After hearing the court read five guilty verdicts on charges of child sexual assault, a Texas man chugged a water bottle that apparently contained a poisonous solution, and he died shortly thereafter, WFAA ABC-6 in Dallas reports.
Edward Peter Leclair, a 57-year-old man from Frisco, Texas, started drinking from the water bottle after the first guilty verdict was read by the judge and continued drinking as the other four were announced. No one in the courtroom thought anything was amiss, dismissing Leclair’s action as nerves. One of the attorneys at the prosecutor’s table, however, notice the liquid Leclair was chugging was cloudy.
Minutes later, someone on Leclair’s defense team asked a bailiff to check on their client, who had been taken to a holding cell in the courtroom. Leclair was found unresponsive and gray; efforts to resuscitate him were unsuccessful, and he was declared dead.
A former Navy mechanic who became a corporate recruiter after his discharge, Leclair was accused of assaulting children between the ages of 14 and 17 during June and July 2016; he was arrested on the charges in 2018 and had been out on bail since. He faced a maximum 100-year sentence after conviction.