Today is
Sunday July 19, 2026
SALINAS, Ca, (AP) – Taylor Farms has expanded a voluntary recall of its iceberg lettuce products sourced from central Mexico because of a potential link to the multistate cyclospora outbreak that has sickened people across the U.S.
Products with the potential to be contaminated with the diarrhea-causing parasite were shipped to 27 states including Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois and New Jersey, the California-based company said in a statement Friday.
“We are actively removing the implicated products,” the statement said, adding that the company has stopped sourcing lettuce from an implicated lot in central Mexico.
U.S. health officials earlier this week identified lettuce from a supplier in Mexico as a source of cyclospora contamination in food served at Taco Bell restaurants in five Midwestern states.
The Taylor Farms recall announcement listed 25 shredded lettuce and salad mix products sold under eight different brand codes. Taylor Farms did not respond to an emailed request for the full names of those brands or retailers. The recalled products were shipped as recently as Thursday and have “best by” dates as late as Aug. 3.
Sysco, the nation’s largest food distributor, has halted distribution of all Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce products sourced from Mexico and instructed customers to destroy them.
Cyclospora is a microscopic parasite that infects food that has come into contact with human feces, most commonly when produce is irrigated or washed with contaminated water. When ingested, the parasite causes intestinal illness marked by “frequent and sometimes explosive bowel movements,” according to the CDC.
In 2026, cyclospora has sickened at least 1,645 people in the U.S. and hospitalized 141, according to the CDC, which is investigating more than 5,000 additional illnesses that may be linked to the parasite. This time last year, only 249 cases had been reported.
The CDC initially warned consumers to avoid eating shredded lettuce served at Taco Bell restaurants in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia.
UVALDE (AP) – After deadly floods killed more than 100 people in Texas’ Hill Country last July, officials vowed major changes in hopes of preventing the failures that contributed to the high death toll. They promised better flood warning systems, tighter safety rules for children’s camps and improvements to the state’s water infrastructure.
That work was far from done when a new round of storms began pummeling the state this week, triggering catastrophic flash floods in some of the same areas devastated in 2025. At least two people died. Hundreds needed rescue.
But residents in some hard-hit areas said a year of preparation did make a difference. Newly installed flood sirens sounded in the darkness, warning people to get out. Phones buzzed with alerts that weren’t sent out in last year’s disaster.
Still, stories of people surprised to find their homes inundated by rising rivers illustrate the challenges of trying to bolster early warning systems in a vast, rural area known as Flash Flood Alley.
Some agencies were more proactive about sending wireless alerts
Over the last decade, a variety of Texas state and local agencies missed opportunities to implement flood warning systems along the Guadalupe River, the AP reported after last summer’s floods killed 136 people, including 28 at a sleepaway camp for girls.
That changed after the tragedy as lawmakers and others scrutinized a lack of preparedness by government agencies and riverside camps.
Unlike last summer, when local officials in Kerr County said they had been reluctant to “cry wolf” and order evacuations and failed to send out wireless alerts to warn of flash floods, Kerr County issued four alerts and the city of Kerrville issued one early on Thursday as the risk for flooding became apparent, according to an Associated Press review of available data.
They warned residents along Quinlan Creek to evacuate to higher ground, and of “extremely dangerous” flash flooding. Those alerts came alongside flood watches, warnings and emergencies sent to broadcast outlets, weather radios and mobile phones by the National Weather Service. People who signed up for the CodeRED notification emergency system in Kerr County also received text message warnings.
“Last year, we got no alarms. We had no idea what was going on,” said Suzanne Sutphin Gschwind, of Kerrville.
“This year, very different,” she said, with multiple texts and calls coming in from local authorities, a weather channel and her doorbell camera. One night the warnings arrived “about every two hours.”
“I think we would all like to err on the side of too much,” she said.
The warnings didn’t reach everyone
Between the early morning hours of Tuesday and about 9 a.m. Thursday, the National Weather Service sent 38 alerts to people in certain southwest Texas communities, including 14 tornado warnings and 24 warnings that flooding was occurring or imminent and could be “life threatening.”
Those Weather Service notifications, though, often don’t contain the highly localized information put in alerts sometimes sent by municipal and county emergency agencies — and people in some places may not have gotten any of those local alerts, which can be more decisive for people considering whether to seek high ground.
An Associated Press review of wireless emergency alert data did not find any listed as sent by agencies in Uvalde County, which was hit hard by flooding, though agencies in that county might have used other means to alert the public.
