The governor’s race in Ohio got real nasty this week with an ad produced by Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. His campaign dug up his Democratic opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, who accused Acton of lying about her past and told Ohioans not to vote for her.
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Acton and her brother responded by pointing out that Arthur had lost custody of Acton when she was 12 years old because Arthur’s then-husband sexually assaulted her. Arthur supported her husband during the ensuing prosecution, left the state with him, and helped him avoid justice for the next 20-plus years, until he died. Acton had not heard from her in decades, until now. It was such a nasty smear job that even National Review published reporting showing that court records agree with Acton’s account.
But a morbidly fascinating sub-theme of the story was how it contrasts with typical conservative rhetoric about one of the most Republican demographic groups in the country: divorced men. Polls showed 54 percent of such men supporting Trump in 2024, compared to 42 percent of divorced women. The “family court dad” is practically a stock character at MAGA rallies at this point.
By all accounts, Acton’s actual father really was a good parent—he repeatedly attempted to get custody of her and her brother, and did raise them after her mother skipped down. “My dad always told me I could be in life whatever I wanted to be,” Acton told a local interviewer in 2019. It was a real-life example of the manosphere myth of the honest father being victimized by his ex-wife and family court. Yet because that wouldn’t provoke the desired hit-job response, his story was ignored in favor of a truly repulsive deadbeat mother.
But another Republican’s role in a family tragedy has gone relatively unnoticed. In a dispute that ended up with a father shot dead, Ken Paxton’s office had the opportunity to indict the perpetrator—and he failed to convince a grand jury to do so.
It happened on November 5, 2021, in Lubbock. A man named Chad Read had divorced his wife Christina Read, and on that day showed up to pick up his kids at a property owned by her boyfriend, Kyle Carruth. Chad’s new wife, Jennifer Read, had come with him, but stayed in the car and took a video with her cell phone.
Jennifer Read later published the video publicly in an attempt to get justice for her slain husband, though I strongly recommend against watching it. It shows Read and his ex-wife arguing angrily over her apparently not following the rules of the custody agreement. Carruth comes out and demands Read leave the property. Read refuses, repeating that he is there to pick up his son, and threatens legal action against multiple parties. Christina seems to admit that she was supposed to have the son ready to go, but didn’t because she “wanted to see him.” Read retorts that “I get him at 3:15 p.m. If you want to see him, you see him up until 3:15. You keep trying to keep my son from me.”
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Then Carruth comes out with a shotgun, and the situation escalates very quickly and severely. Read gets right in Carruth’s face, yelling and insulting him. They scuffle, Read grabs the barrel of the gun, and they shove each other back and forth. A few seconds later Carruth gets loose, spins around, and shoots Read in the chest at close range. He died at the scene.
EverythingLubbock.com has a timeline of the resulting investigation laid out in elaborate detail. The core of the story is fairly simple, however. The Lubbock district attorney recused from the case, because Carruth was himself getting divorced from a local state judge, Ann-Marie Carruth. So the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, took over. On March 31, 2022, he announced that the grand jury he’d empaneled voted against any criminal indictments for Carruth.
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As the Texas law firm Pullan & Young explains, while Texas state law does have some “stand your ground” style legal structures, the requirements are fairly strict. You are supposed to reasonably believe taking violent action is “immediately necessary to prevent serious bodily harm,” and you cannot have provoked the confrontation, or used excessive force. In my view, whipping out your shotgun because your girlfriend is in a custody argument with her unarmed ex-husband, and shooting him dead after a shoving match, appears very far over those lines.
Conversely, it is virtually certain that if Carruth had not gotten his gun out, everyone involved would have been fine. Either the son would have been produced, or Read would have eventually gone back to family court to file his threatened legal claims. Worst-case scenario, a couple of middle-aged guys get into a clumsy fistfight and go home with a bruise or two. This kind of thing is just what happens when guns are introduced into a heated confrontation, which is why a responsible gun owner should never do that unless there is no other option.
The Paxton campaign did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
A traditional tough-on-crime prosecutor could and would have gotten an indictment in this situation, easily. They have extremely wide latitude to persuade a grand jury, because they can control what evidence is presented, and it is not an adversarial process. Donald Trump’s Department of Justice repeatedly failing to convince grand jurors has been so shocking precisely because the cliché is that any prosecutor with half a brain could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
Republicans may like to pander to divorced men whose wives couldn’t take their terminal Fox News addictions any longer. But if he pursued the case, Paxton would have to take on Texas’s formidable gun rights. The grand jury bailed him out of that choice, and he didn’t seem that choked up about it.
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