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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate passed a bipartisan housing bill on Monday that aims to reduce federal regulations and expand local control, one of the most sweeping efforts in recent decades to increase supply and bring down prices.

The bill, which passed 85-5 and now heads to the House, has been the focus of intense negotiations in recent weeks as lawmakers in both parties try to address housing costs in an election year. The final version of the legislation bans corporate investors from buying single-family homes but doesn’t include a Senate provision that would have required investors to sell newly constructed homes within seven years.

The measure was the result of years of work to “lower costs, expand housing supply, cut red tape, protect taxpayers, and help more Americans achieve the dream of homeownership,” said Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott, R-S.C., who worked with Democrats to get the bill passed.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the banking panel, said it is the most significant housing bill to pass Congress since 1990, when the average home in America was sold for $150,000. Now it costs more than $500,000, she said.

The bill “acknowledges that the federal government has a role to play in lowering housing prices,” Warren told The Associated Press. “For the first time ever, private equity will be blocked from buying up single-family homes and trying to turn housing into one more Wall Street investment.”

Senate passage of the bill shapes up as a rare bipartisan legislative achievement when much of Republicans’ agenda has stalled. The House is expected to give final approval later this week and send the bill to President Donald Trump, who has signaled his support.

Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California, who helped negotiate the legislation, said it was a “huge step toward finally addressing the affordable housing and homelessness crises in this country.”

Housing costs are a concern for both parties

Republicans and Democrats have embraced the bill as a way to show they are addressing the nation’s affordability crisis, driven in part by rising home prices due to a shortage of affordable housing. The U.S. housing market has been in a slump dating back to 2022, when mortgage rates began to climb from pandemic-era lows.

Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes have been hovering close to a 4-million annual pace going back to 2023 — well short of the 5.2-million annual pace that’s historically been the norm. Sales slowed last year to a 30-year low and have remained sluggish so far this year, declining in January and February versus a year earlier.

The Economic Report of the President in April found a shortage of 10 million homes, while a report this month from the Joint Center For Housing Studies at Harvard University found sales of existing homes were at three-decade lows and inventories were rising due to high home buying costs. “Cost burdens for both renters and owners continue to climb, while assistance remains profoundly underfunded,” the report said.

While the median U.S. monthly rent has been declining for nearly three years, it was still 17.2% higher in May than it was before the pandemic, according to data from Realtor.com.

Changes for grants, Section 8 and manufactured housing

To increase the supply of housing, the bill would streamline environmental reviews and speed up the construction process.

It would offer funding to local governments that build more housing, including Community Development Block Grant money to places exceeding the median rate of homebuilding. It would also provide new dollars for communities to turn abandoned infrastructure into housing, and offers a framework for communities that want to reform outdated zoning regulations, which often limit larger housing developments.

The legislation would allow banks to invest more in affordable housing and raise limits on the number of public housing units that can receive private financing through Section 8 funding to rehabilitate properties. And it would remove outdated requirements and expand federal financing to make manufactured homes more affordable.

“Manufactured housing produces some of the most cost-effective housing in America, but access to financing has been tightly restricted,” Warren said. “This creates the opportunity for more manufactured housing and, at the same time, creates a structure for people living in manufactured housing communities to organize and protect their investment in their homes.”

Lawmakers compromised on a disaster program

One of the sticking points between the two chambers was over a federal disaster recovery program.

An earlier Senate bill had permanently authorized block grant recovery funds, a change intended to ensure that funding requests aren’t needed after every disaster. House lawmakers opposed that provision because of concerns over how the program was run, so they agreed on a three-year authorization instead.

The final bill has received widespread support in the housing community, both from organizations representing landlords and large property owners as well as groups that advocate for tenants and low-income renters.

“There is no magic wand that will fix this crisis overnight, and no single piece of legislation is perfect,” said David Dworkin, chief executive of the National Housing Conference, the nation’s oldest housing coalition.

“Compromise demands that. But this bill is a significant down payment on a long-term effort to make housing more affordable for all Americans.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Monday ruled that a recently revamped version of a federal tool central to the Trump administration’s efforts to nationalize elections can no longer be used.

U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan sided with advocacy groups that argued the recent upgrades to the program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, aggregated Americans’ sensitive personal data in a way that could result in voters being wrongly purged from voter rolls.

“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan said in an order explaining the decision. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

She said Congress had expressly prohibited the government from centralizing Americans’ personal identifying information and that the federal agencies that created the SAVE program “knew that the database violates those statutory protections.”

