“[T]hey will lose the lifeblood of the revenues they receive from property taxes in Texas,” Abbott explained. “What this does, in English, is it is going to defund cities and cities’ ability to operate at all if they try to defund law enforcement.
“We believe in law enforcement in Texas and we are not going to allow a replication of the types of policies we’ve seen destroying cities like Seattle and Portland and others.”
Abbott accused such liberal precincts of “caving to the forces of socialism” even as crime increases, and added that some are allowing their municipalities to be “hijacked.”
“So Texas is laying down a marker and that is, whether it be the city of Austin or another city, such actions are not going to be tolerated. In Texas, we embrace law enforcement, we will not accept turning power over to these socialistic forces that seek to abandon the rule of law and abandon the law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line to keep our communities safe.”
However, unlike Abbott’s various Wuhan Coronavirus mandates, this will require the Texas legislature to enact, which won’t happen until next year. And Socialist Austin city councilman Greg Casar says it won’t deter his anti-police agenda.
Meanwhile, Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell blasted Austin’s defunding vote and asked Gov. Abbott to send more law enforcement. “In the correspondence, Gravell blasts Austin City Council members for cuts to the Austin Police Department valued at $150 million — including some $20 million in immediate budget cuts and a transfer of several departments away from police oversight to civilian functions, such as interacting with the homeless and dealing with mental health-related cuts.”
It always seems to go back to the decision to make Austin bumsville, doesn’t it?
“There were thousands of pounds of trash, human waste, and needles washing through our backyards and the creek bed.”
Kevin Ludlow struck a nerve after posting his time-lapse video of the Windsor Park creek, which runs from Cameron Rd., into the neighborhood behind Ludlow’s house, and continues east. It even runs past a new community pool and water park.
The video in question:
The portion of creek bed which runs the length of the Heritage at Hillcrest apartment complex, behind his back yard, and down a couple of blocks further is prime real estate for the city’s growing homeless population because of its shade and relative seclusion.
Since the beginning of 2020, Ludlow noted the population of homeless individuals living in the creek bed grew to a few hundred people until its apex a couple of weeks ago. A storm came on July 31, causing the creek to flood and wash the piles of debris further down the area.
The issues that have arisen downtown and in the city’s business-heavy districts have been well-documented, but it has extended beyond these areas.
Snip.
In his video, Ludlow was able to record footage of campers smoking crack and shooting up heroin. Multiple times, campers became confrontational over his documentation.
He added that because regular syringes can be hard to come by, campers turn to insulin needles — which are much smaller both in length and tip — of which he’s found numerous on the ground.
He underscored, “I’m a pretty progressive-left guy, but [allowing homeless camping] has helped nobody, especially the homeless.”
Snip.
Back in October, Austin Police Department Chief Brian Manley reported statistics showing a 15 percent increase in violent crimes wherein both the victim and the suspect were homeless from July through September of 2019 compared with the same time frame the previous year.
Austin’s homeless problem has been growing for decades, but a watershed moment occurred last year.
In June of 2019, the Austin City Council approved the rescission of its public camping and lying ban. It went into effect in July and has led to a massive uptick in the unsheltered homeless population ever since, as more transients made camp on public property ranging anywhere from parks, sidewalks, underpasses, and more.
The city’s stated intention was that the policy change would bring the homeless population into sheltered facilities wherein they could receive whatever aid they needed.
In this year’s homeless population survey, the city recorded a 45 percent increase in its unsheltered population and an 11 percent decrease in those sheltered. There was an unmistakable incentive to leave shelters or the woods and live on the streets.
The city eventually reinstated some of the restrictions in place before July 2019 but stopped well short of fully reinstating the ban. The issue has grown substantially and fractured the community and its elected council considerably.
Read the whole thing.