Jaclyn Gonzales was awakened at 2 a.m. Wednesday by a friend who called to warn that a tornado might be headed toward her Uvalde-area home. When she jumped out of bed, the floor was wet.
“It was the shock of the water to my feet that made me really wake up,” she said.
Kat Sprawls only learned floodwaters were nearing her Batesville home when a friend called her at 3:30 a.m. Friday. It took five or six calls before she woke up, because she had her phone on do-not-disturb mode.
“There’s no warning system at all. It’s just like the flood in Kerrville last year — we had no warnings,” Sprawls said. “Over half of Batesville is under water now.”
Zavala County Sheriff’s Department secretary Jessica Belmarez said the department is updating its Facebook page with evacuation information and that law enforcement officers were going door-to-door in affected areas, including Batesville.
The network of flood sirens is expanding
Newly installed sirens in Ingram and in Kerr and Kendall counties were used this week to warn residents, said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, who authored legislation in 2025 to help fund the sirens. Twenty-eight additional counties are also eligible for flood warning funding. Most are in the process of putting together implementation plans for review by the Texas Water Development Board.
“Between the outdoor sirens, and the cellphone alerts, the response was very positive in getting people out of the way and to higher ground,” Bettencourt said. “It’s an enormous improvement over a year ago.”
Three of six new sirens installed in Kerr County were used to warn people to seek high ground, said Tara Bushnoe, manager of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority. The other three were in areas with only minor flooding, Bushnoe said.
The small town of Comfort had one warning siren for years. The volunteer fire department recently installed two more.
“Some people just don’t want to leave — that’s our problem here,” said Danny Morales, the assistant fire chief. “But we did set them off twice, probably an hour from one to another, just because we had people just lingering, and not wanting to move.”
Private companies are working to fill the gaps
Ian Cunningham founded River Sentry after the 2025 floods, building flood siren towers for privately owned sites like RV parks, camps and hotels. The sirens are triggered by rising water levels.
So far, the company has installed 104 sirens along the Guadalupe River, Cunningham said, including several near the site of an RV park where more than three dozen people died in 2025.
“We installed them about three months ago and did not expect them to be used so soon,” Cunningham said.
Hononu, which has developed water-level sensor technology and a real-time data network, received a state contract that will make it easier for agencies to purchase its flood warning technology.
Watch Duty, a fire-tracking app used by millions, expanded earlier this year to help monitor floods.
Officials say the changes saved lives
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the lessons of 2025 led to a better emergency response this time.
“Everybody in Texas has been far more prepared to deal with what has happened this year,” Abbott said during a news conference in Uvalde. “Lives have been saved.”
UVALDE (AP) — First responders in storm-battered Texas again rushed to save people trapped in high waters Friday, as more heavy rain widened the danger from floods that have killed at least two people and left hundreds more in need of rescue.
A week of punishing downpours dumped more than 2 feet (60 centimeters) in some areas. The rain was expected to taper off, but another round of showers worsened already swollen rivers and flooded rural communities near the border with Mexico that had largely been spared major damage.
Near Ozona, a small town about 200 miles (322 kilometers) west of San Antonio, floodwaters spilled over Interstate 10. More than 50 people were rescued by boat from flooded apartments and a water-logged RV park.
A section of a bridge also collapsed over the Nueces River in Uvalde County, where months worth of rain has fallen in a span of days. In Uvalde, about 80 miles (129 kilometers) southwest of San Antonio, floodwaters rushed through Miguel Vasquez’s home twice this week, leaving a layer of mud and knocking over his refrigerator and other items.
Debris was strewn around his neighborhood and a neighbor’s shed teetered over a washed-away section of the property. He said Friday that he’d been caught in the waters’ current and nearly been swept away and drowned in trying to get to his house Wednesday.
“I had to grab on with my hands and my feet. You couldn’t swim,” he said. “People think that when there’s a flood, you can swim. Swimming’s not going to help you. It’ll take you. The current’s too strong.”
Almost a trillion gallons of water fell in a flood-prone area
Nearly 1 trillion gallons of water fell on the three hardest-hit counties over three days — enough to fill 1.5 million Olympic-sized swimming pools or supply 11 million homes for a year.
Uvalde County alone got more rain in that period than California has seen over the last month, according to Ryan Maue, former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.
The Hill Country is especially prone to flash floods because the area’s signature limestone is covered by just a thin layer of soil. During heavy rains, water can quickly shoot downhill before filling the narrow river basins.