The decision is a major legal setback for President Donald Trump in his efforts to use federal agencies to encourage a nationwide crackdown on having noncitizens illegally on state voter rolls. The modified SAVE system, which critics had referred to as an unlawful centralized federal database of voter information, had been a key pillar of the second election executive order the Republican president signed earlier this year. The ruling leaves its future uncertain.

“It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist,” James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, said of the ruling in a social media post.

DHS referred to his post as its comment on the ruling. The Department of Justice said in an emailed statement that it would “continue to aggressively defend President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda and DHS’s use of the SAVE system to verify citizenship.”

Voting by noncitizens was already rare

The executive order seeking to create a national voter list is among numerous steps Trump has taken during his second term to try to overhaul the way elections are run. He also has tried to force voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, ban mail ballots from counting if they are received after Election Day and prohibit the Postal Service from mailing ballots to people not on an approved list of voters. Most of those steps have been blocked by various courts, in part because the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to set election rules, but provides no such power to the president.

Voting by noncitizens is already illegal and punishable as a potential felony that could lead to deportation. It also is rare, accounting for just a tiny fraction of those on state voter rolls,

The SAVE program was created under an immigration law mandating that DHS help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. At least 25 states used it to check their voter rolls since April 2025, after the Trump administration significantly expanded its search abilities. Since then, at least 67 million registrations have been scanned through the program, but critics worry it could end up purging valid voters from the rolls.

Anthony Nel was one of those whose registrations were wrongly flagged. The South Africa native became a U.S. citizen more than a decade ago but had his voter registration in Denton, Texas, north of Dallas, canceled temporarily last year after Texas ran its voter file through SAVE. The check wrongly identified him as a potential noncitizen.

“I hope others can see this fight and not take their right to vote for granted,” he said in a text message.

Right to keep Americans’ data private is at heart of the case

The plaintiffs, including the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and five unnamed U.S. citizens, had alleged the revamped SAVE program violated Americans’ privacy and voting rights. The groups also alleged the Trump administration violated federal privacy laws by ignoring transparency requirements about the changes to the system.

“The agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification,” the judge wrote. “So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”

Plaintiffs attorney Nikhel Sus told the court during the October hearing that naturalized citizens face a greater risk of unlawfully being purged from voter rolls.

“They are uniquely vulnerable to errors in the database,” said Sus, an attorney for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Sus said Monday he sees Sooknanan’s ruling as an “across the board victory” and noted the plaintiffs were pleased the judge’s ruling reinforced their argument that the federal government doesn’t have implied authority to freely share sensitive data across agencies.

Mark Johnson, who teaches at the University of Kansas law school and regularly pursues lawsuits over election laws, said “it couldn’t be more clear” that the SAVE program violates federal privacy laws.

He said an executive order from Trump cannot override a federal law.

“It’s an illegal idea. Plus it’s a bad idea,” he said.

Elon Musk’s DOGE effort was crucial for updating the SAVE system

During the 2024 presidential campaign, as Trump pushed false claims of widespread noncitizen voting, Republican secretaries of state began requesting improvements to the SAVE system to make it more efficient for catching noncitizens on their rolls. One limitation was that the system had been able to check just a single individual at a time.

DHS, Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency delivered on those requests in 2025, according to public announcements. They made SAVE free for election officials, allowed agencies to search voters by the thousands and began permitting queries using names, birthdays and Social Security numbers, as opposed to requiring DHS-issued identification numbers.

Several secretaries of state have said the SAVE overhaul improved its value as one of multiple tools they use to assess voter citizenship. But in her ruling, Judge Sooknanan said the plaintiffs had shown that the updated system had indeed been identifying some lawful voters as noncitizens and that states using it “are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”

HOUSTON (AP) – Parents of a 2-year-old girl involved in a drowning incident on Memorial Day have sued to stop Texas Children’s Hospital from testing if she’s brain dead, testing a new strategy in Texas’ “right to life” movement aimed at giving people as much access to life-supporting services as possible.

While most fights to keep patients on life support begin after they’ve been given a brain death diagnosis, Annelise Camp’s parents are battling the hospital at an earlier stage, the testing phase.

“This is not settled science,” said state Rep. Steve Toth, R-The Woodlands, who has helped drive the public’s attention to the Camps, who live in Cypress.