Speaking of crime and the homeless:
Adler emails his Senior Policy Advisor to confirm homeless crime stats as reported by the Statesman. Adler is advised that the Statesman did them a favor by not emphasizing the 5 yr homeless crime rise & instead focusing on the violent crime by the non homeless. That figures. pic.twitter.com/oTIqsUQU5n
Things that make you go “hmmmm”: “Austin council member Jimmy Flannigan has received more than $17,000 in contributions from members of a real estate development company that has worked on several city projects, as well as a lobbying firm that has many real estate, business and events clients, according to his latest campaign finance report.”
Speaking of Jimmy Flannigan:
This must be the email that got Jacob Aronowitz his new position as Jimmy Flannigan's field director. ATX you have been warned. pic.twitter.com/leJLtPt3rG
“Funding that upholds our dignity.” What bilious, gaseous nonsense. What he probably meant to say is “the graft that lines our pockets.”
Cahnman floats a radical solution: revoke the City of Austin’s charter, abolish the city council and have functions carried out by the county and state.
Williamson County commissioners took a step toward suing Sheriff Robert Chody when they voted Tuesday to hire lawyers for a possible lawsuit over a contract he signed for the “Live PD” television show.
LivePD is sort of “NFL RedZone for Cops.”
Chody did not get permission from the Williamson County Commissioners Court before he signed an agreement in March allowing Big Fish Entertainment, the production company for “Live PD,” to resume filming sheriff’s deputies.
In August, the commissioners canceled the county’s contract with “Live PD” after the show had come under fire from prosecutors and defense attorneys who cited a lack of access to potential evidence gathered by film crews, and from officials who said it portrayed the county in a poor light.
Chody did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. He has hired, at his own expense, attorney Eric Taube to represent him, Taube said in an email Tuesday.
“While the sheriff would have preferred to resolve this issue with the commissioners with civil discussion and dialogue, it appears that the commissioners would rather attempt to go down a different path,” Taube said.
“The sheriff is happy to resolve this issue based upon the law and not on politics, and will look forward to continue to exercise his discretion as a law enforcement officer to serve the citizens of Williamson County as he believes most effective.”
Taube did not respond to a request for comment on why the sheriff decided to sign an agreement with the production company without getting permission from the Commissioners Court, as had happened with the original contract.
Jason Nassour, general counsel for Williamson County Attorney Dee Hobbs, sent the commissioners a letter Friday saying that, although the commissioners have the power to determine the sheriff’s budget, they cannot “decide how an official uses those resources once allocated and may not micromanage an official’s decisions as to the use of those resources.”
The letter also said that what the sheriff signed with Big Fish Entertainment was not a contract but an access agreement.
“The court has attempted to assert control based on the premise that the access agreement is a contract rather than what is actually is the sheriff’s lawful authorization to allow Big Fish representatives into those areas controlled by the sheriff,” the letter said.
Commissioners have disagreed, saying what the sheriff signed was a contract and that the law gives the county control over how the sheriff’s facilities and equipment are used.
Austin attorney and former Travis County Judge Bill Aleshire said Tuesday, “The sheriff has almost no authority to contract with a vendor without approval by the Commissioners Court.”
“But the sheriff has independent authority to operate his office, including deciding who can and who cannot be present on calls the deputies go out on. Having disputes between county officials that give rise to litigation is not common, but there have been plenty of them over the decades.”
On Tuesday, the Commissioners Court unanimously hired the law firm of Howry Breen & Herman LLP and the law office of Randy Leavitt to represent the county in the dispute.
“We are in the middle of a disaster, a pandemic, and people are sick, and people are losing their jobs … and the sheriff is playing on TV,” Commissioner Russ Boles said after the court approved hiring the lawyers.
County Judge Bill Gravell abstained from voting on the hiring of the law firm and said he would not take part in the discussion of it in executive session. Gravell said there were “attorneys involved” that would cause him to abstain. He made no further comments.
You may remember my post on the original LivePD ban, which seemed to be in response to various non-PC events at the Sheriff’s office.
Chody reinstating LivePD after the Commissioner’s Court banned it once suggests there’s some sort of deeper pissing match going on there. Chody was an APD officer before he and his wife literally literally won the lottery, which would suggest that money isn’t a factor in his insistence on keeping LivePD filming.
