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Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
The Deadly Floods Revealed Texans' Heroism—and Their Failed Politics
Texas novelist Billy Lee Brammer once described the rivers and creeks of the Hill Country around Austin as 'running deep like old wounds, boiling round the fractures.' This past weekend, those wounds opened. As of this writing, the catastrophic floods have claimed 95 lives, including 27 from an all-girls Christian summer camp. Climatologists peg the start of Central Texas's years-long drought to the La Niña event of 2021; over the past four years, we've had a 'rain deficit' of 36 inches. On July 4, parts of the Hill Country—that distinct, creek-carved, cedar-green and chalk-bright thumbprint in the heart of my state—received almost half of that in one day. Kerr County got 12 inches in just a few hours. With the death toll rising and more still missing, this is now set to be the deadliest flooding event in modern Texas history, surpassing even Hurricane Harvey. As I write this on Monday morning, a flood watch is still in effect in Travis County, where I live. The dangers near me are mostly in the streets that dip into formerly dry creek beds, but even I can see that the ground is too wet to absorb anything more. The water seems to push up out of the dirt rather than sink into it. The land here has always been prone to flooding; its thin soils and steep slopes funnel water into rivers with brutal speed. When I heard about the children lost at Camp Mystic, I thought about the Hill Country girls' camp I went to as a kid, also set along a river. The riverbed was nearly all limestone—bright, slick, shallow, quick and easy to underestimate. It made for fun canoe runs but there was nothing to hold onto if the water came fast. When it rained, the counselors would put a chain up blocking the trail down to its banks. Geologists have called the region 'Flash Flood Alley,' or sometimes, 'the Flash Flood Capital of North America.' Over the last thirty years the pace of destruction and the lives lost have only increased. The 31 people who died in 1998's Central Texas floods were followed four years later by floods which that claimed fewer lives (12 casualties), but crushed the built environment: 48,000 homes lost to the waters, and nearly $1 billion in total damage. Just weeks ago, news organizations published solemn remembrances of the 2015 Memorial Day floods in nearby Wimberly that killed 13 people; at the time, The Texas Observer's Forrest Wilder described the floods as 'like nothing you've ever seen.' Previously unthinkable disasters have followed hard on that flood's heels. Since 2013, this area has experienced two '500-year storms' and one '300-year storm,' to borrow the terminology that civil engineers still use to describe events that were once thought to be rare. Given all of this history, officials who say that they couldn't have seen this past weekend's floods coming are simply lying. At a more macro level, the failure to act on climate change is the most sweeping systemic failure—one that amplifies every other mistake. Zoom in and the temptation to assign blame gets murkier, even as it gets harder to resist. Warnings from the National Weather Service went out as quickly as they could, starting on July 3. The nut of the horror seems to be older and more intractable than the Trump administration and DOGE cuts: Local officials lacked the infrastructure — literally, no local alert system in Kerrville—to warn residents effectively. As Rob Kelly, Kerr County's top elected official, told The New York Times, 'We've looked into it before … The public reeled at the cost.' Asked on July 5 if he thought that the weekend's events might change the calculus, he replied, 'I don't know.' (By this time, 15 children had already been reported dead.) You're horrified, I'm horrified. Still, what looks like political callousness needs to be balanced against the heroism and generosity displayed over the past few days. Here in the Lone Star State, there is a contradiction I've puzzled over for most of my life: Texans have made a whole brand of independence, proud of our 'come and take it' toughness. But they are as eager to come to one another's aid as any human on earth; I happen to think they might be above average in that regard. I signed up to help with sorting donations and shifting displaced pets in foster homes only to find out thousands of people had signed up before me. On Sunday, the city of Kerrville asked people to stop coming to the area; so many had already shown up with flatbeds, boats, chainsaws—anything that could carry help in or haul wreckage out they