Emergency personnel across a wide swath of southern and central Texas have rescued more than 570 people, including stranded drivers and people trapped in homes, Gov. Greg Abbott said. Hill Country residents were beginning to clean up after floodwaters again barreled down the Guadalupe River and through communities still reeling from deadly floods a year ago.
Floodwaters on the Rio Grande temporarily closed the two international bridges on the border with Mexico at Eagle Pass, stranding a few people on the wrong side. About 600 huge buoys placed on the river to deter migrants from crossing into the U.S. illegally were set adrift by the rising waters, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar said.
Cuellar said about 480 of them were captured by noon Friday. Critics have worried about the damage the buoys might do if they became untethered and got caught along banks and against bridge piers. Each is about 15 feet (4.6 meters) long and weighs 1,000 pounds (454 kilograms).
In the Hill Country, Serena Reyna woke up Thursday morning to find her Kerrville boutique, Nu Accents, covered in debris after four feet of floodwater rushed into the store. She described the store as “a total loss.”
“The floors, I mean they’re soaked in mud and still you know an inch of water in some spots,” she said.
The Texas Department of Transportation said high waters closed a 50-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 57 and that parts of the roadway were not expected to reopen until Monday.
In all, roughly 6 million residents across Texas were under a flood watch at various points this week.
Floodwaters had overrun Uvalde and cut off most outside routes, making it one of the hardest hit cities. The waters were receding Friday, and officials said a major highway, Route 90, had reopened.
One person died while driving on a flooded road, swept away near Uvalde, authorities said.
Another victim, 65-year-old John Mark Steward of Kerrville, died after his mobile home was swept into Goat Creek on the Guadalupe River, his wife said. The same river was wrecked by flash floods last year when two dozen children and counselors died at Camp Mystic. Authorities on Thursday said summer campers were safe.
In Ozona, the seat of Crockett County, authorities used seven rescue boat teams to get people out of the hardest-hit areas. They were taken to the local civic center for shelter.
Eddie Martin, the county’s emergency management director, said the area received 6 inches of rain after midnight, on top of nearly 10 inches of rain before that.
“We have more and more accidents on the interstate,” he said. “We have more and more water pouring into the neighborhoods where we’ve been pulling people out of.”
HOUSTON (AP) – A federal prosecutor in Texas shared new details Thursday evening about the moments before an immigration officer shot and killed a Mexican national and longtime U.S. resident in early July. The disclosure complicates the government’s earlier claim that the man struck an ICE vehicle before he was shot.
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, on July 7 as he was driving to a Houston construction job site with three co-workers, one of whom was his brother. The shooting sparked protests in the sprawling Texas city, echoing Salgado Araujo’s family’s calls for transparency. The family describes him as a hardworking father very close to obtaining legal status in the U.S. after living in the country for 35 years.
The shooting came just days before two other men in Florida and Maine died as part of President Donald Trump’s federal immigration crackdown, renewing scrutiny on the Department of Homeland Security’s law enforcement tactics.
Aaron Reitz, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, said for the first time on Thursday that ICE officers were targeting two Guatemalan men who were potentially subject to deportation. He said they were driving a van similar to the one Salgado Araujo was driving when he was killed. In an earlier statement released the day Salgado Araujo was killed, DHS said he was targeted in an immigration enforcement operation, and he was living in the country without legal permission.
Reitz also said that the officers believed that Salgado Araujo and the passengers in his car fit the description of the Guatemalan men the agents were looking for.
Four officers driving two separate law enforcement vehicles attempted to pull over Salgado Araujo’s van using their police lights. Salgado Araujo then made a U-turn and drove over a median to evade getting pulled over, Reitz said.
Later that morning, the officers again encountered Salgado Araujo’s van and for the second time tried to pull him over, this time effectively surrounding the vehicle, Reitz said. Two of the four agents got out of their cars and told Salgado Araujo to put the vehicle in park. Just before he was shot, one of the agents was “partially inside the van or immediately next to it” when Salgado Araujo tried to reverse and then drive forward again, Reitz said.
An earlier DHS statement accused Salgado Araujo of weaponizing his vehicle. The agency said he rammed his van into a law enforcement vehicle and said an officer opened fire in self-defense. The most recent statement from the U.S attorney’s office, however, didn’t mention any collision between Salgado Araujo’s van and a law enforcement vehicle. It also didn’t explicitly say that the officer feared for his life. There are no reported injuries for the officers involved.