Both Chody and three-quarters of the commissioner’s court (along with Gravell) are Republicans, but the commissioner’s court voted unanimously to fill a cease-and-desist letter over LivePD. Chody attended President Donald Trump’s 2019 State of the union address at the invitation of Congressman John Carter.
Does Chody like the fame LivePD brings him? Probably. Does the commissioner’s court have a grudge against him? Probably. But it feels like something else is going on here, and I’m not sure what it is.
Craig Coopersmith was up early that morning as usual and typed his daily inquiry into his phone. “Good morning, Team Covid,” he wrote, asking for updates from the ICU team leaders working across 10 hospitals in the Emory University health system in Atlanta.
One doctor replied that one of his patients had a strange blood problem. Despite being put on anticoagulants, the patient was still developing clots. A second said she’d seen something similar. And a third. Soon, every person on the text chat had reported the same thing.
“That’s when we knew we had a huge problem,” said Coopersmith, a critical-care surgeon. As he checked with his counterparts at other medical centers, he became increasingly alarmed: “It was in as many as 20, 30 or 40 percent of their patients.”
One month ago when the country went into lockdown to prepare for the first wave of coronavirus cases, many doctors felt confident they knew what they were dealing with. Based on early reports, covid-19 appeared to be a standard variety respiratory virus, albeit a contagious and lethal one with no vaccine and no treatment. They’ve since seen how covid-19 attacks not only the lungs, but also the kidneys, heart, intestines, liver and brain.
Read the whole thing.
A coronavirus map based on self-reported symptoms. I note that Williamson County has only about 0.32%.
Over on Borepath, there’s a good discussion of all the known unknowns of the Wuhan Coronavirus, and all the data we don’t have.
Only 38 of the 58 SSEs that I recorded were documented in a way that permitted me to determine their date with any specificity. (And even in these cases, I sometimes had to make educated estimates because of the vague nature of the reporting.) In the case of multi-day SSEs, such as religious festivals, I picked a day corresponding to the middle of the event. Unfortunately, some of the largest SSEs, such as those at North American meat processing plants, can’t be usefully pinpointed at all because the infections span multiple weeks (or even months), and the employers haven’t released detailed date-tagged data.
Of the 38 SSEs for which dates could be usefully identified, about 75 percent (29/38) took place in the 26-day span between February 25th and March 21st, roughly corresponding to the period when thousands of infected COVID-19 individuals were already traveling around the world, but before social distancing and event-cancelation policies had been uniformly implemented in many of the affected countries. (A notable early outlier is Steve Walsh, who spread COVID-19 from a Singapore corporate meeting to a French ski resort to his native UK in late January and early February.) No doubt, a vast number of SSEs occurred in January and February without being reported as such, because public-health officials and journalists weren’t alive to the nature or scale of the coming pandemic. But it is reassuring that, so far, April has been almost entirely bereft of publicly reported SSEs.
I was struck by how few of the SSEs originated in conditions stereotypically associated with the underclass (though a March outbreak at a Qatari migrant workers camp in the industrial area north of Doha offers one such example). Many of the early SSEs, in fact, centered on weddings, birthday parties, and other events that were described in local media as glamorous or populated by “socialites.” Examples here include a March 7th engagement party at a Rio de Janeiro “mansion” that attracted “high society” fly-ins from around the world, and a similarly described birthday party in Westport, CT.
It is theoretically possible that socioeconomically privileged individuals really do lack some immune-response mechanism that protects individuals who have been exposed to a wider array of infectious pathogens. (A recent report on COVID-19 surveillance testing at a Boston homeless shelter contained the stunning disclosure that 36 percent of 408 screened individuals tested positive for COVID-19. Yet the vast majority were asymptomatic, and even the few who were symptomatic did not diverge statistically from the 64 percent of tested individuals who were COVID-19-negative.) But absent more data, the more obvious explanation is that these early SSEs are linked to the intercontinental travel practices of the guests. (In the case of the Connecticut event, reports the New York Times, “a visitor from Johannesburg—a 43-year-old businessman—fell ill on his flight home.” And the Rio party was attended by guests who’d traveled recently from, or through New York, Belgium and Italy.) Moreover, COVID-19 outbreaks in poor communities are simply less likely to be reported, because the victims have less access to testing, high-end medical care, or media contacts.
