Where's the Hook?

Nearly 2 years ago, a longtime Los Alamos employee and whistleblower was beaten severely. He, his wife, and his lawyer all called it retaliation, intimidation, threat. There was a police report. There were witnesses.

Where's the followup? If the guys who beat him so badly were just local punks, jerks working out a little testosterone, a little cultural exchange, why didn't *they* make the front page like Tommy did? Or the back page even? And if even more, why didn't they make the front page of every newspaper in the country?

The good Doctor knows Tommy Hook... not well, but we were once friendly acquaintances. We had a few hallway conversations over the eyars. Tommy told his story to the Doctor several times during the years leading up to the more extreme times. We hadn't had a conversation in several years when this came down... but in the "old days", Tommy was very sincere and earnest.

The good Doctor took him at face value in those days... nothing he had to say was really that surprising, that hard to believe. And for the life of us, we couldn't see any reason for him to make that shit up. But we are not big conspiracy theorists (just amateur dabblers) so we tried hard not to think too much about it all.

That was until I saw what was left of his face on the front page of the papers... Tommy is only about 5'5, in his mid-fifties, maybe 120 lbs... very polite, soft-spoken... not a scary guy... not somebody who needs beating up for anything he might do or say in the moment. Sure, he was coming out of a strip club around closing time. Sure he might have said or done something someone could use as an excuse ( I think it was intimated that he might have backed into someone... like a pedestrian.. or their vehicle?)

Tommy's story to the police indicated he had gone to the club after getting a phone call from another potential whistleblower. Tommy was slated to testify soon and supposedly he was gathering more dirt on LANL management... A strip club is a good location for such meetings in film noir, but not in real life... and it didn't help his story that his wife was out of town that night and in fact had spoken with him on the phone just before he got the phone call and ran off to meet the tipster. It was rumored that one of the girls from the club said she had given him a lap dance... not exactly what you'd expect for his cover story... but then maybe he just got bored waiting for his contact.

So... probably Tommy just likes scantily clad girls wiggling in his face... don't most men? Not all of us actually go to strip clubs, and if we do, we usually avoid getting beaten in the parking lot... so there *are* some questions worth asking.

But the most suspicious? What happened to the perps who did this? Not much justifies several guys beating another pulpy in a parking lot. This is just not acceptable behaviour... And what happened with Tommy's testimony? Was he intimidated out of it? Why did the whole story go dead?

Somebody got the Hook... the Doctor really wants to know what happened after that... what happened next, and why?