didn't need any more non-professional volunteers. Instead, they are directing folks to drop-offs and fundraising. There is such a powerful instinct to help, to give, to protect—an urge to collective action that is instantaneous when the threat has come and gone. Yet that same generosity does not translate into broad support for the kind of public infrastructure that can prevent or mitigate disaster. I have seen people stand on a roadside and cheer an H-E-B truck rolling through floodwaters; meanwhile, the local siren system goes unfunded. People will risk their lives to pull a child out of a tree but refuse to invest in what might have kept both the child and themselves safe in the first place. This reflexive aversion to taxes and the social safety net didn't come out of nowhere. Conservative politicians in Texas in particular have spent decades weaponizing the impulse to aid each other on the ground, lauding it as superior to help 'from the government.' They frame government as a thief rather than a partner and separate 'community' from the structures meant to uphold it. And when the government does falter, as all complex systems sometimes do, those failures become proof of its supposed uselessness. In their project, government failures are a design feature, not a bug: starve public systems of resources until they cannot deliver, then hold up their collapse as proof that nothing public can be trusted. But what is H-E-B's emergency relief, really, if not a massive public works project that also sells groceries? The problem isn't massive institutions; maybe it's that Texans have been trained to love the wrong ones. Trump's administration has pushed that spiral of dysfunction and distrust into something so tight and steep it might as well be just an arrow pointing down: slashing FEMA, cutting the National Science Foundation, dismantling public health protections, abandoning the disabled and the poor. That leaves communities even more dependent on last-minute neighborly heroics and more suspicious of the idea that a government could ever act with the same urgency. What mutual aid groups and even H-E-B show us, whether they mean to or not, is that mutual aid and volunteering are not the opposite of government; they are what government ought to be. Taxes are just a sandbag brigade stretched across thousands of miles. It's tempting to blame those who resist building that line—to scoff at anti-tax voters or wish their cynicism washed away. But blame is paralyzing. Responsibility, even when it hurts, is a blueprint to action. And responsibility belongs to all of us. I have strong opinions about what the taxpayers of Kerr County should do differently—and about that decades-long GOP project to undermine faith in government—but as images of the mud-torn Hill Country dominate my phone, I'm drawn to thinking about the middle-term, and how I can influence the people closest to me. Not today or tomorrow but in six months or a year. Maybe the challenge is for those of us who already believe in public systems—who already vote and believe in how taxes work — to go smaller, too. To show up at the food pantry, or at a lifeguarding shift at the YMCA, lending a hand at a church fundraiser, or spending time at a Big Brothers Big Sisters orientation. We need to do more than protest or write letters and start building trust through repetition, routine, and being reliably present in the places where politics don't lead. The more granular and further away from explicit political undertones our actions, the more room there is to connect across the divides that show up at the ballot box. In the mutual aid networks I've been involved with, the political bent is usually progressive to anarchist but they are totally agnostic as to who benefits. In a flood, those groups work right next to evangelical Christian volunteers and alongside people who might call themselves libertarian, hauling supplies in a steroidal pickup. That collective, neighborly instinct is the closest we get to what the government should feel like: not a foreign power, but people helping people, at scale. Billy Lee Brammer saw rivers as old wounds, boiling around the fractures. The Hill Country has always offered up those scars. But Brammer's The Gay Place is a lightly fictionalized account of his time as a speechwriter for Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Texan willing to believe in a government big enough to heal historic trauma. Texans sent him to Washington to build the Great Society, even as they mistrusted Washington itself. That spirit feels far away right now. But maybe it isn't gone. Maybe it's just waiting for us to notice each other after the waters recede.
