By Tim Binnall
A trigger-happy Texas man has been ordered to pay a whopping $2.8 million to a group of would-be ghost hunters whom he shot at in a bizarre incident nearly five years ago. According to a local media report, the strange encounter at the center of the case occurred on the evening of December 27, 2020, when a group of seven then-teenagers in the city of Raymondville went out to look for an apocryphal haunted location known as the Devil's Lagoon. As the cadre of thrill-seeking youngsters drove down a remote road hoping to spot a spirit, they stumbled upon a far more nightmarish scenario when they saw a parked car with a man waving them down.
Upon pulling up the vehicle, the teens were stunned when the driver, William Dane Rhodes, suddenly began shooting at them. "He shot right over my truck," recalled victim Arturo Joseph Sayas, "and when I heard it shoot, I just stepped on it and took off." While only the bumper of his vehicle was hit during the gunfire, a second shot whizzed through the backseat, miraculously missing two youngsters sitting there. Looking back on that fateful night, the seven 'ghost hunters' remain rattled by the run-in with Rhodes. "It was probably the most terrified I’ve ever been in my life," victim Slade Gutierrez mused, "I don’t think I’ve ever felt that kind of terror, that kind of emotion in general. It was so intense."
That sentiment was echoed by Diego Gutierrez, who was one of the teens in the backseat of the car. "I was just in shock. I couldn't do anything," he remembered, "all I could do was just crawl up and try to avoid getting shot." For his part in the frightening fracas, Rhodes received seven years of probation. However, the proverbial bill for that incident wound up being considerable as the teens and their families sued him in civil court. The result of that recently decided case saw the jury award the sizeable $2.8 million sum to the victims, who are now a group of young adults that will undoubtedly never forget the night they went looking for the Devil's Lagoon and encountered gunfire rather than ghosts.