By Pete Vasquez
Pvasquez@cherryroad.com
This rural town is fed up with the latest murder where a repeat offender himself called the local authorities to report what he had done Tuesday, Jan.21 at 1:07am. The gunman Howard Harris admitted to murdering his 80-year-old mother with a single gunshot. He had previously been arrested for the same crime back on June 6, 2021, when he killed the mother of his children.
Chief of Police Eden Garcia states that the problem here is that Harris has committed two homicides in four years.
“He was indicted on the first homicide so now he’s committed a second one. We’ve arrested him a total of five or six times already. We have to look at a system that has problems, and we need to fix them, not be afraid to say that it needs fixing, not let it continue and see it get worse as time goes on. The police department is doing what it must do. We arrested him again and so we’ll present it to the District Attorney’s Office and hopefully we can get this gentleman indicted quickly, get him into our courts and send him wherever it may be. Something needs to be done. Whatever it may be, we need to do more. We can’t say this is the status quo. We can’t accept it, we have to be better at what we do. There must be a change to the system,” said the Chief.
Brooks and Jim Wells County District Attorney (DA) Carlos Omar Garcia told the Alice Echo-News Journal that once there’s an offense committed and there’s an arrest, the general process is that once an individual is arrested, they’ll be booked into the jail, and they will get a bond set on them.
“The bond is officially set by the magistrate who’s on call. If it’s a felony case though, after that initial bond is set, if they haven’t been indicted within 90 days, they’re entitled to have a bond reduced to an amount they can make,” Garcia said. “Most of the more high-level offenses, a lot of times 90-days is a very quick turnaround just because a lot of times there’s going to be ballistic and DNA testing. There are different things that will take more time to get in, but the individual gets arrested. There is that window of time to get as much in and if it can get indicted it will get presented but most of the time on those cases that require information that’s going to come in from scientific testing it’s usually not going to happen within those 90 days,” he added.
Garcia went on to say that the 90 days are set up to ensure that somebody isn’t held indefinitely or an accusation that’s been made against them. He said after that happens, they do file a 90-day writ which is to get them before the court so the court will then determine whether in fact 90-days has past or not and then and if it has past, the court doesn’t have a choice but to reduce that bond regardless if it’s a low-level felony like a property crime and no one was injured or if it’s the highest level whether someone was either injured or killed. According to the DA, they’re still going to be entitled to have that done.
“A lot of the defense attorneys, once an individual is in jail and hasn’t been able to make bond, that generally will trigger them being assessed for either getting a court appointed attorney if they can’t afford one and that court appointed attorney will generally file the writ that their required to file,” he said.
According to reports, in the Harris case, he had been given bonds but had been revoked sometime back. He had been indicted for the first murder. After the indictment, he had one hearing through Zoom when the court was still doing that. In April of 2024 when he was called to court in person he did not show up. According to the DA, the court on that day did revoke his bond and he became a fugitive and did have an arrest warrant.
“After that, we had a drug related offense that we indicted him on and in August he was supposed to show up for that and he failed to do so. That bond was also revoked. We had two active warrants throughout this whole time, so he wasn’t out on the streets on bond, he was out as a fugitive,” Garcia said.