In fact, the truly remarkable trend that jumped off my spreadsheet has nothing to do with the sort of people involved in these SSEs, but rather the extraordinarily narrow range of underlying activities. And I believe it is on this point that a close study of SSEs, even one based on such a biased and incomplete data set as the one I’ve assembled in my lay capacity, can help us:
Of the 54 SSEs on my list for which the underlying activities were identified, no fewer than nine were linked to religious services or missionary work. This includes massive gatherings such as February’s weeklong Christian Open Door prayer meeting in Mulhouse, France, which has been linked to an astounding 2,500 cases; and a massive Tablighi Jamaat Islamic event in Lahore that attracted a quarter-million people. But it also includes much smaller-scale religious activities, such as proselytizing in rural Punjabi villages and a religious meeting in a Calgary home.
Nineteen of the SSEs—about one-third—involved parties or liquor-fueled mass attendance festivals of one kind or another, including (as with the examples cited above) celebrations of weddings, engagements and birthdays.
Five of the SSEs involved funerals.
Six of the SSEs involved face-to-face business networking. This includes large-scale events such as Biogen’s notorious Boston leadership meeting in February, as well as one-on-one business meetings—from the unidentified “traveling salesperson” who spread COVID-19 in Maine to Hisham Hamdan, a powerful sovereign-wealth fund official who spread the disease in Malaysia.
All told, 38 of the 54 SSEs for which activities were known involved one or more of these four activities—about 70 percent. Indeed, the categories sometimes overlap, as with patient A1.1 in Chicago, who attended both a party and a funeral in the space of a few days; or the New Rochelle, NY man who covered the SSE trifecta of Bar Mitzvah party, synagogue services, and local funeral, all the while going to his day job as a lawyer in New York City.
But even that 70 percent figure underestimates the prevalence of these activities in COVID-19 SSEs, because my database also includes five SSEs involving two warships and three cruise ships—the USS Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Diamond Princess, Grand Princess and Ruby Princess—at least three of which (and probably all five) featured onboard parties.
These parties, funerals, religious meet-ups and business networking sessions all seem to have involved the same type of behaviour: extended, close-range, face-to-face conversation—typically in crowded, socially animated spaces.
So you probably want to avoid such events for the near future. Snip.
In the case of religious SSEs, Sikhs, Christians, Jews and Muslims are all represented in the database. The virus makes no distinction according to creed, but does seem to prey on physically intimate congregations that feature some combination of mass participation, folk proselytizing and spontaneous, emotionally charged expressions of devotion. In the case of Islam, it is notable that the same movement, Tablighi Jamaat, has been responsible for massive outbreaks at completely separate events in Lahore (noted above), Delhi and Kuala Lampur. At Mulhouse, the week’s schedule included Christian “choir performances, collective prayer, singing, sermons from preachers, workshops, and testimony from people who said God had cured their illnesses… Many people came day after day, and spent hours there.” And in Punjab, dozens of Sikhs died thanks to the itinerant rural preaching of a single (now deceased) infamous septuagenarian named Baldev Singh.
It’s worth scanning all the myriad forms of common human activity that aren’t represented among these listed SSEs: watching movies in a theater, being on a train or bus, attending theater, opera, or symphony (these latter activities may seem like rarified examples, but they are important once you take stock of all those wealthy infectees who got sick in March, and consider that New York City is a major COVID-19 hot spot). These are activities where people often find themselves surrounded by strangers in densely packed rooms—as with all those above-described SSEs—but, crucially, where attendees also are expected to sit still and talk in hushed tones.