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Ronnie Dugger, trailblazing founder of The Texas Observer, dies at 95
Ronnie Dugger, the founding editor of The Texas Observer once referred to as the 'godfather of progressive journalism in Texas,' died Tuesday in Austin. He was 95. His death was related to Alzheimer's disease complications, said his daughter, New York Times health and science editor Celia W. Dugger. Dugger launched the Observer in 1954, when he was just 24 and a recent graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. He wanted to create not just a newspaper, but something to serve 'the rolling, ongoing community of liberal and left, radical, some centrist and conservative, decent people, still moored in this still oligarchical political hellhole, beautiful Texas,' he wrote in the Observer in 2014, recalling the time when the publication was created. He wrote the Observer's mission statement, which is still displayed on its website today: 'We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it.' Gus Bova, the Observer's editor-in-chief, described Dugger as a 'trailblazing journalist in Texas.' 'He insisted on covering stories that, in the 1950s, the major daily papers wouldn't touch. He drove around Texas in this broken-down little old car, finding stories of KKK violence in East Texas or issues faced by Mexican Americans in San Antonio or the border,' Bova said. 'Now we see journalism like then it was really something different that he started.' The Austin-based Observer has been awarded multiple national awards in its 71-year history. The New York Times Book Review once called it 'that outpost of reason in the Southwest.' In 2023, the publication almost shut down because of funding issues, but then it crowdsourced more than $300,000 and continued its operations. Ceila Dugger said 'journalism runs in the family.' Dugger's grandson, Max Bearak, also works at The New York Times. She said she was inspired to join the profession by her father's belief in the power of the press. 'Our house was just alive with people who were in the thick of Texas politics, trying to make this a better state,' she said. 'It was impossible not to be infected as a young person by all of that.' Dugger was known for his indefatigable work ethic. In a 1974 op-ed, Dugger's former colleague, historian Lawrence Goodwyn, reflected on how Dugger stood out from other young journalists, in their early thirties at the time, who were already worn out because of the high-paced reporting in Texas politics. Goodwyn recalled a conversation with one of them who said, 'I don't know how Dugger does it.' Jim Hightower, who was the Observer's editor in the 1970s, recalled that at that time, there was barely any coverage of progressive candidates in Texas. Dugger wanted to change that. 'His integrity was not sanctimonious. It was not some stiff concept to put on a honesty and truth,' he said. 'His belief in journalism that guided my own ever since is that you tell the truth. You tell what you see, what you hear, what you smell. And do so with as much liveliness as you possibly can.' Dugger was concerned with more than just Texas politics. He wrote biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan. And he was strongly against nuclear weapons, as reflected in his first book, 'Dark Star: Hiroshima Reconsidered in the Life of Claude Eatherly of Lincoln Park, Texas.' Bova said that up through last year, he was still talking about nuclear weapon threats, democracy and journalism, and would read The New York Times every morning. Outside of journalism, Dugger was passionate about Russian literature, loved reading, and 'wrote thousands of poems that were never published,' his daughter said. On top of all the national recognition Dugger received throughout his career, Joe Holley wrote in the Observer's obituary for Dugger, 'he will always be associated with the scrappy little Austin-based political journal created in his image.' Disclosure: New York Times and University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here. First round of TribFest speakers announced! Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd; U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-San Antonio; Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker; U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-California; and U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas are taking the stage Nov. 13–15 in Austin. Get your tickets today!
