A capital murder trial has started in San Antonio. The state says a man beat his cellmate to death in jail.

The man on trial is Shandrick Van Anthony Buckley. He was 31 when the beating happened.

The man who died was Alexander Wise. He was 29.

Wise died on May 30, 2019. He died inside the Bexar County jail.

The case is in the 226th Criminal District Court. State District Judge Benjamin Robertson is on the bench.

Jury picking started Monday. About 100 people were called in for it. Testimony began Wednesday.

Buckley faces one count of capital murder. That is the most serious murder charge in Texas. Prosecutors are not asking for the death penalty. If the jury convicts him, the sentence is life in prison. He would never get parole.

Buckley told the judge he is pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. That plea asks a jury to find that mental illness kept him from knowing his act was wrong.

What the state told the jury

Bexar County Assistant District Attorney Raul Jordan gave the state's opening.

He said deputies found Wise beaten badly in the cell. He said Buckley was lying on one of the beds. He said Buckley had socks over his hands.

"Buckley does not have a scratch on him, and Wise was beaten to death and had no defense wounds," Jordan told the jury. "He ambushed him and he beat him to a bloody pulp and killed him."

Jurors also saw video from body cameras. It came from the sheriff's office emergency response team. The video shows blood coming out from under the cell door.

Jesus Ramirez took the stand. He used to work as a Bexar County detention officer. He now works for the Shavano Park Police Department.

Ramirez said Buckley did not talk to the officers. He said Buckley had "a thousand yard stare."

Deputies cuffed Buckley and left him on the bed. Then they went to work on Wise.

What the defense told the jury

Cleophus Marshall is Buckley's lawyer.

Marshall told jurors that only two men knew what happened in that cell. One of them is dead. He said nobody else saw it.

For that reason, he said, the state cannot prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Why the two men shared a cell

Buckley was already locked up in 2019. He was waiting on a murder charge from 2017.

Police said he stomped a man to death that year. That man was Jose Gustavo Hernandez, 55. He was found near railroad tracks behind the Haven for Hope shelter. He died weeks later.

Days before Wise died, Buckley was charged again. Deputies said he hurt a deputy. That charge was assault of a public servant.

Wise was in jail on much smaller charges. They were theft, credit card abuse, drug possession and fake ID use.

Both men had been in violent run-ins at the jail that same day. Staff moved both of them to the maximum security area. Then staff put them in one cell together.

About an hour later, a deputy was walking cell checks. It was about 1:28 in the afternoon. He saw blood spreading out from under a door.

Deputies went in and found Wise. He had bad head and face injuries. Medics worked on him. He died there.

Buckley was charged with capital murder within a day. A judge set his bond at $1.5 million.

The jail's part of the story

A death inside a jail is the county's problem too.

The Texas Rangers took over the death investigation. State law called for that. The Sandra Bland Act says an outside agency must look into jail deaths.

Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar backed the housing call at first. "Nothing showed up that would make these folks incompatible to be together," he said.

Days later he said this: "I don't know that anything was violated by having them together."

But the sheriff's office ran its own review. A spokesman said the review turned up a problem. "We identified that standards were not being met," he said. He was talking about how the jail sorts inmates and picks their beds.

Three jail employees were moved to other jobs. Two of them were supervisors in the classification section. Classification is the unit that decides who sleeps where.

The sheriff's office had said Wise was once in the Aryan Brotherhood. That is a white supremacist prison gang. Buckley is Black. Jail rules normally keep those two kinds of inmates apart.

Salazar said the jail had few good options. "There's only so much we can do with people that have a violent history or an organized crime history," he said.

The mother pushes back

Wise's mother did not accept the gang label.

Wanda Wise said her son was no angel about drugs and theft. She said he was not in a gang. She said his tattoo was not a gang mark.

"It was a swastika, and he had a big red bar running through it to say 'No,'" she said.

She also questioned the cell pairing itself. "Here's a white boy with the Nazi emblems," she said. "And then you stick them in with a volatile, black man."

Why it took seven years

Wise died in 2019. The trial started in 2026.

Court records show years of mental health checks on Buckley. A doctor found him competent in 2019. Later he was found not competent. His competency was restored in 2024.

Jordan told the jury that experts will say Buckley is competent now.

The trial is still going. Everyone is presumed innocent until proved otherwise.