OFF THE RECORD

Attorney Takes the Plunge As Often As He Can

If you are a criminal defendant or a novice sky diver,
Russell Webb has your back

By Roland Moore

It is another hot day in the middle of this year’s dry Texas September. Forty-five minutes from downtown Houston, out highway 290, over an unstriped road surrounded by parched scrub grass, pin oaks and grazing horses, an invisible biplane drones. The barely audible rustle of parachute silk out of the vast blue sky foretells a blossoming of small colorful dots. Suddenly amid the scudding cumulus clouds, the pinpoints steadily grow in size as sky divers plummet towards the yellowing prairie. The specks of color enlarge quickly to oblong patches of beautiful, pure color: one monochromatic lime green, another a patchwork of clashing colors, others coordinated colors from across the spectrum. The solo divers wheel in a sharp u-turn 75 feet above the ground and with a quick downward pull on the shrouds, settle gracefully on terra firma without skipping a step.
Last to arrive are the tandem divers. One of the spectators gazing upwards yells, “That one has four legs.” Two belong to Russell Webb, a local lawyer, and two belong to the passenger strapped in front of him. The two of them make a wide, gentle turn, land, and after a few steps, when they are almost still and vertical, fall gently backwards onto Russell. They jump up, and he gathers up the parachute to be repacked for another jump not an hour later.
Russell, a tandem sky diver and instructor, is available for those who want the challenge of plummeting from an altitude of 13,000 feet without risking the learning curve of diving alone. In the first two jumps on one typical Saturday morning, he went aloft twice, carrying women who could have been mother and daughter. Their husbands, also a generation apart, watched together from the ground. It appeared that they were present because of their wives’ ambitions to try sky diving, but were adamant about remaining spectators.
Russell Webb was an “oil patch” kid, but one with a unique foreign location. He grew up in an Aramco oil company colony in Saudi Arabia on the Persian Gulf. He studied in the same one-room-schoolhouse with the same classmates for 10 years. There was no school in Saudi Arabia after the ninth grade, so he returned to Texas for high school. While a college student at Sam Houston, Russell worked at the Texas Department of Corrections as a prison guard. And he became fascinated with sky diving. When he graduated from college, he became a parole officer, and then a parole hearing officer. His next step was enrolling at Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University. Again, working for T.D.C. helped pay the bills. And sky diving.
After graduating from law school and passing the bar, Russell used the skills he learned from working in the Texas Department of Corrections to help his clients. He began representing criminal defendants, particularly parolees facing parole revocation hearings. Few lawyers working in the criminal justice system have had so much practical experience with its inner workings.
This veteran lawyer, sky diver and instructor works out of a recently renovated office overlooking Houston’s revitalized Main Street. His legal web site (http://www.lawyerwebb.com) has a link labeled “My Other Life” (http: //www.tandemjumping.com). His current jump total: 3,169, including over 1,000 tandem jumps. His CD “Jumping with Russell Webb: A Short Flick” is available from his website.

Roland Moore is a Houston attorney in solo practice. He is a 1970 graduate of the University of Texas and a 1975 graduate of the Yale Law School. Moore is board certified in criminal law.

< BACK TO TOP >