This is part one of a two-part look into what really happened between Tony and Skip Baxter leading up to the latter brother's death.
BRAZORIA — At CHI St. Luke’s Health emergency room in Lake Jackson, a car chase that began on FM 2004 ended with Tony Baxter lying down on his stomach in the parking lot, hands above his head, as Brazoria County Sheriff’s deputies arrested him, and Skip Baxter dying despite attempts to save his life.
Only two things were known for certain at the start of last week. One, that someone shot Skip Baxter, and two, that at least one witness said they saw Tony Baxter shoot him in the driveway of a neighbor’s home.
As the community buzzed with gossip and neighbors traded rumors, investigators released little information, as is procedure during an investigation, and the truth of what really happened and why remained a mystery. Until Tony Baxter agreed to an interview Saturday morning.
Monday
Monday, a female friend asked Tony to come over and help her move her things out of the house she was living in, he said from one side of a metal grate in a tight, box-like visitation room at the Brazoria County Jail. The house he mentioned is exactly halfway between Tony and Skip Baxter’s homes in Las Playas, right up against the San Bernard River.
Baxter was sometimes still as he talked, completely unmoving except for his mouth, not making eye-contact and occasionally turning his back away. Other times, he moved constantly, adjusting how he sat, slapping his neon orange Crocs against the floor and pulling at his orange jumpsuit or playing with his hair, greasy and tangled up in a ponytail.
Skip, probably on his way to his house, saw Tony in the driveway outside and pulled over, Baxter said, continuing his version of events. Then his brother got out of his car and immediately started screaming at him, demanding $60 for a leather jacket he said Tony gave away to a girl, he said.
“He liked to use that phrase a lot, that he’s going to kick my ass,” Baxter said, leaning forward on his arms, eyes wide. “But that time he said he is going to kill me.”
Every now and then, Baxter stopped, shook his head and said he doesn’t belong here. It’s the second time he’s ever been in jail, once back in April 2018, according to court records. But the Brazoria County Jail isn’t unfamiliar with the Baxter family — grandpa, dad and all three of his brothers have been arrested numerous times.
With his back to the house and trucks on either side of him, he said he felt blocked in. When asked did he shoot his brother out of self-defense, he said,
“Yeah. I thought he was going for a weapon, I swear to God I thought he was going for it.”
Then, Tony Baxter put his face in his hands and said, “I really didn’t even mean to, God,” and began to cry.
Catalysts
During the two-hour interview, Baxter only wept two other times. Once, when he talked about a lucky two-dollar bill he always carried in his wallet which he had to use to purchase things like a toothbrush and toothpaste once he was booked in jail.
“I almost put that two-dollar bill in the till at the church once, you know,” Baxter said.
That was the first time he cried. He talked about that lucky two-dollar bill a lot from the beginning, adding he guessed it wasn’t so lucky after all since he’s in jail now. He talked a lot about God, too. Either about how he had always tried to share his blessings with others or about how his priest died a year ago, around the same time he stopped going to church.
When recalling the day his daughter, now a teenager, was born, he cried for the second time. Starting last year, he said he caught his wife cheating on him, and soon after she moved out, along with his daughter. Not long after that, his 17-year-old daughter moved out on her own all together. He hasn’t seen or talked to her in six months, he said.
“I felt like I was the greatest guy on Earth when she was born,” Baxter said. “She saved my life just by being born. She’s the love of my life. Otherwise, I would be a criminal like my whole family.”
In the hours before Skip Baxter was murdered, Tony said he took over 10 pills of several different kinds of medications and repeated over and over how “fogged up” he was that day. Xanax, hydrocodone and muscle relaxers were included in the list of names he rattled off. They were all prescribed to him for varying health conditions, Baxter said, like anxiety, an ulcer and physical disabilities which include degenerative disc disease. Over and over, he said he felt really sick and needs his medications.
Degenerative disc disease is an incurable though common chronic disorder causing pain as the spine deteriorates with age, something Baxter said he was born with and something that meant he would lose any fist-fight he got in. This was a weakness his older and younger brothers were aware of and exploited every chance they got, from childhood to adulthood, he said.
“They’re pretty scary, you know. I’ve been scared pretty much my whole life,” Baxter said.
His brothers assaulted him on more than one occasion, he said, to the point where it aggravated his degenerative disc disease. Often times, the brothers would get together for a night of fun and start drinking. Baxter quit drinking a while ago he said, and would often go to bed early once his brothers got rowdy.
But more than once, just for fun or because they were mad, one of his brothers would kick down his bedroom door, right off the hinges, and grab him up out of bed, Baxter said. Sometimes they tried to physically force him to stay in their party, others they were mad at him for some reason and would start hitting him.
“I don’t understand why. I couldn’t even quantum (understand) when they looked at me with that crazy stare,” Baxter said. “Did they hate me?”
It was known the four Baxter brothers didn’t get along, not with each other and not with other people, neighbors said.
Tony Baxter was also slammed with a triple loss a few years ago, on top of the multiple health conditions and near constant fighting with his brothers. First, his best friend died. Then his dad. And two months later, his grandpa died too. Baxter soon found out his dad left a house behind — in his name, alone.
That house turned into a black cloud on the Baxter family. Fighting became more frequent because his brothers hated him for getting the house while they were left with nothing, Tony said. Even when he added their names to the deed of the house, aggressive and violent encounters with his brothers seemed to escalate.
“Most of the time, I just tried to get out of their way but they disabled me. All my injuries were from them,” Baxter said. “I couldn’t protect myself so I got a handgun license. That slowed a lot of it down. I didn’t threaten them or nothing but they knew I could be carrying. I felt safer, anyways.”
Baxter started carrying his gun all of the time and his brothers knew it but it didn’t seem to deter them, he said.
“Nothing deters them. They think they’re big and bad,” Baxter said.
While Baxter began going through the divorce process, he also began fighting with Skip more and more frequently. Skip would talk to him about guns a lot and was hanging around with “a bad crowd”, Baxter said. Tony would often warn his brother he was following in the parents’, grandparents’ and older brother’s footsteps, he said.
But the violence and drugs Baxter said now characterized his brothers’ worlds was something they were all born into.
Childhood
In Pasadena in 1970, Tony Baxter was born into a world of poverty, drugs and abuse of every kind, with no role models and no means of escape, he said.
“Skip, Ed, Chris, my dad, my grandpa; I took care of all of them,” Baxter said.
He’s the kind of guy that would give you the shirt off his back if you needed it, he said.
Baxter never bothered his neighbors, they said, but they also kept their distance. Luke Luckenbach, owner of Luckenbach Deer Processing down the street from the Baxter home, said he’d sometimes help Baxter out but otherwise didn’t interact with him much.
“When he was down on his luck, I’d bring him some meat. He always returned the favor,” Luckenbach said.
Baxter did everything he could to protect his two younger brothers from any abuse, including molestation from someone he wouldn’t name, he said. One year, Baxter said he realized it would be up to him to take responsibility for his family.
“My grandma shot my dad in the throat because he was beating my mom so bad at Christmas,” Baxter said. “I tried to get the gun from her, I really did.”
For months, his dad was in the hospital recovering. Shortly afterward, his mother was arrested. Both grandparents were ill and disabled and needed full-time care. And the older brother, Ed, was starting to go in and out of jail, leaving Tony Baxter to care for his ailing grandparents and his younger brothers, he said.
What Tony Baxter said he didn’t realize that Christmas is that it was probably already too late to keep his little brothers, especially Skip, from following in their parents’ and grandparents’ footsteps.
Tony and Skip Baxter’s ex-wives did not respond to requests made via Facebook and through a family friend for interviews.