TxDOT launches new pedestrian and bike safety campaign
'Pedestrians and cyclists are among our most at-risk road users, and too many of them are killed or injured in our communities each year,' said TxDOT Executive Director Marc Williams. 'If everyone looks out for each other and follows the rules of the road, we can help prevent these terrible crashes.'
Investigators seek man for alleged drug operation that crossed Texas state line
According to the TxDOT, the campaign aims to remind Texans to follow traffic laws and share the road safely with people walking and biking.
'TxDOT's campaign aims to raise awareness among all Texans—drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists alike—of the shared responsibility to help everyone get where they're going safely,' a press release stated. 'To support this goal, the 'Be Safe. Drive Smart' campaign is sending teams of 'walking billboards' around the state to share vital safety messages in crash-prone areas.'
Visit www.txdot.gov/drivelikeatexan for more information about the campaign and a list of safety tips for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Yahoo
19-07-2025
- Yahoo
The long road to tragedy at the Texas girls camp where floods claimed 27 lives
Investigators of the catastrophic Hill Country flooding in Texas may never be able to pinpoint a precise moment that sealed the fate of 27 young girls, teenage counselors and staff who perished after a wall of water surged through Camp Mystic on the banks of the Guadalupe River. But perhaps no bigger clue can be found than the account of an otherwise unremarkable and sparsely attended meeting of Kerr county commissioners in March 2018. Members waited with anticipation for news of an application they submitted the previous year for a grant from the state of Texas to help pay for a comprehensive new flood warning system along the Guadalupe. The county's unreliable old network of gauges and sensors, installed following flooding in 1987 that killed 10 children trying to flee a waterside church camp, had been inactive since 1999. Commissioners were chasing a $1m slice of federal funding made newly available to the state after a succession of flood disasters, including Hurricane Harvey in August 2017. Now-retired commissioner Tom Moser brought bad news, noting 'about eight different counties' were selected, but 'they didn't select us,' according to minutes of the meeting still viewable online. Tom Pollard, the county judge at the time, was incredulous. 'They prioritized us lower?' he asked, the county's many low-lying and therefore vulnerable youth summer camps immediately adjacent to the Guadalupe uppermost in his mind. 'They did,' Moser replied solemnly. Without that funding from the state, the project foundered. No widespread gauge system was ever set up that would have given early warning of a life-threatening torrent of water further up the river; no sirens ever installed that would have warned Camp Mystic residents that their lives were in peril and they needed to get out immediately. The investigation will look at other missteps and lost opportunities along the way that might have brought a different outcome at the 99-year-old Christian-themed, all-girls camp that served as a joyous rite of passage for generations of young Texans. Prominent among them will be this week's revelation that the camp owner and director Dick Eastland, who lost his own life trying to ferry a group of his youngest campers to safety as the river rose towards a peak height of 37.5ft, waited more than an hour to issue an evacuation order after receiving a severe flood warning on his phone at 1.14am on 4 July. Yet it is to the eternal regret of Moser, a former senior Nasa engineer who had studied flood monitoring and alert systems installed in other nearby counties, that money was never found or spent, either then or later, to replace or upgrade a broken mechanism born from a near-identical tragedy for the sole purpose of saving lives in the future. 'Not having the funds to accomplish it was not very satisfying to me but we tried,' Moser told NPR. 'That's all we could do. We didn't have the resources in the county operating budget to do that.' Moser, who did not return a message from the Guardian seeking further comment, had advocated for sirens, a proposal dropped from the state grant application when it became clear some residents and commissioners opposed them. 'If sirens were there, clearly people would have known about it. Would it have saved everybody? I don't think so. This was an event that's probably one chance in a million,' he told the radio network. At Camp Mystic, like elsewhere in the county, residents were reliant on an outdated and patchwork early warning system of alerts. Some were from the National Weather Service (NWS), which Eastland's family concedes he did receive. Other messages came from local authorities, some sent only after an inexplicable delay, which others along the Guadalupe's banks say they did not see in any case. Inside the camp, with water rising fast, especially around dormitories closest to the river where the youngest campers, mostly aged eight and nine, were sleeping, there was chaos. Many of the teenage counselors left in charge of the dormitories were left to make instant life-or-death decisions on their own, having lost contact with adult supervisors. According to two counselors interviewed in the days following the disaster, campers were not allowed to bring mobile phones, and the counselors were made to surrender theirs, leaving them cut off from any emergency alerts. Eastland, who had run the camp with his family since the 1980s and was a past director of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority that pressed for the original warning and alert system, was familiar with the danger of flash flooding from heavy rain. 