Tommy Ray Hook Goes Home

Pursued by a million questions:

“He’s still pretty out of it,” said Bob Rothstein, the attorney for the Los Alamos National Laboratory employee. Hook, 52, has a fractured jaw, a back injury, damaged teeth and perhaps more. Rothstein hopes to read the full medical report today.

Meanwhile, interest groups, FBI agents, police detectives, lab workers and journalists across the nation want to know why Hook was pummeled by a group of assailants outside Santa Fe’s only topless bar and allegedly told to keep his mouth shut.

One theory, according to Rothstein, Hook’s wife and a co-worker at the lab, is that Hook was lured to the bar, beaten up and left for dead because he planned to testify before a congressional committee later this month about financial abuses at the nuclear-weapons laboratory. He was supposed to meet with another lab auditor who had told Hook on the phone that he had information about fraud. That person never showed up.

It would be ironic if it was just a matter of bone-headed jealousy, or out-of-control bikers, or something like that. It's still quite murky, though. They hit him pretty hard! Seems like a crime of passion, but what's driving the passion? In general, with political or business matters, if you want to deliver a beating, you should try to miss the face.

My father tells a story of when he worked briefly with Land Grant Activist Reies Lopez Tijerina, in the mid-60's. According to the story, one day Tijerina was stopped by the NM State Highway Patrol. They delivered a beating from the neck down. He could barely walk, but he looked fine.

Of course, cops are professionals, and less prone to passion over such matters. Either it was inexperienced Lab types doing the beating, or local hoods who didn't like the way this guy was ogling the dancers. I'm thinking Lab types, because why would hoods pick on THIS guy, when the club was full of oglers?

Or something! Who can say?