Brain death is defined in Texas law as the irreversible cessation of brain function. Under the law, once a patient is declared brain dead, a hospital can withdraw life-sustaining measures.

According to court documents, the Camps say Annelise shouldn’t be tested for brain death so she can have more time to recover. They also ask that she be transferred to another hospital to explore other treatment options. However, Texas Children’s has stated it wants to conduct testing to determine next steps in her medical care and that it has no imminent plans to end care for Annelise.

This case has drawn the attention of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who posted on X in support of the Camp family: “I am closely monitoring this case and will act to protect this child and honor her parents’ efforts to save her.” Influential anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life has started working with the family, too.

Given growing attention to the Camp family’s fight, bioethics and legal experts say that this could empower other families to fight brain testing, which is becoming more common. The case has already inspired at least one lawmaker to create new laws and build on Texas’ existing laws that protect the rights of patients and their families to extend life-sustaining services and access experimental treatments.

The lawsuit is the latest chapter in a yearslong fight among some right-to-life advocates to end the brain death diagnosis because they believe multiple organs have to fail to be considered a biological death.

Meanwhile, medical experts believe there needs to be a “clear line” that distinguishes life from death otherwise ICUs would lose capacity to treat patients that have a chance of recovery, said David Magnus, a Stanford University medicine and biomedical ethics professor.

It appears no courts in Texas have determined the legality of brain death tests, said Thomas Mayo, professor emeritus of law at Southern Methodist University. If the state district court rules in the family’s favor, it would not be binding in other courts, Mayo said.

However, “if Texas Right to Life is involved in any way, and the family loses, this case would likely go to appeal,” he added.

The brain death debate

The Camp family were visiting relatives on Memorial Day, when Annelise wandered into the hotel pool without her life jacket, Johnston Camp, Annelise’s father, told FOX 26 Houston in early June. She was pulled out of the water by family members who began CPR until first responders arrived. Camp was taken to Texas Children’s west Houston location and after an hour her heartbeat returned.

“She never gave up when I asked her to do something… I’m never gonna give up on her,” Camp told the station.

Since the interview, the Camps have declined speaking to The Texas Tribune, citing a court order that prevents them from doing so, said their lawyer Heath Novosad. Texas Children’s has also declined to comment on the case.

Three days after Annelise was hospitalized, her parents filed a temporary restraining order against Texas Children’s after physicians said they had exhausted all treatment options and advised that the child get tested for brain death, according to court documents filed in late May. The documents say Annelise’s heart was beating, although she was dependent on a ventilator. The Camps have refused any brain death testing and want to transfer Annelise to another hospital to receive hyperbaric oxygen treatment or stem cell therapies.

Texas Children’s officials said in court documents they’ve contacted medical facilities to ask about accepting Annelise, but 35 of the 36 have declined and the one pending hospital said it needed her to undergo brain death testing to consider transfer.

The court granted the family’s request for a temporary injunction and the family is asking for a permanent halt to brain testing.

Hospitals usually notify family members, but are not required to get permission from them or the patient to conduct brain death testing.

Under the Uniform Determination of Death Act, if someone is determined brain dead, they are considered legally dead and hospitals have the right to discontinue organ-supporting services.

According to Texas Right to Life, which has long fought the legal recognition of brain death and its use to stop life-sustaining measures, brain death is not consistent with the Christian faith. As long as there is a heartbeat, a person is still alive. The Camp family has stated in court documents brain death testing is against their religious beliefs.

“Texans have the right to say we don’t believe in this,” said John Seago, president of Texas Right to Life, adding that his organization has worked with 106 patients to fight for life-sustaining treatment, an increase in the last three years. “A dead person has no rights, and that’s the problem with the brain death concept, in general, is it is a shortcut to deprive individuals of the right to life and other rights.”

Magnus, the Stanford professor, said that if hospitals are no longer able to diagnose someone with brain death and are forced to keep more people on life support, this could strain resources, such as ICU beds.

“Using that scarce resource for somebody who has no chance of ever making any recovery doesn’t really make a lot of sense,” he said. “When the hospital beds are full, Texas will not be a good place to get sick.”

Magnus worries that if hospitals are no longer allowed to recognize brain death diagnosis, organ procurement could decline which places the burden of organ donations on other states or else, many Texans could be at risk of dying.

“That means that if you have renal failure, you die. You have liver failure in Texas, you’ll die. When you have heart failure in Texas, you’ll die,” he said.