Yahoo
11-03-2025
- Yahoo
Man Convicted In Serial Killer Case Gets Stay Of Execution As Court Considers Innocence Claim
In the late 1980s, the bodies of six missing girls and young women were found buried in shallow graves in the desert of El Paso, Texas. Most of the bodies were too decomposed to determine a cause of death, but there were signs that some of the victims had been sexually assaulted. As the death count rose, the El Paso Police Department faced increasing pressure to find and arrest the so-called 'Desert Killer.' 'There are girls being killed out there. The public wants to know what we are doing,' the deputy chief of police told the El Paso Herald-Post in November 1987. 'The department is feeling an impact never felt before because of the notoriety of the case, the serial killer aspect.' It wasn't long until the police zeroed in on David Wood, a man with a history of sexual assault convictions. The evidence against Wood was purely circumstantial, the state would later centered their case around testimony from jailhouse informants who had incentives to lie, and on acrylic fibers from a vacuum cleaner bag in Wood's apartment that were similar to fibers found on one of the victim's bodies. Despite the inconclusiveness of the evidence, in 1992, Wood was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. Wood has steadfastly maintained his innocence. 'I've been trying for 30 years to tell people I didn't do this,' he recently told The Texas Observer. For decades, Wood has been unable to get relief in court — until now, just two days before he was to die by lethal injection in the Texas death chamber. Earlier this month, Wood's longtime lawyer filed a nearly 400-page petition laying out the case for his innocence and asking a judge to halt the execution. On Tuesday, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted Wood a rare stay of execution to allow time to review some of his claims. Wood was born in 1957 in San Angelo, Texas. He failed multiple grades and eventually dropped out of school when he was 17. He was arrested two years later for indecency with a child. He pleaded guilty and spent two and a half years in prison. Shortly after he was released, he pleaded guilty to raping an adult woman and a 13-year-old girl. After about seven years in prison, he was released on parole in January 1987, shortly before police would find the first body in the desert. Two weeks after Wood's release, a woman was blindfolded and sexually assaulted in El Paso. The victim never saw her attacker, but the mother of the girl Wood had previously pleaded guilty to assaulting called Crime Stoppers and said that the woman's assailant matched Wood's 'modus operandi.' The assault victim spoke with the girl, contacted the police, and identified Wood's voice in an audio lineup as the man who had attacked her. In October 1987, Wood was arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a second woman. Prosecutors announced they intended to introduce the assault of the first woman as evidence of a pattern of behavior if the lab results from the first woman's rape kit implicated Wood. But the rape kit excluded Wood, and prosecutors declined to raise that case at the second woman's trial. The second woman, who struggled with heroin addiction and had previous convictions related to drugs and sex work, gave inconsistent accounts about her assault, according to court records. Richard Jewkes, assistant district attorney at the time, said in a recent declaration that he felt the odds of convicting Wood of the assault were a 'coin flip' because the evidence was 'pretty slim.' But the district attorney's office felt pressure to secure a conviction against Wood, Jewkes wrote, because 'a decision was made to take him off the streets.' Wood was convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison. Early on in his sentence, he shared a cell with a man named Randy Wells and lived a few cells down from two men named George Hall and James Sweeney. Wood confided in the other three men about feeling harassed by the El Paso police, who were trying to build their case against Wood in the desert killings. Sweeney, a jailhouse lawyer, agreed to help Wood file a civil lawsuit accusing El Paso officials of harassment and consulted with Hall, his cellmate who worked in the law library. The case was ultimately dismissed, but in the process of filing the suit, Wood gave Sweeney more than 100 newspaper articles about the killings, according to Wood's petition. The four men were eventually split up by transfers and releases. But in 1990, Hall was abruptly sent to the El Paso County jail, as the Marshall Project previously reported. Soon, Sweeney and Wells showed up, too. Sweeney was still completing his sentence, but Wells had been released and rearrested on a murder charge. Wells said that after he learned he was facing a life sentence, he told his attorney he knew something about the bodies buried in the desert, Hall wrote in a declaration last year. According to Hall, Wells concocted a story about Wood, his former cellmate, being the killer, based on information he had gleaned from listening to Wood work on his civil suit with Sweeney. Wells also encouraged the police to speak with Hall and Sweeney, Hall wrote. While the three of them sat in the El Paso jail, Wells asked if Hall or Sweeney could give him specific information about the case, but both declined. Eventually, the three of them were placed in a car with no shackles or handcuffs, contrary to usual practice. The cops gave the three men 'the red carpet treatment,' Hall told HuffPost. They went to a hamburger joint and, once at the police station, were given coffee, snacks, cigarettes and phone access. 