'I'm sure there will be other drownings,' Eastland told the Austin American-Statesman in 1990, reported by CNN. 'People don't heed the warnings.' In a Washington Post report that contained harrowing first-hand testimony from girls who were there, parents of some who were rescued from Camp Mystic said it was Eastland and his staff who ignored warnings on the morning of the disaster. Also under scrutiny will be why Eastland made, and was granted, repeated applications to remove dozens of Camp Mystic buildings from the Federal Emergency Management Agency's 100-year flood map, which allowed the camp to operate and expand in a known risk area. A review by the Associated Press found that 15 of at least 30 exempted buildings were at the Camp Mystic Guadalupe site where most, if not all of the campers and counselors lost their lives. Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications at First Street, a climate risk assessment and modelling company, said the dormitories were in a known flood zone, which records show had been swamped numerous times in the camp's near century of existence. 'People that ran the camp had the ability to understand that the risk was close by, the risk was in the area, and maybe adapt the buildings. And there was no action there,' he said. 'In fact there were letters of map amendments that were submitted instead.' But Porter said it was hard to place blame on any single person or entity: 'A lot of that is just our overall risk psyche and understanding of what risk looks like, our expectation that these really rare events aren't going to affect us and they're not going to be as bad as we think they're going to be. 'The way we treat climate risk and flood risk in the country is really that, you know, if it happens, it'll be something we'll be able to rebuild, recover, and then it won't happen again for 100 years.' The Guardian was unable to reach anybody at Camp Mystic for comment. Donna Gable Hatch, a writer and former staff editor at the Kerrville Daily Times, said she believed lives would have been saved at Camp Mystic with an early warning system, but city and county officials were not responsible for its absence. 'If the funds had been made available in a timely and adequate manner, this catastrophe might have unfolded differently. But too often, those at the helm of small towns must wait for permission, wait for funding, wait for bureaucracy to catch up to reality,' she wrote in a guest editorial for her former employer. 'To accuse local leaders of negligence is to completely misunderstand who they are and what this place means. In Kerr county, heartbreak isn't abstract. It has a name. A face. It's a neighbor, a classmate, a church member or a childhood friend. 'The truth will come out. In time, we'll trace the chain of failure back to where it truly began – not in Kerrville, but in the halls of distant agencies who failed to act with the urgency that rural lives deserved.' Solve the daily Crossword
USA Today
17-07-2025
- USA Today
'Texans should be outraged': Execution back on for inmate who has strong innocence claims
Last year with hours left to live, Robert Roberson's life was spared following a furious effort by a bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers − a development rarely seen in the hardliner state A Texas judge has rescheduled the execution of a death row inmate who won a rare stay of execution last year as prison officials were poised to administer his lethal injection. Judge Austin Reeve Jackson on Wednesday set Robert Roberson's execution for Oct. 16, almost exactly a year after the Texas Supreme Court granted him a stay on his last execution day, Oct. 17, 2024. Roberson, 58, is imprisoned in the 2002 death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, despite strong evidence that suggests he is innocent. Roberson was convicted based on shaken baby syndrome, which has since been largely debunked. Last year with hours left to live, Roberson's life was spared following a furious effort by a bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers − a development rarely seen in the nation's most prolific death penalty state. The Texas Supreme Court intervened even as the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles declined to recommend clemency for Roberson and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to stop it. Judge Reeve has rescheduled the execution at the request of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton even though the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals is "currently considering new evidence further proving" Roberson's innocence, said his defense attorney, Gretchen Sween. 'Texans should be outraged that the court has scheduled an execution date for a demonstrably innocent man," Sween said in a statement. "Everyone who has taken the time to look at the evidence of Robert Roberson's innocence − including the lead detective, one of the jurors, a range of highly qualified experts, and a bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers − has reached the same conclusion: Nikki's death was a terrible tragedy. Robert did not kill her. There was no crime." The Attorney General's Office didn't immediately respond to USA TODAY's request for comment Wednesday. Here's what you need to know about the case. Detective who pursued Robert Roberson: 'I was wrong' Roberson was convicted of killing his daughter in their home in the East Texas city of Palestine in 2002. Roberson reported hearing Nikki cry and finding that she had fallen out of bed. After soothing