While some of the loudest critics of the brain death diagnosis have been among anti-abortion advocates, not all are in agreement. Texas Alliance for Life points out that the definition of death in state law is based in “sound medical science,” its executive director Amy O’Donnell said. She declined to comment specifically on Camp’s case.

Room to expand “right to life” laws?

In the last few decades, Texas legislators made attempts to create and fine-tune “right to life” laws that expand the rights of those who have been declared brain dead. None have addressed brain death testing, which is ripe ground for new legislation.

“We passed legislation in the state of Texas and we think people will just follow it,” Toth said.

In 2023, state lawmakers expanded the Right to Try law – originally limited to terminally ill patients – to give chronically ill patients access to investigational treatments if they had exhausted approved options. The same year, the Legislature changed the Texas Advance Directive Act, so that hospitals must give families of patients 25 days’ notice before pulling life support, increasing it from 10 days. Although, groups like Texas Right to Life believe that there should be no time limit.

This change came three years after the family of 1-year-old Tinslee Lewis challenged the advance directive act, also garnering national attention. Lewis was born with a rare heart defect that kept her on life-support in Cook Children’s Medical Center’s ICU from birth. Leveraging the law’s life-support time limit, doctors at the Fort Worth hospital wanted to take Tinslee off life support against her mother’s wishes and an appeals court ruled in the family’s favor. Lewis was discharged after two years, according to CBS.

Toth, who carried the House version of the bill that changed the Right to Try law in 2023, said he would push to give families the right to contest the brain death test and make it difficult for hospitals to procure organs from patients declared brain dead.

Toth, who won the Republican primary for Texas’ 2nd Congressional District in Houston in the spring, ultimately wants to eliminate the brain death diagnosis on a national level.

“I think that we’ve got to be really careful at just observing the rights of parents to make this decision, this call for themselves,” said Toth.

Texas does not have legislation that provides for a reasonable accommodation of a religious objection to brain death, said Mayo.

If the brain death diagnosis was taken off the books, hospitals can still leverage the Texas Advance Directive Act which places a time limit on how long a hospital is responsible for life-supporting treatment, Magnus said, but “courts in Texas have been inconsistent about applying their own law.”

“Courts in other states have gone back and forth over whether a determination of brain death can be done at all, and whether once it’s done, the physician’s findings are determinative of further treatment or stopping treatment. I think it’s a very, very emerging question that is getting disparate treatment in various jurisdictions,” said Mayo.

In these cases, the courts will usually tell the hospital to keep the patient on life support, said Magnus. “Basically the courts don’t want to be the one that makes (the brain death) determination,” he said.

NEW YORK (AP) — The top U.S. auto regulator opened an investigation Monday after a Tesla using an automated driving feature slammed into a Texas home at high speed and killed a 76-year-old woman standing inside.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it’s opening a special investigation into the Tesla Model 3 crash on Friday near Houston, a significant probe because the car was using technology that Elon Musk considers key to the company’s future.

The Tesla CEO is rolling out robotaxis using automated software in several U.S. cities this year and plans to invite Tesla owners to put their cars into the fleet using the same system across the country.

The driver told the Harris County Sheriff’s Office that he was using the technology, according to a police report on the crash, but it’s not clear what role, if any, it played in the incident.

The police report also noted that the driver was not drunk and is cooperating. It identified the woman killed as Martha Avila.

Video obtained by KHOU-TV shows the car traveling at top speed over the front lawn of a brick home in Katy, then ramming into a front room. The next shot shows the car encased in the home amid piles of crumbling plaster, split beams and bits of furniture.

Tesla did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

The auto safety regulator, known as NHTSA, has launched several investigations into Tesla, including one late last year into 58 incidents in which Teslas reportedly violated traffic safety laws while using self-driving technology, leading to more than a dozen crashes and fires and nearly two dozen injuries.

A few months earlier, the NHTSA opened an investigation into why Tesla apparently had not been reporting crashes promptly as required.

As for special crash investigations, the NHTSA has opened 46 involving Teslas using self-driving or driver-assistance technology over the past decade, according to the agency’s records. In more than a dozen of those crashes, at least one person — a driver, passenger or pedestrian — was killed.

Tesla stock fell sharply early last year as car sales plunged amid a boycott of Musk after he waded into politics, leading President Donald Trump’s budget-cutting Department of Government Efficiency initiative and embracing European extremist candidates.