The latest statement didn’t name the officer who killed Salgado Araujo, nor did it specify if the officer who fired the shot was the same person who was next to, or partially inside, the van.
Reitz also said in the statement that officers “saw in plain view several small bags of a white, crystal-like substance inside the van” and that the FBI later executed a search warrant to investigate for possible illicit substances. Salgado Araujo’s brother, who was in the van when the shooting happened, has been in ICE detention since the incident. His attorney said the white substance was a salt mixture that the men used as electrolytes to stay hydrated while doing manual labor in the grueling Texas heat.
Few photos or videos surrounding the shooting in Houston have emerged on social media, unlike other deaths involving federal immigration officers.
BOCA CHICA (AP) – SpaceX’s mega Starship rocket came within a second or so from blasting off on a test flight Thursday, but some of the engines failed to ignite, triggering a launch abort amid billowing clouds of smoke and vapor.
Elon Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, said two engines will be replaced “to be confident of a good flight” before sending Starship from Texas on a space-skimming journey halfway around the world. It will be the 13th flight for Starship, which at 407 feet (124 meters) tall with 33 main engines is the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket.
SpaceX’s launch webcast showed the start of engine ignition three seconds before the planned liftoff, viewed from a drone high above the pad. Although the company did not elaborate, onscreen data showed four engines not firing, with the remaining 29 engines immediately shutting down and keeping the rocket anchored to the pad. It was the first time a full-scale Starship experienced a last-second abort like this.
The launch team immediately began draining the fuel from the rocket.
“Most probable launch timing is early next week,” Musk said via X.
Everything was going SpaceX’s way, even the weather, until the partial engine ignition. In the end, the rocket’s automatic launch system worked as planned by halting everything. Too few operating engines could have doomed the launch. Some earlier Starship flights ended in explosive fireballs.
Elon Musk’s company had newest, most advanced Starlinks aboard
Twenty of SpaceX’s newest and most advanced Starlinks were on board Starship for release during the planned hourlong flight from Starbase, the company’s hub near the Texas-Mexico border. The internet satellites were going to try communicating with Starlinks already in orbit while taking photos of Starship’s heat shield.
Neither the first-stage booster nor spacecraft were meant to be recovered, with both ending up in the sea.
The rocket’s automatic launch system worked as planned by halting everything. Too few operating engines could have resulted in a failed launch. Some earlier Starship flights, for example, ended in explosive fireballs.
World’s biggest rocket is key to putting astronauts back on the moon
NASA is counting on Starship to land its astronauts on the moon in the next few years. The space agency has hired SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to build and fly the lunar landers that will return humanity to the surface of the moon after an absence of more than half a century.
Both companies need to have their landers — Starship and Blue Moon — ready to fly by next year so that the newly named Artemis III crew can practice docking their capsule with them in orbit around Earth. The mission after that — Artemis IV planned for no earlier than 2028 — would use one of those landers to take two astronauts to the moon’s south polar region.
LUFKIN, Texas (KETK)– Lufkin city officials are asking residents to help keep squatters away from abandoned properties near their homes, as fires have allegedly been started by homeless people recently.
According to Lufkin Fire Marshal Ozzie Jarman, since 2025, 12 structure fires have been reported at vacant or abandoned homes and it is believed that the fires were started by homeless individuals squatting on the property.
Officials said that the majority of the fires occurred in the middle of the night or early in the morning. It was also reported that 25% of the structure fires that have taken place in Lufkin since 2025 occurred at vacant homes.
“These fires are unpredictable and extremely dangerous,” Lufkin Police Chief Travis Brazil said. “It is only a matter of time before a firefighter, occupant, or member of the public is seriously injured or killed in one of these fires.”
Lufkin residents who see individuals squatting in homes are being asked to call 911 so officers can remove them from the home before a fire may start.
“We want to save the homes, lives and the possibility of nearby homes burning,” Brazil said. “Our police officers will take care of the individuals before a fire can be started. Any assistance from our residents is appreciated.”
NEW YORK (AP) — Federal safety investigators looking into a runaway Tesla that killed a grandmother in her home say the driver had pressed the accelerator to full speed, suggesting the vehicle’s self-driving software was not to blame.
The driver had told police that he had the self-driving software turned on, but a report from the National Transportation Safety Board on Wednesday concluded that he had actually overridden that feature when he pushed hard on the pedal. Moments later the Tesla Model 3 raced down a residential street in Katy, Texas, at highway speeds, slammed into a brick home and killed a 76-year-old woman standing in the front room.