Again, read the whole thing.
Speaking of things you’re not supposed to do: “Bangladesh: Over 100,000 gather for funeral of Islamic teacher, defying coronavirus lockdown.” What could possibly go wrong? (On the other hand, if this doesn’t turn into a superspreader event, then we have some valuable data about that seemingly invariant infection curve and/or the role of sunlight/warm climates in preventing infection.)
Speaking of superspreader events, want to guess who owned that South Dakota meat packing plant with the heavy infection rate? “In September 2013 Smithfield Foods was acquired by China’s biggest meat processor, Shuanghui International Holdings, in the largest acquisition ever of a U.S. company by a Chinese one.”
Speaking of China’s perfidy, while they rest of the world was struggling with the Wuhan coronavirus, they thought it was the perfect time to arrest dissidents in Hong Kong:
Fifteen activists between 24 and 81 years old were rounded up on suspicion of organizing, publicizing or taking part in several unauthorized assemblies between August and October and will face prosecution, the police said on Saturday without disclosing their names, following protocol.
The arrested democratic heavyweights included the veteran lawyers Martin Lee and Margaret Ng, the media tycoon Jimmy Lai and the former opposition legislators Albert Ho, Lee Cheuk-yan and Leung Kwok-hung, political parties and aides said.
Half the residents of a Boston homeless shelter had the Wuhan Coronavirus, but none showed any symptoms.
If the Malevolent Donkey Party was actively seeking to plunge the country into an economic tailspin, while still maintaining some level of deniability to the credulous suckers out there, exactly what would it be doing differently? It would be pretty much doing exactly what it is doing right now – shilling for the bat-gobbling ChiComs, delaying needed assistance to keep America working, and generally trying to keep us all locked in the dark in perpetuity.
It’s fair to assume that you intend the expected consequences of the actions you take, and the consequence of the actions the Democrats are taking is economic ruin. The indisputable fact is that they’re totally cool with that if that is what gets them back into power.
Democrats are never ones to let a good crisis go to waste, and this Wuhan Flu is a very good crisis indeed if your goal is leftist hegemony. The Trump economy was booming after the near-decade of the Obama doldrums, and people were getting a taste of prosperity. But a happy, prosperous America is something the Democrat dudes can’t abide. All the Democrats had to sell were recycled cries of “RACISM!” and “RUSSIA!” and their standard-bearer was that sinewy weirdo Grandpa Badfinger, who was promising to drag us all back into the nightmare of globalist failure. The future looked grim, which means it actually looked bright for the rest of us.
So, the Chinese coronavirus was a dream come true, a deus ex pangolin that finally, after an endless series of leaks, impeachments, investigations, and media meltdowns, might be the magic bullet that actually takes Trump down.
Am I saying that the Democrats are exploiting the pandemic for their own cheesy advantage? Well, yeah. Everything they are doing is consistent with that. Everything. No, in the abstract, many of them would probably not prefer that tens of thousands of Americans die (I get enough Twitter death wishes to know, from their own filthy mouths, that some absolutely do want us to die), but their attitude seems to be that if life gives you tens of thousands of dead Americans, make political lemonade.
How can Nancy Pelosi worry about your piddling lives when there’s so much ice cream to eat?
“U.S. Intelligence Knew Russia Preferred Hillary to Trump, But John Brennan Hid the Truth, Ex-NSC Chief Says.” This story probably deserves more attention than I can give it right now…
Iran: Watch our tiny boats harass the Great Satan! President Trump: I hope you like your gunboats getting destroyed.
Won’t someone please spare a moment to think about how the coronavirus outbreak has derailed the Austin politicians’ plans to spend billions on their toy trains? (Hat tip: Iowahawk.)
Speaking of Austin, the coronavirus has closed landmark Austin restaurants Threadgill’s…
Is Apple moving to ARM for Mac? They’re planning to have their own Apple-designed chips fabbed at TSMC on the latter’s 5nm process. Intel, the current supplier for Mac CPUs, isn’t slatted to hit 5nm until 20203, and there’s long been talk that bringing up yield on their existing 10nm process has been in a world of hurt for a while.
