Deadly Rollover Kills Illegals in Kinney County
And: Washington Border Bill, Procedural Monkey-Fingering, and Texas Ranger History & the Border
Good morning, friends,
We’d like to share something with you that we posted on the Sheriff’s behalf on the Kinney County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page:
A small update to Sunday's rollover accident that shutdown Highway 90, after mass casualties were discovered.
Most photos taken at the scene are unsuitable for release. 2 individuals were pronounced dead at the scene. A third died in a helicopter while being med-evac'd.
It all began with DPS troopers attempting to pull over a driver behind the wheel of a black pickup, suspected of smuggling illegal aliens.
The driver evaded several attempts to use 'stop spikes.' The chase came to an end when he tried to go offroad near the City of Brackettville Office Annex West of town, hit a ditch and started rolling.
Many of the 8 passengers crammed into the pickup were ejected as the vehicle rolled and rolled and rolled, scattering them all about the countryside and accounting for the severity of the injuries.
Traffic was held up for quite some time, as emergency workers coordinated the comings and goings of the med-evac flights-- not all of the helicopters were able to land at once.
4 helicopters were dispatched, 3 wound up being used, along with multiple ambulances. The Department of Public Safety is conducting an investigation and will be releasing any further information.
Kinney County EMS Director Henry Garcia notified County Commissioners today (04/24) that he and local paramedics consumed a month's worth of supplies in attending to this one event.
—KCSO Facebook Page
As mentioned in the post, most of the photos are unsuitable for release. Just awful. People were pitched all over the place as the truck rolled. Each of the unreleased photos is a relatively wide shot. A wide shot with only one victim visible in the frame. A telling clue in how scattered each was, forcing deputies and troopers to comb the brush in order to find them all— marking each for triage.
As one commenter pointed out— this was probably a million-dollar incident that will have to be absorbed by local taxpayers and communities. Not a stretch by any means— especially once you add in the time/value lost by those held up in traffic and the potential losses to freight carriers.
Sharp-eyed workers at KSAT-12 in San Antonio took the Facebook post and ran with it last night. They didn’t have much to add— we’ve personally been waiting to see what DPS might release, but so far, they’ve been mum.
That may sound sinister, but there’s actually no shortage of benign potential reasons for the silence.
We’re told members of the FOX News Drone team were present that day and shot video. Don’t know if it has aired. Odds are they used it as a component of various liveshots in their coverage of the border crisis but didn’t quite make the cut for a google web-index.
There already are some who are pointing to this incident and saying law-enforcement should do better, be better— consider not conducting high speed pursuits, etc.
Our own personal opinion is that anything less than the rigorous application of the law and its consequences will only lead to more illegal immigration and cumulatively greater tragedies of other sorts.
What many fail to realize is that the vast majority of pursuits in this area have been conducted safely. A testament, we believe, to the efforts by DPS and local deputies to restrict them to areas outside of the city limits. It’s also a testament to how rural the area is, that authorities can manage such discretion.
Are they perfect? No. Have there been some incidents inside municipal areas? Yes.
But we are honestly thankful every day that there haven’t been more incidents like this one, and can only chalk it up to good fortune, but also good prudence overall on the part of area lawmen in how they’ve been engaging these events.
In Washington, word comes from the Washington Examiner of another piece of paper in Congress that aims to “fix” the border crisis.
If we sound skeptical, it’s because we are.
The paper and effort by Congressional Republicans may be sincere and well-meant, but until the sausage finishes making its way through the sausage factory that is legislation and Congress, one would always do well to remain skeptical.
Indeed— it could be argued that not one single additional law needs passing to fix this, when it is almost entirely the result of procedural monkey-fingering by the executive branch.
We’re beginning to believe that lawmakers are wasting their time and ours, with anything less than the most cutthroat of funding and legislative hostage-taking to force the executive branch to play a sincere hand.