Musk has since shifted the Tesla story to one less about car sales and more about AI and robotaxis, and done so successfully. The stock is up 16% in the past year.

BOSTON (AP) — A Delta Air Lines jet was roughly 300 feet (90 meters) from an American Airlines plane during a close call at Boston’s airport that forced the Delta aircraft to abort a weekend landing attempt, an aviation expert said Sunday.

The Federal Aviation Administration said it was investigating the incident between two commercial flights that happened Saturday at Boston Logan International Airport.

Todd Curtis, a former safety engineer at Boeing, estimated the distance between the two jetliners using Flightradar24, a website that tracks flights. Curtis now coproduces a podcast about flight safety issues.

“This is a significant incident,” Curtis said, adding that it was particularly concerning because it involved two professional airline crews.

He said federal aviation officials have been concerned about such runway incursions for a while now and will scrutinize Saturday’s close call.

Near-misses and runway incursions at U.S. airports will be the subject of a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. The Senate Commerce?Subcommittee?on?Aviation, Space,?and Innovation will?seek ways to strengthen safety across the national airspace system.

The Delta flight from Dallas had to execute a go-around, or aborted landing, to avoid the American plane departing from an intersecting runway, according to the FAA and flight logs.

The crew of Delta flight 2351 coordinated with air traffic control to perform the go-around, an airline spokesperson said. The plane, which had 129 passengers and six crew members on board, landed safely and deplaned normally, according to the spokesperson.

Go-arounds are safe, routine procedures performed at the discretion of the pilot or air traffic controllers, according to the FAA.

KATY (AP) – A driver in a Tesla vehicle that was allegedly in driver-assist mode crashed into a Texas house Friday night, killing a woman who was inside the home, investigators said.

Michael Butler was traveling in his Tesla Model 3 around 8 p.m. local time in Katy, Texas, and was operating the vehicle “with an automated driving assistance system,” the Harris County Sheriff’s office said in a statement.

Butler allegedly failed to drive in a single lane, left the roadway and struck the residence, according to the sheriff’s office.

“Butler’s Tesla entered through the brick residence, at a high rate of speed, and struck M. Avila who was inside the residence,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement.

Avila was airlifted to a hospital where she was later pronounced dead, the sheriff’s office said.

Investigators said Butler, who was injured, showed no signs of intoxication and he was cooperating with officers. Attorney information for the driver wasn’t immediately available.

The investigation is ongoing and as of Saturday afternoon there were no charges.

HOUSTON – Monday, Chevron Corporation announced that a 20-year power purchase agreement has been signed between Microsoft Corp. and Energy Forge One LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary, to develop a co-located power facility in West Texas that will supply dedicated electricity to a Microsoft-operated data center. Project Kilby is the development that Chevron and Engine No. 1 have been working on together.

Kilby is anticipated to provide roughly 2.67 gigawatts of capacity, constructed using a modular, phased architecture that allows for gradual expansion. Large GE Vernova turbines and related electrical infrastructure will provide the majority of the generation, with Solar Turbines, a fully owned subsidiary of Caterpillar Inc., contributing additional capacity. By utilizing America’s natural gas edge, this places Kilby among the biggest co-located natural gas power and data center expansions in the United States and supports the next stage of American AI growth.

HOUSTON COUNTY – After heavy rains swept through the area overnight on Saturday, several roads near Crockett and across Houston County have been left flooded or damaged.

The Crockett Fire Department issued a public safety alert on Saturday morning after heavy rainfall caused flooding on several roadways throughout the area, making many roads completely impassable.

The Texas Department of Transportation shared that they’ve closed FM 228 in Houston County after it was damaged and partly washed out by heavy rainfall on Saturday. They said repairs are underway and are expected to be finished on Saturday night.

The Crockett Fire Department gave the following safety tips for anyone on the road during flooding and heavy rains:

Stay home unless travel is absolutely necessary.
Do not drive through flooded roadways.
Turn around, don’t drown.
Use extreme caution if you must be on the roads.
Monitor local weather and emergency updates.

HOUSTON COUNTY (KETK) – The body of a teenage driver from near Houston was recovered from a creek near Crockett on Saturday after his car left the roadway.
Flooding leaves Houston County roads damaged, blocked

The Houston County Sheriff’s Office said they got a call at around 11 a.m. on Saturday about a young teen who was overdue at his home near Houston after he left Houston County Lake.