Mayor Steve Adler, Travis County Judge Sarah Eckhardt and Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell all signed shelter-in-place orders Tuesday. The orders take effect at midnight and runs through April 13.
The orders dictate that all residents must remain in their home unless performing essential activities, such as buying groceries, pet supplies and other items needed to work from home. People can also leave their homes to exercise and walk their pets as long as they comply with social distancing rules, the order states. Travel is also permitted when needed to take care of another person or pet at another home.
Since I live in Williamson, I’m definitely included in the lockdown area. Harris County (Houston), Dallas County, and Bexar County (San Antonio) are all under similar lockdowns.
HEB, our local supermarket chain, has taken to queuing people six feet apart outside before you can even get into the store. Yesterday stock was somewhat picked, and there were limiting quantities on just about all items, but you could find all the staples if you were willing to make substitutions. (Didn’t try to get toilet paper, but I did find a bottle of rubbing alcohol.)
I’m better equipped for this than most people. My job allows me to work from home, I have dogs, books, and video games to keep me occupied, and this will give me a jump on doing my taxes…
Austin on Tuesday joined other major Texas cities in closing bars and restaurant dining rooms to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, which has now resulted in the state’s first death.
Dr. Mark Escott, director of Austin-Travis County Health Authority, also announced that pubic gatherings in the Texas capital are now limited to 10 people, following recommendations released a day earlier by the Trump administration. That’s more restrictive than similar measures taken in Dallas, which on Monday ordered that public gatherings should not exceed 50 people.
Those shutdowns are scheduled to last through May 1st. “Food establishments must now close common dining areas and are encouraged to give take-out, delivery or drive-thru options.”
Six weeks is a long damn time for a restaurant or bar owner, many of whom just barely scrape by. I wonder how many restaurants and bars this will drive into bankruptcy.
With all these draconian bans coming down, do you think the city of Austin will do anything about the illegal encampments of transient drug users Mayor Steve Adler has lured here?
This is your reminder that there is a Texas Constitutional Amendment Election today, as well as various local elections. At the very least, show up to vote for Amendment 4, which constitutionally bans a state income tax.
Links covering other races around the state:
Houstonians have a chance to vote out corrupt incumbent Sylvester Turner. I hear good things about Bill King, but he’s in a tough race with trial lawyer Tony Buzbee (who went from backing Bill Clinton to supporting Rick Perry, David Dewhurst and Donald Trump) to make the runoff against Turner. Either would likely be an improvement over Sylvester.
Ballotpedia has links for other Texas elections, including four special elections for state representatives, local elections, and school board elections.
Since I don’t have cable, I was unaware that reality TV show LivePD had a contract with Williamson County to be one of the departments featured. (I’ve heard LivePD described as “NFL Red Zone TV for Cops.”) Now comes word that the Williamson County Commissioner’s Court just voted unanimously to terminate the LivePD contract, saying “it did not accurately portray life in the county.”
On the one hand, yeah, he shouldn’t have done that. On the other hand, slamming Deaton for personal Facebook posts that mock “The Elf on The Shelf” is a lot closer to PC run amuck, like saying this:
is “an Elf dismembering a black football player at the knees with a chainsaw.” As opposed to an action figure attacking a plastic football player.
And the fact that the original complaint came from those dishonest radicals at the Southern Poverty Law Center makes me even more inclined to cut Deaton some slack, and believe that Williamson County Sheriff Robert Chody made the right decision in not taking further action.
