Texas Observer

Sophie Novack reports on why residents of the Rio Grande Valley lose limbs and appendages to diabetes-related amputation at a rate 50 percent higher than anywhere else in the United States.

ICE is bad, but as that agency gets the bulk of critics’ ire, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency legally operates within 100 miles of the border, where it needs neither warrents nor explanations to search and detain American citizens. Civil liberties are in danger. How did this happen?

Hurricane Harvey decimated a small Texas Cambodian community’s houses and farmland. When white far-right groups arrived to help them rebuild, tensions mounted between FEMA and the volunteers, whose vocal, Neo-Confederate politics raised many questions about what they wanted with a group of Buddhists.

An attorney remembers the life of a death row inmate killed by the state of Texas.

Thirty-eight years ago, a young woman in Texas died of an illegal abortion. Rosie Jimenez’s story is now more relevant than ever.

After a controversial raid on a West Texas smoke shop, nothing is hazier than the truth. On synthetic drugs, federal muscle and the limits of freedom:

Sarah Brian says her two children were stolen by her own parents—with help from the state of Texas.

As a 25-year-old woman who’d grown convinced that her parents were trying to control her, Sarah saw her arrest and her daughter’s removal as stark displays of just how little power she had in her hometown. The court order mandated she was allowed to be with Zoe only if one of her parents supervised. But they fell gradually back into their old routines, Sarah making Zoe’s organic baby food in the kitchen and taking her daughter out for walks. Sarah and her parents often had heated fights over parenting questions—like whether the girl should eat peanut butter—letting Sarah’s father decide.

She placated her parents, they later claimed, by scheduling an evaluation with a doctor in Shreveport, Louisiana, later in 2007, but secretly she planned her escape. On the computer at home, while she watched her daughter and her mother watched her, Sarah discreetly researched other cities—weather, support networks, work prospects—and settled on Flagstaff, Arizona. Pictures of its forests and hills even reminded her a little of home.

A man, deep in debt, hides in the woods of East Texas for several months, stealing from the residents of a small community:

Few residents were willing to discuss the run of break-ins—the sheriff estimates at least 35 in all—that spanned most of 2013. Dyes Kountry Katfish, the last spot in town where locals might gather to gossip about the mystery over iced teas and fried lunch, went out of business in 2011. But privately, in homes or at the school nearby in Woden, residents spun their theories. Popular opinion first blamed delinquent youth on spring break; investigators even pulled kids out of classrooms for questioning. The sheriff’s department rushed out for calls about suspicious vehicles that could be the thieves’ getaway cars. Deputies patrolled Melrose at night in unmarked cars and called in the Texas Department of Public Safety to fly over the area. But the break-ins continued—cars, homes and abandoned trailers—without a sign of the culprit. Cash and Social Security cards disappeared from wallets, but oddly, not checks or credit cards. The thief plucked food, guns and other tools of the outdoors from their homes, but perhaps most disturbingly, he robbed residents of the secluded security they prized above all.

How the manager of a million-dollar horse breeding facility became an informant on one of Mexico’s most feared cartels: Los Zetas.

“Key to the operation in the United States was Jose Treviño, a U.S. citizen with a clean record who had never wanted anything to do with his family’s illicit dealings, until Miguel gave him $25,000 to buy Tempting Dash. ‘You can pick your friends but you can’t pick your family,’ Jose often said.

“The FBI wanted Graham to keep working with Jose Treviño and see where it led. He reluctantly agreed to cooperate. Within months, the young horse agent with a Texas A&M ring and an Aggie bumper sticker on his truck was given a Nextel cell phone with a wiretap. The FBI would be listening to every phone conversation Graham had with his new business associates. Unwittingly, Graham, heir to a Texas horse-racing empire, had become an informant on one of the world’s most lethal crime syndicates.”

In the summer of 2012, a homeless man named William Greer Jr. was bludgeoned to death in a park in Austin, Texas. Greer’s case remains unsolved, and his daughter is determined to find answers:

“In the weeks that followed her dad’s death, Tangie drove to Austin three times: once to speak to police, once to speak to reporters, and once to commemorate what would have been Greer’s 50th birthday on July 29. On one of those visits, Tangie went to the spot where her father lost his life. She spoke to a transient named Chris who sleeps nearby and asked him if he had seen anything the night of the murder. She knew detectives had already questioned him—and eliminated him from their investigation—but maybe he had forgotten to tell them something that could prove crucial. ‘I was playing detective in a way,’ Tangie told me.

“Chris told her he didn’t remember her dad, but that he did recall another transient sleeping at the same spot before Greer’s murder, and afterward. He gave her a description of the man, and Tangie relayed the information to detectives. But she says they told her Chris wasn’t reliable. ‘If you interviewed him eight times, you’ll get eight different answers,’ a detective said.”