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Jason McKnight
More than 20 years of committing crimes in Southeast Texas coalesced Aug. 12 into nearly three decades behind bars for a local convicted con artist – a 55-year-old business owner who most recently earned 27 and a half years in prison for fleeing the scene of a fatal accident he caused in Beaumont’s West End March 29, 2020.
Amazing Siding and Roofing owner Jason Lynn McKnight was already no stranger to the Jefferson County courthouse before appearing – multiple times over two years – in defense of his latest felonious transgression, a charge resulting from crashing into 37-year-old Edward Stedman IV and leaving the cyclist with fatal injuries without calling for help or rendering any manner of aid. Defense attorney Ryan Gertz’s arguments centered on the assertion that the defendant thought he hit a gray garbage can, admitting his client “shouldn’t have been driving” due to his suspended license and post-crash cataract diagnosis.
“His story that he hit a garbage can, that he thought he hit a garbage can is just that: garbage,” summarized prosecutor Phillip Smith ahead of the jury’s guilty verdict, which would be issued after hours of deliberating over two days. Prosecutors asked for 37 years, but jurors were empowered to send McKnight to prison for life. Ultimately, they decided on 27 and a half years, two and a half years more than the minimum 25.
In the crime marking his ninth felony indictment via Jefferson County grand jury, officers most recently arrested McKnight in March 2020. Eyewitnesses saw him hit a cyclist on Delaware Road and continue driving. Court testimony revealed Stedman and his bike careened over McKnight’s truck as the man continued driving, allegedly oblivious to the lives he altered around 9 a.m. that March morning.
“I can’t see good enough to be driving – I shouldn’t be driving,” McKnight admitted to officers, as heard on recorded audio played in court. “I hit something. I did hear something. I didn’t hear nobody holler.”
McKnight is quite familiar with criminal allegations – charged with eight felony indictments between 2001 and 2006 – but, this time, a man was critically wounded and left for dead in the street after McKnight allegedly struck the Beaumont bicyclist and fled the scene before help could arrive.
Sunday, March 29, 2020, at 9:09 a.m. Beaumont police officers responded to the 5300 block of Delaware in reference to a hit-and-run accident involving a bicyclist. Within five minutes, EMS, police and fire personnel were on the scene with Stedman, who was unresponsive and had to be life-flighted to a Houston hospital due to the extent of his injuries. According to the probable cause affidavit describing the scene, the victim had a gash over his left eye, was bleeding from his left ear and had abrasions all over his face. Stedman succumbed to his injuries 10 days later.
“There’s no way in the world (the driver) didn’t know,” said an eyewitness. “It was crazy. I was about 100 yards behind (McKnight)… approaching the Montclaire light by H-E-B. I did not see a bicycle or really even notice the truck until, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a bike spinning around in the air. The bike and the guy bounced off the hood and probably bounced off his windshield.”
Collecting felonies since 2001
As reported in The Examiner in 2006, already convicted felon Jason McKnight, aka Jack Green, at that time owned and operated Three Star Siding & Roofing Co., where the perennial defendant’s criminal tendencies cropped up again.
McKnight had been charged with several felonies beginning when he was 34 in 2001, although the cases wouldn’t be resolved for years. According to a winding list of indictments signed in 2002 against McKnight for 2001 thefts, he absconded with more than $20,000 from one victim, as well as thousands upon thousands more from another four victims. Misapplication of trust accusations also came around the same time frame – spring 2001 – an indictment against McKnight details. By the time The Examiner heard of additional thefts in 2006, McKnight had been a regular defendant in the Jefferson County Courthouse, but rarely an inmate at the county jail.
“All I can say is that, when I took over the bench, that was the courtesy that had been extended to Mr. McKnight, and I just continued it because I understood that he was paying restitution in these cases,” then-252nd District Court Judge Layne Walker told an Examiner reporter in 2006, regarding seven pending cases dating back to 2001. “It was an effort to let the victims get compensation.”
By 2006, McKnight had been granted 44 extensions over the five years charges lingered in the court system. While McKnight awaited prosecution, free on bail, he continued to ply the trade investigators would say he knew all too well – taking people’s money. Examiner articles from October 2006 described a police affidavit that accused McKnight of taking thousands of dollars for Hurricane Rita repairs he never did.
According to the affidavit for McKnight’s eventual arrest on the accusation, “The work crew left and never returned, nor was the roof put on the house by McKnight. Damage was sustained … to the structure and personal property. (The victim) eventually had to hire another company to finish the roof, which cost him an additional $4,400. McKnight has not returned any of the monies, nor attempted to complete the contract.”
Less than four months prior, McKnight was indicted by a grand jury for taking thousands of dollars from another victim, as well. Still, Justice of the Peace Ken Dollinger set McKnight’s bond for the second felony theft case of the year at $40,000 and the accused was out of jail within the hour, archives reveal.
About a month later, however, McKnight was again behind bars. While being taken into custody, McKnight began threatening an Examiner reporter on the scene, physically and verbally.
“You better hope I don’t get out,” McKnight is quoted as saying. “If I do get out, you got a problem, I can promise you that.
“You’re a dead (expletive) when I get out of jail.”
McKnight had previously threatened to kill Examiner Publisher Don Dodd and Dodd’s entire family, the newsman still remembers vividly to this day.
“The Beaumont Police Department did provide some degree of security until (McKnight) was apprehended and put in jail,” Dodd recalls.
According to records obtained from the Jefferson County Correctional Facility in 2006, McKnight was booked into the jail on warrants for four state jail felonies and three other third-degree or higher felony warrants.
And that was just Jefferson County. McKnight was set to answer felony forgery and felony theft cases in Hardin County in 2007. Jefferson and Hardin counties, Angelina, Nacogdoches … McKnight has prior criminal history that runs up to 60 pages on a Texas Department of Public Safety report. Among the charges he’s faced: DWI, violating a protective order, driving with an invalid license, assault causing bodily injury, resisting search and arrest, theft of property, forging a financial instrument, felony bail jumping, failure to appear and misapplication of a trust fund.
At the time of the Beaumont auto/ bicycle hit-and-run, McKnight was under the authority of the parole and probation department until at least April 2, 2021.
Officers booked McKnight into the county jail Aug. 11, after being found guilty that afternoon.