Former Kinney County Judge Tully Shahan has his critics out there. But we believe he was 100-percent correct last July when he and other affected Texas County Judges gathered at the Kinney County Civic Center and historically declared a state of invasion, saying “…they (The White House) could stop all of this tomorrow. They could stop this right this second.”
It’s been almost a year since he said that in front of the cameras. Our memory and the quote may not be perfect. But we’re living dangerously this morning. If someone wants to find it and tell us we got it wrong— go right ahead— if spite will make you watch the whole thing, who are we to stop you?
If the White House wanted— an executive order could go out immediately, squelching the US Taxpayer monies being sent to the NGO’s and other organizations aiding and abetting this uncontrolled migration. An executive order could go out immediately, reversing all of the procedural changes that have hamstrung US Border Patrol. An executive order could go out immediately, ordering Immigration to begin shipping illegals directly back to their home countries instead of just releasing them into Mexican border towns.
Would it be painful? Sure. Would activists call it cruel? Of course they would. Even as they ignore the far greater cruelties their actions are enabling. These are not wholly genuine critics. They only care about cruelty when it serves their purposes. They willfully ignore it when it does not. Could they say the same thing about anti-immigration activists? Of course they could. And of course they would. But anyone who thinks the present situation deserves to continue as is, is not someone who deserves your consideration.
None of this is likely to happen, however. The White House has zero desire to change what we are all enduring. That’s why Congress is going to have to do more than just pass some laws that will only be ignored and/or procedurally neutered.
We’re almost done this morning. We’ve been thinking some more about efforts in Austin and the proposed Border Protection Unit being called for in House Bill 20.
Some time back, we took a spin through Texas History and the beginnings of the Texas Rangers and how some of that all applies to the limitations of volunteer militias.
It was part of one of our earlier dispatches— something that’s gone unread by many of our newest subscribers.
It bears repeating:
One thing that has been illustrated again and again over the course of the Border Crisis has been the level of expertise held in trust by the U.S. Border Patrol.
What is increasingly becoming obvious, is that most volunteers and current and ex-military personnel are incredibly ill-prepared to accomplish what Border Patrol used to do day in and day out. It’s a matter of training, procedure, experience, and also logistics.
The Texas Department of Public Safety is learning quickly, of course, but, “locking down the border” as an exercise is going to be much easier said than done. Don’t believe anyone telling you “Mission Accomplished” this election season. The average soldier is just not ready to hit the desert running. Period. Outside of a comparative few, select, special forces members, there are almost too many gaps in training to list. Right off the top of the head, there’s language barriers, old-fashioned tracking and brush cutting techniques that aren’t taught in many places, and not to mention simple things like: How do you even approach a group in the desert and take them into custody, without making them scatter to the winds? How do you approach them in a way that uses the land to help you?
The Texas DPS Brush teams have been learning quickly— and expanding their ranks in Kinney County. Officials have taken their initial teams of trained men, broken them into two, and paired them up with others for further training. They’ve also been leveraging drones and other technology, of course, but it’s apparent that a certain amount of their success is stemming from the fact that there’s just so much foot traffic coming through, the technology can’t help but find some of it, and the troopers are getting all the real world practice they can stand. Why are we telling you this? To make it clear— the border does not come with a big ol’ switch that says “Open,” and “closed” on it. It’s going to take a lot of work for quite some time to come— and some of that work is going to have to happen in places many miles away from the border. Places like Austin, and Washington D.C.— locations partly responsible for screwing it all up to begin with.
Ironically, Texas History is once again being mirrored by current events. Many know the broad strokes of the Texas Rangers— initially a volunteer fighting group of men who were remainders from the revolution— many were young, rootless individuals that arrived too late to fight Mexico, and were pressed into service as Rangers and went on to great fame and infamy both. Known for ruthlessness and their effectiveness in combatting Indians on the frontier, they kept the peace between the far flung and separated homesteads and villages scattered around the state, and did it at very low cost. A bargain for taxpayers and cash-strapped lawmakers in Austin.
