On a cool September morning, Pamela Rivas picks me up in a light beige F-150 driven by her 24-year-old son, Ivan. Country music plays softly on the stereo. We’re in Edinburg, the Texas border city where they now live, but we’re headed west. A 60-year

Armando Carrillo had been waiting outside the Nueces County Jail for hours when he heard sirens approaching in the middle of the night on March 5, 2018. He had visited the jail earlier that day to see his youngest son, Danny, 27, who had been incarce

THE VIEWING deck at Port Arthur’s City Hall offers visitors to the industrial city a view of the small downtown and the glimmering waterway. The channel is lined with massive tankers and refineries. John Beard, a former city councilman, can name each

Patty Tidwell awoke one night to find that a massive python had taken up residence in her toilet. She called animal control, which responded quickly and somehow captured the reptile using Tidwell’s own hair straightener. Police told NewsWest 9 that t

Texan David Lee Espinoza was 3 months old when the events that would lead to his death began. In the wake of 9/11, hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers would be pulled into the war on terror, a war started by a Texan that spanned four pres

The mythos of Pauline Oliveros begins, in many tellings, underground. In the fall of 1988, the Houston-born composer and accordionist crawled with her friend, composer Stuart Dempster, into a 2-million-gallon cistern below a decommissioned U.S. Army

I was watching TV one night about four years ago when my friend Latrice bounced into the prison common area. She’d just gotten mail and found out her mom had finally saved enough money to bring her five kids to visit from Houston. She could barely co

In the blistering September day that ended Grape fest, a wine festival in Grapevine outside of Dallas, Mayor William Tate pushed up the brim of his cowboy hat and addressed the crowd gathered for the unveiling of a new public work of art: Peace Circl

On March 2, Governor Greg Abbott entered a Mexican restaurant in Lubbock wearing a black cloth mask. As he waited to be introduced, Abbott adjusted the ear loops and gave a small tug on the fabric covering his mouth. A moment later, perhaps rememberi

Gerald Nielson’s back pain has plagued him ever since the day in 1986 when he crashed his Trans Am while going 80 miles an hour. The accident broke his back in several places and left him with a constant, searing ache from his neck to his tailbone. T

A year and a half into the pandemic, millions of Texans have been infected with the coronavirus and more than 54,000 have died. Vaccines brought family reunions and the hopeful, albeit short-lived, promise of a semi-normal summer. But with less than