Deputies started searching along FM 229 in the areas that usually flood during times of heavy rain like the storms that moved through Houston County on Saturday morning. At around 1:45 p.m., the Houston County Emergency Management Coordinator was travelling on FM 229 when they noticed a damaged guardrail.

That damaged guardrail runs along FM 229 and over a creek which is just off of Loop 304, to the northwest of Crockett. The coordinator and a deputy went around 70 yards down the creek and found a front bumper of a car that had the missing teen’s license plate on it and then they found the roof of a car submerged about 30 yards further down the creek.

A Texas Parks and Wildlife Search and Rescue team that was in the area to help with flooding and the Houston County Search and Rescue team both responded to the scene and they were able to remove the young man’s body from the submerged car.

“This is a tragic event that will affect many of this young man’s family and friends,” Houston County Sheriff Zak Benge said on Saturday.

The cause of the crash is currently under investigation by the Crockett Police Department.

KAUFMAN COUNTY – Nine people were sent to local hospitals on Saturday after a 13-vehicle crash happened near FM 2965 on Interstate 20 westbound in Kaufman County.

According to the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), a multi-vehicle crash happened in the westbound lanes of Interstate 20 leaving several people injured.

The nearby Elmo Fire Department reported that multiple crashes happened on I-20 westbound near mile marker 511 at around 10:55 a.m. on Saturday. They also reported several other minor crashes on the eastbound side of I-20 from mile marker 509 to mile marker 511.
Video courtesy of Bonnie Rose.

In total, the Elmo Fire Department said 24 people were assessed for injuries at the scene and nine of those people had to be transported to local hospitals to be treated for non-life-threatening injuries. They said the crashes at the scene involved a total of 13 vehicles and four 18-wheelers.

The Elmo Fire Department added that mass casualty incident triage had to be established to help treat those injured at the scene. DPS said the roadway was reopened to traffic at around 3:30 p.m. on Saturday.

FRISCO (AP) — Newly released video from an officer’s body camera and a surveillance camera at a Texas running track captures the moments after a teenage athlete fatally stabbed another teen from a rival team in the stadium bleachers during a high school meet last year.

Karmelo Anthony, 19, was convicted of murder on June 10 in the death of Austin Metcalf, 17, and sentenced to 35 years in prison. A jury rejected Anthony’s claims of self-defense. The videos were included in a batch of evidence released by the Collin County court following the conclusion of the trial.

The surveillance video shows the track and bleachers on a rainy day. Suddenly a figure wearing a gray sweatshirt is seen popping up from behind a yellow tent and then running down the steps. The video has no sound.

He got to the bottom of the bleachers, tripped and fell on the ground, and then kept running along the edge of the fencing that separates the bleachers from the running track. He stopped briefly, turned to look at what appeared to be someone chasing him, and then kept running.

After making his way part way around the track, he was joined by an unidentified person. They stopped to talk and then hugged. They started walking again and were joined by another person. After talking more, Anthony walked toward the fence where he appeared to meet up with a police officer.

The officer put him in handcuffs and walked him toward the police cruiser. Anthony obeyed the officer’s commands and then started crying.

“He put his hands on me,” Anthony said in a broken voice. “I told him not to. He put his hands on me.”

The officers escorted him to the police cruiser and placed him inside.

HOUSTON COUNTY (KETK) – After heavy rains swept through the area overnight on Saturday, several roads near Crockett and across Houston County have been left flooded or damaged.

The Crockett Fire Department issued a public safety alert on Saturday morning after heavy rainfall caused flooding on several roadways throughout the area, making many roads completely impassable.

The Texas Department of Transportation shared that they’ve closed FM 228 in Houston County after it was damaged and partly washed out by heavy rainfall on Saturday. They said repairs are underway and are expected to be finished on Saturday night.

The Crockett Fire Department gave the following safety tips for anyone on the road during flooding and heavy rains:
Stay home unless travel is absolutely necessary.
Do not drive through flooded roadways.
Turn around, don’t drown.
Use extreme caution if you must be on the roads.
Monitor local weather and emergency updates.

KAUFMAN COUNTY (KETK) – Nine people were sent to local hospitals on Saturday after a 13-vehicle crash happened near FM 2965 on Interstate 20 westbound in Kaufman County.

According to the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), a multi-vehicle crash happened in the westbound lanes of Interstate 20 leaving several people injured.

