A federal judge's ruling now clears the way for a civil trial against two Houston police officers over a controversial arrest more than three years ago. Jose Gomez was arrested over a traffic violation in March 2017.
Essay: Lina Hidalgo puts principle over politics at her own peril
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Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer
It was about a week before Christmas and 29-year-old Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo was on the phone talking turkey.
There were holiday giveaways going on all over town, a community leader on the line said. He wanted to know: would the county organize one in his neighborhood?
Hidalgo was sorry, she told him, but she couldn’t justify using her staff’s time, pulling them from their work on next year’s budget, to do a giveaway. Instead, she detailed what the county was doing to distribute congressional stimulus dollars to curtail food insecurity.
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The families of two Houstonians who were killed in the botched 2019 Harding Street raid filed a pair of lawsuits against the city Wednesday night.
Lawyers allege that the 12 officers involved in the raid had violated the civil rights of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, who were both killed by Houston police officers.
Attorney Mike Doyle, who represents the Nicholas family, said HPD still has questions to answer. Every step of the way, all we ever heard from the city was, ‘No, we re not giving this information. We re going to keep concealing this information, he said during a news conference Thursday.
WATCH: Deputy recovering from shooting, suspect detained after 4-hour manhunt
ABC13 was there as the suspect was captured after a 4-hour manhunt. Watch the moment in the video above.
A review of records kept by ABC13 shows at least a dozen incidents, including four where law enforcement officers were killed since May 2020.
Separate incidents in 2021 included three deputies who were wounded outside a Midtown nightclub on Jan. 3, and two other law enforcement officers who were fired upon during chases.
The new year of violence began with the shooting outside Club Set in the 2900 block of Travis Street when those uniformed Harris County deputies were working extra jobs. Investigators said 25-year-old Joseph Anthony Gonzalez confronted the deputies with a gun during a fight in the parking lot and shot all three of them. One of the deputies returned fire and hit Gonzalez, the sheriff s office said. During the confrontation, Gonzalez s mother was shot in the leg and later died at the h