(Stillwater, Okla.) — A Yale man – who was 24 when he was given a one-year prison term for the fatal beating of an Oklahoma State University student following an argument about a bagel in a bar near the campus in 1987 – was arraigned Thursday on his fourth drunk driving charge.
David Joe Doty, now 50, remains jailed on $5,000 bail pending a July 6 court appearance on a felony charge of drunk driving a 1992 Chevrolet pickup on Norfolk Road on June 26 in a case investigated by the Payne County Sheriff’s Office.
In 1988, minutes before jury selection was to begin for his homicide trial, Doty pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the 1987 death of 19-year-old Ebert Eissenstat, an OSU sophomore. Doty was given a one-year prison term followed by four years’ probation.
Doty admitted he had knocked Eissenstat to the ground in a 2 a.m. scuffle outside A.J.’s Bar and Grill near the OSU campus in Stillwater on April 25, 1987. Doty is 6-foot-one and weighs 248 pounds, state Department of Corrections records show.
Eissenstat died of a skull fracture two days later after hitting his head on the pavement in front of the bar, prosecutors said.
Eissenstat had been in the bar arguing about a bagel with a friend of Doty when he stepped outside and was struck, according to preliminary hearing testimony.
Eight years after Eissenstat’s death, Doty, then 31, was shot in 1995 while he was in his father’s yard, a mile north of Stillwater, then-Sheriff Carl Hiner said.
Doty received a “through and through wound in the fleshy part of his side,” from a small-caliber bullet, probably a .22, Hiner said. He was treated and released at Stillwater Medical Center, the sheriff said.
Doty then told authorities, “he doesn’t know of anybody who’d be after him,” the sheriff said.
Asked if the shooting was believed related to the 1987 slaying of Eissenstat, the sheriff said, “I have no idea. I don’t think so.”
Five years after Doty was shot, he was charged in two separate incidents of felony drunk driving in Stillwater in 2000, court records show.
In 2001, Doty was given two concurrent five-year prison terms for those two DUIs — with an order to complete the Bill Johnson Drug Offender Work Camp, court records show.
However, Doty, then 36, was considered by state prison officials to be too old for that program, and so his prison sentence was subsequently suspended, court records show.
In 2012, Doty was charged with felony drunk driving in Creek County, which was reduced a year later to misdemeanor DUI in the Drumright division, for which he was placed on one year’s probation, court records show. Two months ago, a bench warrant was issued for his failure to pay court costs in that case, court records show.
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