Another one of those sneaky May elections is upon us. In particular:
Cedar Park – City Council
Eanes ISD – Board of Trustees, Bond
Georgetown – Mayor, City Council
Georgetown ISD – Board of Trustees
Hutto – Mayor, City Council
Hutto – ISD – Board of Trustees, Bond
Leander – City Council
Lakeway – Mayor, City Council
Pflugerville ISD – Board of Trustees
Round Rock – City Council
Taylor – City Council
Village of Briarcliff – Mayor, Aldermen
Village of Webberville – Sales Tax Proposition
In fact, none of those elections applies to me, so I can’t offer you any advice on who or what to vote for or against (though if I did live in Pflugerville ISD, I would definitely vote against the union organizer), but I did want to make you aware of them.
Check your local League of Women Voter guides/media/etc. to see if there’s an election you weren’t aware of today. These things have a way of sneaking up on you…
I was getting ready to do my “Biden is in” post when this news dropped:
Former Williamson County District Attorney Jana Duty was found dead Wednesday in South Texas, Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell confirmed to the American-Statesman on Thursday.
Local authorities and Texas Rangers are investigating Duty’s death, but do not suspect foul play, Gravell said.
“We are heartbroken for her family, her kids and her grandkids,” he said.
Duty served two terms as county attorney before defeating longtime incumbent John Bradley to become district attorney in 2013. She was defeated in the 2016 Republican primary by current district attorney Shawn Dick.
Duty was at times controversial, and served a short time in jail on a contempt of court charge in 2016.
Rockport police say they responded to a call Wednesday morning of a deceased person in a condo complex on the Rockport Country Club. No other details were immediately available.
Duty was a bad DA who had serious professional and ethical lapses, had trouble working with other Wilco officials, was defeated in the 2016 Republican primary by Shawn Dick, and had a lawsuit filed to remove her from office for various transgressions, including not coming into work. In hindsight this suggests that Duty may have been struggling with an undiagnosed mental illness. Maybe if she had resigned from the high pressure post she was so clearly unsuited for, she would have been able to get the help she so obviously needed.
Remember how Democrats were shouting “Believe all women!” during the Kavanaugh hearing? Turns out, not all women should be believed:
The morning of September 22, 2017, Cristopher Precopia went to work at a lumber yard in Georgetown.
By the end of the day, he was in jail facing 99 years in prison.
But he didn’t know why.
Why had police come to his work and arrested him? Why was he being accused of these horrible crimes? Who was accusing him?
She said he broke into her home in Temple.
She said he sliced an “X” into her chest with a box cutter.
She said it happened on Sept. 20, 2017 around 7:20 p.m.
She was his high school girlfriend. The two dated several years earlier, but he couldn’t remember the last time the two had contact.
Now Precopia was facing a felony charge: burglary of a habitation with the intent to commit other crimes.
“I had no idea why everything was happening, and I was lost,” he said.
Precopia was taken to the Williamson County Jail, where his parents posted a $150,000 bond. Then they began fighting to prove his innocence.
Precopia knew he didn’t do it. He knew he couldn’t have done it.
On the night of the alleged attack, he was with his mother, Erin, at a Northwest Austin hotel about 65 miles from the accuser’s home.
“I’m thinking, ‘this is awesome. By the grace of God, she said it happened on the day when I can say totally, 100 percent, where he was at,” Erin Precopia said.
There were sworn affidavits from several people who were with him that evening.
There were pictures to prove it, and they were posted on Facebook. Timestamped. Geo-located.
An alibi.
“Most of the time, we deal with gray matters,” attorney Rick Flores said. “It’s not normally black or white. But this is one of those cases where I could definitely prove he did not commit this offense.”
Snip.
“Nine months after Precopia’s arrest, Flores said he took the evidence of an alibi to Bell County prosecutors, who dropped the charge ‘in the interest of justice.'”
Yet, as far as I can tell, the woman who tried to destroy his life by falsely accusing him of rape, has not only not been charged, but newspapers refuse to print her name because “she hasn’t been charged with a crime.” The only reason her criminal scheme was thwarted was that hard evidence to the contrary was available, and we still have due process in America. If the feminist inspired kangaroo court “guilty until proven innocent” standard that prevails on too many college campuses had been used, Precopia would have already been convicted.