The crash last month drew national attention because Tesla CEO Elon Musk is seeking to reassure the public its self-driving feature is safe as he prepares to turn hundreds of thousands of Teslas already on the road into fully automatic vehicles and begin selling two-seated Cybercabs missing steering wheels and pedals.
The crash came two months after officials at a separate federal agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, announced it was elevating a 2024 investigation of the self-driving feature to new “engineering analysis” level, raising the possibility of a recall of 3.2 million Tesla vehicles.
That NHTSA probe was triggered by crashes where the self-driving feature failed to alert drivers to take control in fog and other poor visibility conditions.
The agency opened an investigation 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.
Separate from the National Transportation Safety Board, NHTSA is also looking into the Tesla house crash in Texas, one of 46 “special crash” investigations of Tesla’s self-driving or driver-assistance technology in 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 had originally called its driver assistance software Full Self-Driving, or FSD, but auto experts and regulators complained it was misleading because drivers must always keep their eyes on the road and be ready to take over at any time.
The company has since changed the name to Full Self-Driving (Supervised).
Video of the Katy, Texas, accident shows the Tesla traveling at more than 70 mph (112.65 kilometers per hour), jumping a curb then tearing across a lawn before crushing through a brick wall of a home. A woman standing feet away, Martha Avila, was found amid piles of crumbling plaster, split beams and bits of furniture and rushed to a hospital but died.
Sales of Tesla cars still haven’t recovered fully from boycotts last year over Musk’s far-right political stands, but the stock is rising anyway as he has successfully shifted attention away from the sales figures. He says they matter less now that the company is on the cusp of major technological advances, such as turning Teslas into hands-free vehicles and having its Optimus robots take over for humans for tasks at home and work.
Tesla stock has risen 22% in the past year and is currently trading at 170 times expected annual earnings compared to 20 for the S&P 500.
For its second-quarter financial results out next week, financial analysts surveyed by FactSet expect earnings per share will barely budge — 32 cents versus 33 cents a year earlier — continuing a sixth quarter streak of flat or falling profits.
LUFKIN – Lufkin Police detectives are asking for the public’s assistance in solving the murder of Darrence Kindle, a case that has remained unsolved for nearly nine years, according to release from the City of Lufkin. Kindle was shot and killed during the commission of an aggravated robbery at approximately 10 p.m., November 3, 2017, at the Dollar General on Kurth Drive.
The only description detectives have at this time is that the man is approximately 6-feet 1-inches tall, African American, and he was wearing a mask from the movie Scream.The shoes the man was wearing have been identified as limited-edition Nike Zoom Kobe Venomenon 4. The shoes were identified by a forensics company in Arizona.
“We will continue to investigate this murder,” said Lt. James Cowan, LPD Criminal Investigations Division. “It has never been closed, and we remain committed to seeking justice for Kindle and his family.”
Detectives believe there are members of the public who may hold information — no matter how small it may seem — that could help solve this case. Anyone with information regarding this incident is urged to come forward.
If you have any information, please contact Lieutenant James Cowan, Criminal Investigation Division, at 936-633-0325 or email jcowan@lufkinpolice.com.
PANOLA COUNTY (KETK) — A traffic stop in Panola County led to the discovery of a nearly $30,000 money laundering scheme on early Thursday morning.
According to the Panola County Sheriff’s Office, a deputy conducted a routine traffic stop on State Highway 315 in Long Branch at 3:15 a.m. for a traffic violation.
During the stop, the deputy observed several indicators of criminal activity including false statements from the driver. The deputy requested a K9 unit, which gave a positive alert for narcotics prompting a search of the vehicle.
Within the vehicle, a bag containing multiple bundles of money wrapped in rubber bands were found, totaling over $29,000.
The driver, Jose De Jesus Torres, Jr. of McAllen was arrested for money laundering $2,500 to $30,000, which is a state jail felony. The currency was held as it awaits a seizure hearing.
Additionally, there were two children in the vehicle who were released to Child Protective Services and later placed with other family members.
MEXICO CITY (AP) — The U.S. government has designated two new Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
They are the Juárez Cartel, on the border with Texas, and Los Viagras, a criminal group from the western state of Michoacán. The Federal Register, the U.S. government’s gazette, published the designation on Thursday.