'David Wood is our suspect,' the detectives told them, according to Hall. 'It'd be best if you tell us something because we can't let this guy walk,' the detectives said, mentioning there was reward money available. According to Hall, the detectives handed the men the case files about the murders and asked if Wood had ever said anything about the killings. Wells and Sweeney each said that Wood had confessed to the killings described in the files, Hall said. 'They're just fabricating everything,' Hall told HuffPost. 'I was really upset.' The lead detective from Wood's case, who has since retired, told The Marshall Project that the idea anyone gave the informants case files to review was 'preposterous' and 'insane.' When Hall declined to corroborate their theory of the case, the detectives told him, 'We can help you, if you can help us,' Hall wrote, adding that they said they might be able to 'do something' about his parole. 'I said I wasn't going to lie about David Wood,' Hall wrote. Hall was eventually returned to prison. Months later, he was approved for parole, but shortly before he expected to go home, someone submitted a letter to the parole board protesting his release, and he was required to serve the final years of his sentence. He suspects it was retaliation for refusing to implicate Wood. In March 1991, Hall wrote a letter to Assistant District Attorney Debra Morgan stating he would not testify for the state against Wood. 'If the State subpoenas me for the trial, I will have no choice but to be a witness for the defense!' Hall wrote in neat cursive in a letter affixed as an exhibit to Wood's recent petition. Wells and Sweeney testified at trial that Wood had confessed to the killings and described how he would lure women into his truck by offering them drugs. Some of their testimony was inconsistent with the facts of the case. For example, Wells testified that Wood had said he always used his pickup truck during the murders — but his truck was damaged and sat in an auto salvage yard for about a month during the time that three of the victims disappeared. Wells' murder charge was dismissed after he testified against Wood. Sweeney sought $25,000 in reward money and eventually received $13,000 after suing the city. Both men have since died. The only piece of forensic evidence the state presented at trial were orange acrylic fibers found on and near the body of one of the victims. After Wood moved out of his apartment, police obtained a vacuum cleaner bag from the garage and found similar fibers inside. A chemist with the Texas Department of Public Safety testified that the fibers from the crime scene 'matched' those from the bag, citing their size, shape, color, polymer composition and dye composition. Wood's post-conviction legal team later hired trace evidence expert Christopher Palenik, who wrote in a report that the testimony at trial describing a 'match' was 'problematic and misleading.' Although Wood was accused of killing six women and girls — Karen Baker, Rosa Maria Casio, Ivy Williams, Desiree Wheatley, Angelica Frausto, and Dawn Smith — the jury instructions only required members to find that Wood had killed Williams and one or more of the other five victims. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1992. Since then, Wood has maintained his innocence and fought his case in court. In 2010, at his request, a court ordered DNA testing on three items that had been tested before his trial but came back inconclusive. Testing of a bloodstain on a piece of clothing worn by one of the victims contained a partial male DNA profile that excluded Wood as the contributor. Wood requested testing of more than 100 additional pieces of evidence and for the state to investigate an alternative suspect, but the state successfully fought further testing. Hall was released from prison in 1994 and went on to serve 30 years on parole. He believes in the death penalty, but he also thinks Wood was unfairly convicted. He followed Wood's case over the years, and in 2009, when Texas first set Wood's execution date, Hall came close to calling Wood's legal team and sharing what he knew about Wells and Sweeney. But he believed that if he spoke up while still on parole, he would end up back in prison. Last year, when Hall was finally 'off paper,' he tracked down Wood's lawyer and left a voicemail. He said he had information about fabricated testimony and invited Wood's lawyers to come visit him to discuss. In October, Hall wrote a detailed seven-page declaration, describing why he believed Wells' and Sweeney's testimony was false. 'Every person's gotta meet their maker, and I don't wanna meet mine thinking I should've said something,' Hall said in a phone interview. 'That's no different than me killing David Wood.' How One Texas County Built A System That Sends Poor People To Death Row Texas Law Misled A Juror Into Voting For A Man's Death Sentence Damning Report On Texas Death Row Cases: 'The System Is Utterly Broken'
