Is it just coincidence that all the bad guys here, the prosecutor, the principal and the judge, all have the surname Garza? And I couldn’t get to what the actual charges are before the paywall kicked in. Sounds fishy as all hell.
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It’s a common last name in Texas and particularly common in that part of Texas. Not quite as common as Smith but probably as common as Johnson or Carpenter. I doubt they are related.
However, I could totally believe that DA and school officials have something corrupt going on, just based on friendships and local political alliances. Plus this school district is well known for using law enforcement against their students.
I got access thru a different browser. I think there must be an article limit. Couldn’t get Waybackmachine to save it so here is the relevant part:
…
After the Texas Observer first reported last month that 11-year-old Timothy Murray was arrested by the Brownsville Independent School District police and detained in solitary confinement just days after he reported being bullied by his school principal, Myrta Garza, Timothy’s mother Nadia Rincon had hoped prosecutors would drop the charges against her son.
But during a status hearing today, Cameron County District Attorney Rene Garza made it clear the office is hell-bent on building a criminal case against Timothy, asking for more time to gather evidence after school administrators who previously worked under Garza filed another criminal charge against the student earlier this month.
“We’ve got an overzealous prosecutor who, regardless of what the facts or lack of facts there may be, made decisions that have proven to be more harmful than anything else time and time again,” said Sara Stapleton-Barrera, who is now Timothy’s attorney.
Garza did not immediately respond to the Observer’s request for comment. We will update this story if he does.
Judge Adela Kowalski-Garza scheduled another hearing for February 14 but granted permission to Rincon for Timothy to be homeschooled.
“He’s not safe in this district,” Rincon said.
A week ago on December 5, school administrators who had worked under Garza while she was principal at Canales Elementary had the district police file a report charging Timothy with aggravated assault. For the second time, school administrators seized a chance to use the police to punish the fifth-grader and violated state laws requiring parental involvement in a fact-based investigation before determining if there was an imminent threat warranting a referral to law enforcement. Rincon’s repeated appeals to the district and even the state education agency have gone unanswered.
Despite the recent incident, Timothy says he’s been thriving at his new school, Canales Elementary in the Victoria Gardens neighborhood of Brownsville. Since he transferred there from Palm Grove in mid-September, he’s been making straight As, competing in the University Interscholastic League chess competitions, and in the Battle of the Books contest. For Battle of the Books, he was required to memorize the details from four fiction books and answer 100 questions about them. He proudly told me he got 98 out of 100 correct.
“I made a new start here. I’m getting 90s to 100s. And people like me. I’ve made friends,” Timothy said.
But Garza remains in her position as principal at Palm Grove Elementary School; her ties in the district run deep. Her mother, Rachel Ayala, served as area superintendent for 45 years. At Canales Elementary, she served as principal for four years, from 2018 to 2023, before she was removed by then-district superintendent Rene Gutierrez, who targeted the school, saying it needed improvement.
A day before Assistant Principal Gabriel Rodriguez, who previously worked under Garza, had a Brownsville ISD police officer file a report charging Timothy with aggravated assault, another student reported to Principal Patricia Chacon that Timothy pulled his hair and tried to cut his finger with scissors. Timothy said Chacon brought both boys into her office and told the students she would report the incident to their parents. Timothy apologized for pulling the student’s hair but clarified he had pretended to cut the student’s paper and was not aiming for his finger.
He thought the matter had been resolved until he was pulled out of lunch the next day and into a meeting with Assistant Principal Gabriel Rodriguez.
“It looked like most of the administration was there except for the people I trusted. Then the police officer came in, and he started touching his handcuffs,” Timothy said. “I kinda panicked and said, ‘I will not continue this conversation without my mother present.’”
Timothy said Rodriguez “clammed up” after and released him back to lunch. But he no longer felt safe at his new school.
“I didn’t think it was a good idea to stay, so I asked one of the teachers during lunch to go back to the office and to call my mother to pick me up.”
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“Aggravated assault” because he pulled a kid’s hair? WTF, man?
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I didn’t want my post to be too long with the copy/paste but I agree that’s a vile miscarriage of justice.
I’m glad he is being homeschooled and I hope the judge isn’t so enmeshed in local politics that she doesn’t rule against this. Nice to see some sanctions against the DA too.
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There is serious abuse of power at play, check the statistics at the end of the piece. Over 3000 arrests in two school years with the majority of charges being felonies. ^This is what the school-to-prison pipeline looks like, and it needs to be stopped.
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I guess no one has explained 1) how IQ scores work, and 2) that they are utterly useless. But I guess the point is made already. Assholes gonna asshole and idiots gonna idiot.
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Makes sense. He could never fit a large compensating truck in his office.
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INT: 10.
WIS: 3.
Yes, that is a complete sentence.
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Maybe they can be fun for kids in carefully supervised use, but dang!
While they seem harmless enough, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) in the United States said water beads were responsible for 4,500 emergency room visits over the past four years.
The tiny beads can grow in a child’s body and they don’t show up on an x-ray machine which is why there is a growing call to have them banned.
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They dont show up on an X-ray? Well the obvious fix to that is to include a steel BB inside each one.
/s
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What a gigantic asshole.
https://nitter.net/edzitron/status/1736093675686596956
https://nitter.net/edzitron/status/1736095919295369448
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This asshole of the year nominee keeps making her case for that placement
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When I saw the Valley Bros using Accelerationist, I shrugged. I knew Roger Zelazny had used it in Lord of Light, but assumed that the term has been used for lots of things in history.
But apparently, that’s where they got it from. Oy! Another book that they’ve read superficially, if at all.
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Calling the police on a comedian is really not going to help his “not being a fascist” case, isn’t it.
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