What many don’t know, is that the most legendary rangers of the 1830s and 40s were simply those lucky enough to survive the initial one-sided encounters with Indian raiders. They learned on the job, in the most brutal and hardest of ways— as fellow Rangers were cut to pieces by the Comanche and others— spitted on the ends of their buffalo lances, or turned to pincushions by the legendary accuracy of their horse bows. Some early Rangers were simply outwitted— their horses stolen and men left to die alone in the wilderness.
The toughest of those early Rangers that survived this merciless winnowing process was perhaps John Coffee “Jack” Hays— the man Hays County is named after.
He and others at the time, came to believe that in order to fight the Indians one had to be willing to endure worse deprivations on the trail, just to keep up with them. Cold camps. No fires. No coffee. No food, other than what they called “cold flour” a mix of sugar and parched corn that could be kept in the saddle bags. Endless hours of tracking and trailing. And when it came time to fight, there could be no hesitation and little mercy. The savagery of the plains fighting cannot be overstated in most cases. To modern audiences it can be hard to grasp or conceive without the most graphic of description. Suffice to say, there was little true glory to speak of for Indians, or Rangers— just a series of brutal encounters that savaged the sensibilities of all those participating.
One wonders what unrecorded words were spoken in the aftermath of the Mexican-American war that saw Coffee Jack Hays and the rest of the original class of rangers shut down and dispersed, despite their legendary performance on the frontier and in Mexico. It is most likely that it was simply a matter of money and jurisdiction, and the perception that the U.S. Government was now in charge and would be using federal troops. In any event, Hays never returned to Texas, becoming an early Sheriff of San Francisco, and later an early settler and leading light of Oakland, California. Hays was apparently well-respected by the Comanche. One chief, named “Buffalo Hump,” sending Hays a golden spoon to commemorate the birth of Hays first son. The spoon was engraved with “Buffalo Hump, Jr.”
The hard lessons learned— the sacrifices of their own health and humanity by that first class of Rangers were squandered and allowed to depart state service. Years later— other groups of men were formed, dissolved, and reformed again, and also called Texas Rangers, but at first, they were Rangers in name only— forced to relearn many of the same hard lessons— lessons that the U.S. Cavalry were having to learn also.
Once again along the Rio Grande, Texas is being forced to relearn how to police itself, and patrol its own borders in the vacuum created by the already well-documented changes in federal government policy that have effectively neutered the U.S. Border Patrol.
Awaiting them, instead of a barren no-man’s land of savage combatants, is an overrun border of communities drowning in asylum seekers, some legitimate, others less so— creating a unique human crisis that allows criminal smugglers to run the rest of the border almost at will.
—First published in the Cavalry - Dispatch March 3, 2022
Let’s say certain bills pass in Austin and others don’t. Say the state builds a big ol’ beautiful wall. But fails to establish any sort of body of men to patrol it or direct funds to maintain it.
Now what?
Waste of time and money.
The best time for Texas to have created a border protection unit was 10 years ago. Or more. The next best time would be tomorrow, one supposes.
It would be far, far better, for US lawmakers to find their guts— to screw their courage to the sticking place, as a better writer once wrote— and start holding feet to fires, so that the US Border Patrol can begin doing its job— the job we are all being taxed to hell and back for.
It would be better for these communities. It would be better for the US citizens being recruited as drivers that we can’t help but feel sympathy for, and in time it would ultimately be better for any migrants looking for safe harbor beyond the reach of the Cartels.
As always, this newsletter is an independent work product, put out into the world without oversight or input from Kinney County government.
Any mistakes, errors, or overwrought language are entirely our own. No one should mistake it for an official communication.
The end of the week is supposed to be blustery as hell around here. Try not to set any fires. And keep a light jacket handy.
Until the next time— keep your head up, and don’t stop your toes from tapping. As bad as things might sound, none of us are having to eat cold flour or hunt Comanches. So, we have that going for us. Which is nice. See you again soon.
Excellent article. Thank you.