The nearby Elmo Fire Department reported that multiple crashes happened on I-20 westbound near mile marker 511 at around 10:55 a.m. on Saturday. They also reported several other minor crashes on the eastbound side of I-20 from mile marker 509 to mile marker 511.

In total, the Elmo Fire Department said 24 people were assessed for injuries at the scene and nine of those people had to be transported to local hospitals to be treated for non-life-threatening injuries. They said the crashes at the scene involved a total of 13 vehicles and four 18-wheelers.

The Elmo Fire Department added that mass casualty incident triage had to be established to help treat those injured at the scene. DPS said the roadway was reopened to traffic at around 3:30 p.m. on Saturday.

PANOLA COUNTY – One man was shot and a woman injured after she reportedly jumped from a vehicle that was involved in a pursuit near the Texas-Louisiana border in Panola County on Friday, according to a news release and our news partner, KETK.

Panola County Sheriff Cutter Clinton said dispatchers received a 911 call at around 10:30 p.m. on Friday. In the background, they could hear a man and a woman arguing. The woman on the call then reportedly told dispatchers that she had jumped from the moving vehicle and was injured.

Sheriff’s office deputies, a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper, the Flatwoods Volunteer Fire Department and UT Health EMS were all sent to where the woman’s phone was pinged on FM 2517 near County Road 4702 and the state border with Louisiana.

A deputy and sergeant with Panola County Sheriff’s office stopped the vehicle on FM 2517 near County Road 470. The driver was identified as the woman caller’s brother, Napolean Cordell “Polie” Lockett of Beckville.

The sheriff’s office said Lockett then fled in his vehicle by turning onto FM 3359 and heading towards Louisiana before he reportedly turned onto County Road 455 where his vehicle crashed and rolled over.

Deputies helped remove Lockett from the crashed vehicle and discovered that he had been shot in the abdomen. The deputies arrested him for evading arrest with a vehicle, violation of conditional bond in a family violence incident and an unrelated grand jury indictment for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

Lockett was taken to a hospital in Shreveport to be treated for his non-life-threatening gunshot wound and was booked into the Panola County Detention Center after he was discharged from the hospital on Saturday morning.

The woman caller was transported to a hospital in Longview to be treated for her injuries from jumping out of the vehicle. The case is currently under investigation by the Panola County Sheriff’s Office, which has contacted the De Soto Parish Sheriff’s Office since part of the case took place in Louisiana.

The Texas Highway Patrol is investigating the crash and the sheriff’s office said more charges will be filed in this case.

AUSTIN – A jury in Bexar County sentenced a child predator to life in prison, after he was found guilty of abusing children, according to a news release from Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office. Joe Suarez Jr., 71, was found guilty of continuous sexual abuse of a child and indecency with a child, after the jury listened to four days of testimony. It took only four hours to reach a verdict. The court ordered a sentence of life without parole and two consecutive 20-year sentences, the maximum punishment allowed by law.

“My office worked tirelessly to put this child predator behind bars for life and secure justice for the victims of these heinous crimes,” said Attorney General Paxton. “We are committed to standing up for victims of sexual assault and will use every tool available to us to ensure that child predators are prosecuted to the fullest extent that the law allows.”

In March 2016, an 8-year-old child made an outcry of sexual abuse to a teacher at her school. Following her outcry, two additional victims came forward to report that they had also been subjected to chronic abuse by the same offender, Joe Suarez Jr. Their reports of abuse were referred to the San Antonio Police Department (“SAPD”) by the Department of Family and Protective Services (“DFPS”). SAPD conducted an investigation and referred the case to the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office, where it remained for several years awaiting grand jury presentation. After District Attorney Joe Gonzalez was elected and recused his office from the prosecution, the case was referred to another district attorney’s office in Texas before being transferred to the Office of the Attorney General in late 2023.

Given the years that had passed since the initial investigation, Sgt. Andres Alaniz investigated the case again. In 2025, at the conclusion of the OAG’s investigation and in conjunction with SAPD’s prior work, the defendant’s charges were presented to a Bexar County grand jury. Suarez was subsequently indicted for continuous sexual abuse of young children, and aggravated sexual assault of a child and indecency with a child.

The evidence showed that the defendant, who played in a local mariachi group, would offer mariachi lessons to children in the community to gain their trust, according to the attorney general. The defendant took advantage of the trust his family and community placed in him, and sexually abused multiple children in his home. He also worked as a truck driver and would sexually abuse children in the cab of his 18-wheeler.