her, he said, they both went back to sleep. Later, when Roberson woke again, he found Nikki wasn't breathing, and her lips had turned blue. At the emergency room, doctors observed symptoms consistent with brain death and she was pronounced dead the next day. Doctors and investigators at the time jumped to the conclusion that Nikki died of shaken baby syndrome, but the toddler had pneumonia in both lungs, pre-existing conditions for which she was prescribed opioids now banned for children, and undiagnosed sepsis. Shaken baby syndrome has been largely debunked as junk science, and the lead investigator in Roberson's case told USA TODAY's The Excerpt podcast that he botched the investigation. "Robert is a completely innocent man and we got it completely wrong, because we were looking for the wrong things," Brian Wharton said, adding that his confirmation bias and a number of misunderstandings wrongly pointed him to Roberson's guilt. "I was wrong. I didn't see Robert. I did not hear Robert," Wharton said. "I can tell you now, he is a good man. He is a kind man. He is a gracious man. And he did not do what the state of Texas and I have accused him of." What led to Robert Roberson's previous execution stay? Five Republican and four Democratic lawmakers on the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence issued a subpoena for Roberson shortly before his execution last year in an extraordinary effort to stop it. Texas Reps. Joe Moody, a Democrat, and Jeff Leach, a Republican, led the charge for Roberson's reprieve and issued a statement after his life was spared. "For over 20 years, Robert Roberson has spent 23.5 hours of every single day in solitary confinement in a cell no bigger than the closets of most Texans, longing and striving to be heard," they said. "And while some courthouses may have failed him, the Texas House has not." The move came after a failed effort by a bipartisan group of 84 Texas lawmakers who urged the state's Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend clemency for Roberson "out of grave concern that Texas may put him to death for a crime that did not occur.' The clemency board denied their request. About three dozen scientific and medical experts wrote to the clemency board explaining that had Nikki died today, "no doctor would consider Shaken Baby Syndrome" as the cause because the condition "is now considered a diagnosis of exclusion." "Nikki's pneumonia, the extreme levels of dangerous medications found in her system during her autopsy, and her fall from the bed explain why Nikki died," the experts wrote. Also fighting for Roberson's salvation: groups representing parental rights, autism advocates, faith leaders and anti-death penalty groups including the Innocence Project, and bestselling author John Grisham, who called Nikki's death "a tragedy, not a crime," in a column for the Palestine Herald-Press. What happens now? Roberson's attorney told USA TODAY that she will again seek a stay of Roberson's execution "so all of the evidence that proves he is innocent can be reviewed by the courts without the pressure of a looming execution date.' Roberson will have many chances for courts, the state's clemency board and government officials to stop his execution again.
Yahoo
16-07-2025
- Yahoo
Texas investigates more than 100 potential noncitizens who allegedly cast illegal ballots
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton recently announced the launch of an investigation into more than 100 potential noncitizens who allegedly cast at least 200 ballots in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles. The majority of the suspected illegal ballots cast by potential noncitizens were in Harris County, but Paxton's office is also investigating possible instances in Guadalupe, Cameron and Eastland counties using information from the Texas Secretary of State, according to a news release. The discovery was made possible by an executive order signed by President Donald Trump directing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to provide the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service's SAVE Database to the states. Texas Governor Makes It 'Crystal Clear' Only U.s. Citizens Can Vote In State Elections Paxton, a Republican running against fellow Republican John Cornyn in the Senate primaries, said Texans who vote illegally will be held accountable. "Illegal aliens and foreign nationals must not be allowed to influence Texas elections by casting illegal ballots with impunity. I will not allow it to continue," Paxton said in the release. Read On The Fox News App Red State Ag Investigating More Than 30 Potential Noncitizens Who Voted In 2024 Election "Thanks to President Trump's decisive action to help states safeguard the ballot box, this investigation will help Texas hold noncitizens accountable for unlawfully voting in American elections," he continued. "If you're a noncitizen who illegally cast a ballot, you will face the full force of the law." In June, Paxton opened an investigation into an additional 33 potential noncitizens who allegedly voted illegally in the 2024 general election. Election Investigation Uncovers Alleged Illegal Voting By Noncitizens And Double Voters In Multiple States Rep. Troy E. Nehls, R-Texas, reacted to the latest investigation in an X post Wednesday. "Great work! We must do everything we can to protect the integrity of our elections," Nehls wrote. The crackdown comes after Gov. Greg Abbott in 2024 announced 1.1 million people were removed from Texas' voter rolls. Fox News Digital's Peter Pinedo contributed to this article source: Texas investigates more than 100 potential noncitizens who allegedly cast illegal ballots