They joined six other Mexican criminal organizations that the U.S. considers terrorist groups, including the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Gangs in other Latin American countries, including Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador and El Salvador, also have been designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump began to extend the terrorist label to Latin American cartels in February 2025 to allow U.S. authorities to take more aggressive action against them or against anyone who the U.S. sees as aiding the groups.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that both criminal groups either have committed terrorist acts or pose a serious risk of committing acts that threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.
The measure represents a further increase in pressure on Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration following the indictment of 10 current and former officials from the state of Sinaloa for alleged ties to the Sinaloa Cartel, as well as the controversies about U.S. operations in Mexico.
Higher pressure on the Texas border
Juarez Cartel is one of Mexico’s oldest drug trafficking organizations, which for decades has controlled a key crossing point in the central part of the Mexico-U.S. border: Ciudad Juárez, across from El Paso, Texas.
Both its founder, Amado Carrillo Fuentes — known as “El Señor de los Cielos” for smuggling massive drug shipments by light aircraft in the 1990s — and the brothers and sons who succeeded him, turned the trafficking of tons of drugs into a multimillion-dollar business. Despite the arrests of many of its leaders, the cartel and its allied gangs maintained control of a vast infrastructure for smuggling illegal shipments into the U.S..
According to Mexican analyst David Saucedo, the designation is key to enabling the United States to take more decisive action along the border, where two other groups both located at the eastern end of the border with Texas — the Gulf Cartel and the Northeast Cartel — were declared terrorist organizations in February 2025.
The US again targets Michoacan
Los Viagras is a local cartel in the western state of Michoacan, which is already home to two other criminal groups designated as terrorist organizations: Cárteles Unidos and La Nueva Familia Michoacana.
Los Viagras emerged following the 2013–2014 armed uprising led by farmers who succeeded in driving out many of the old cartels, only to see them replaced by new ones.
The cartel is led by Nicolás Sierra Santana, who faces a formal indictment in the District of Columbia for conspiracy to traffic drugs, filed in June 2025. The State Department is offering a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture.
The group has shifted its loyalties and alliances to consolidate its regional control of the territory through extortion. It also produces synthetic drugs, which sells to other cartels that traffic them into the United States.
CROCKETT (KETK) — A car is stolen or broken into every 23 seconds, according to FBI crime statistics, with an experienced car thief taking less than a minute to steal the average vehicle.
In Texas, more than 65,000 cars and trucks are stolen and almost 200,000 are burglarized every year. On Monday night, the Kilgore Police Department reported that they received 8 calls regarding car burglaries, an unusual uptick for the city with a population of less than 14,000.
The police department is advising residents to stay alert and take proactive measures to protect themselves from becoming victims.
Anyone who may have security video footage or any information regarding the incident is asked to call Detective Torres at 903-983-1559.
Vehicle Theft Prevention
Ensure all windows are closed and your car doors are locked. Always take your keys with you.
Choose to park in well-lit areas for added safety.
Store packages and valuables out of sight; it’s best not to leave them in your vehicle at all. Always make sure to lock your trunk.
Keep your license and registration in your wallet or purse to prevent identity theft; thieves could use them to impersonate you and sell your car.
If you have a garage, remember to lock both your car and the garage door for extra security.
Drone used to capture a suspected car thief in Crockett
Over in Deep East Texas, the Crockett Police Department said that on Tuesday at around 2:30 p.m., law enforcement responded to a vehicle burglary at the J.H. Wotters Crockett Library. The caller said that someone was going through her vehicle before leaving the scene.
Second of three wanted suspects arrested in East Texas car burglary case
When officers arrived, they began a search of the area and deployed a drone to use thermal imaging. They located the suspect attempting to hide between a bush and a nearby church.
As the drone moved overhead, police said the suspect attempted to flee again, but was surrounded by law enforcement and taken into custody. Police were able to recover the victim’s stolen wallet from the suspect’s pocket.
The suspect, identified as Trent Omar Shedd of Crockett, was then taken into the Houston County Jail and charged with burglary of vehicles and evading arrest.
Mugshot of Trent Omar Shedd, courtesy of the Crockett Police Department.
Sentencing for burglarizing a vehicle
For a first-time criminal offense of vehicle burglary, a person can be charged with up to one year in county jail. However, if evidence of prior burglaries is presented, the offense can be punishable by a term in prison no less than 180 days but not more than two years, along with a fine of up to $10,000.
If the suspect stole a firearm or a controlled substance, they may face a third-degree felony, which carries a sentence of two to ten years in prison.