The Great Texas Caper(s)

July 11, 2023

San Jacinto Sheriff Greg Capers

The AP published a story over the weekend about the sheriff of San Jacinto County, Texas, Greg Capers.  It reveals how years of bad police work and corruption culminated in the office’s failure to prevent a man from murdering five people with an AR-15.

In late April, Wilson Garcia asked his neighbor Francisco Oropeza to stop shooting his gun (which was apparently something Oropeza did a lot) because it was keeping the baby awake. Oropeza appears to have taken offense because he grabbed his assault rifle, chased Garcia back to his home, and killed five people, including Garcia’s wife and one of their three children. Garcia himself lived only because one of the victims, before dying, told him to jump out the window. Or put somewhat more directly, “because my children were without a mother and one of their parents had to stay alive to take care of them,” as he later told the AP. (Garcia’s two other children survived.)

Oropeza then went on the lam for four days before law enforcement found him hiding under a pile of laundry. “[T]hey can rest easy now,” the sheriff said in a press conference announcing the arrest, “because he is behind bars and he will live out his life behind bars.” The AP describes how Capers embodied, at least in costume, the Western lawman of yore:

Sheriff Greg Capers was the classic picture of a Texas lawman as he announced the capture of a suspected mass killer: white cowboy hat on his head, gold star pinned to his chest, white cross on his belt and a large pistol emblazoned with his name on his hip.

Despite all of the accouterments of esteem, the AP explained that Capers’s “investigation” was in fact pretty sloppy. Not only had neighbors been complaining about Oropeza’s random gunfire for months – and the sheriff did nothing – his office also ignored reports of domestic violence reported by Oropenza’s wife. (The AP makes a point to state that Capers’ office had never checked Oropeza’s immigration status – Oropeza was ineligible for firearm ownership because he was undocumented – but the AP neglects to mention that checking immigration status isn’t the job of a county sheriff. Regardless of immigration status, when a neighbor is shooting bullets at the feet of children, perhaps that should stop.)

The sheriff took credit for “finding” Oropeza, but he had previously lied about how long it took his deputies to arrive at the mass shooting scene. 11 minutes, he said – a lie. It was closer to 45 minutes, according to reporting by the AP. Long enough for Oropenza to run away.

Capers has apparently been running his office like a personal piggy bank for years, neglecting any actual, you know, police work. Deputies and residents of San Jacinto County describe systemic piss-poor policing on the part of Capers and his deputies. Rather than “protecting the public,” Capers liberally used the process of civil asset forfeiture to stop drivers on the highway and steal their money. (This is an incredibly common practice in rural Texas.)

On May 6, just days after the sheriff managed to find Oropeza, he sent several deputies, decked out in SWAT gear, to raid a marijuana grow house that Capers claims he found while looking for the shooter. (I don’t know how much asset forfeiture money he seized, but I think we can all guess why they were so interested.) Per Breitbart:

San Jacinto County Sheriff's Office deputies raid a marijuana grow house operation found during the manhunt for the alleged murderer of five Honduran migrants. The grow house is about two blocks from the murder scene near Cleveland, Texas.

Way to get on those fugitive…plants.

An ace investigator on the case…of pot.

Move quickly, guys, not like you did when people were getting shot.

For this, the sheriff wore his tough-guy outfit.

The AP describes chaos in the office, including complaints from whistleblowers that led to a $240,000 settlement in 2020, paid by the county. The county hired LION Institute, a police consulting firm, and paid them $50,000 to investigate Capers’s office; the group found 4,000 reports of crimes deputies never investigated as well as “tens of thousands of dollars” of property seized improperly. Some of those funds were used to attend a sheriff conference in Reno that was for “training,” but the sheriff “acknowledged he also spent some of it gambling.” (The Western States Sheriffs Association meets every year in Reno at a casino.)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Capers is on a list of attendees for a far-right sheriff training held by Richard Mack and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association that I wrote about for the Texas Tribune. Mack claims that his trainings are all about “constitutional policing” (they are not) and eschews civil asset forfeiture.

Often when I write about far-right sheriff movements, editors ask me to explain how an ideology based on open Christo-fascist white supremacy affects the actual functioning of sheriffs’ offices. They have a point. Sheriffs are, after all, entirely a product of white supremacy (despite, and of course to some extent because of, their claims to Biblical authenticity) and everything they do is in support of the carceral system, from arrests to jails to their political views, which skew to the right of their constituents overall.  Still, I have found anecdotally that sheriffs who engage in ideologically-driven pursuits are, quite frankly, bad at their job, which I would define loosely to be something like “protecting the public from serial-killing AR-15 wielders” and “running their office without massive fraud.” Capers seems to fit the bill.

As yet another point, Garcia and his family were from Honduras (Oropeza was also an immigrant). A sheriff spokesperson told the AP that “some calls required a Spanish translator,” which contributed to the delay. (The sheriff’s office also told the AP that part of the reason behind their lackluster performance resulted from a “staffing shortage” and “rough roads.”) Famously, Texas Governor Greg Abbott spuriously (and incorrectly) referred to the victims’ immigration status because apparently, he couldn’t help himself. Cleveland, the town where the shooting took place, has a population that about 1/3 Latinos and increasing. (This is about twice as high as the Latino population in San Jacinto County as a whole.)

The CSPOA and Mack have been advocating for years to severely limit immigration, stoking fears that Democrats were encouraging immigration in order to win elections. Just recently in Arizona, Mack told a dwindling crowd, “A lot of these people coming across the border are paid to come here. And you know where they are going now? They’re not going to the Democrat cities anymore. Do you know where they are going? To the Republican areas. And you know want to know why? Because the reason they started all this was to make sure the voter bloc in America changed and the Democrats have a monopoly on voting.”

None of that is true, but if it were, I’d be hard-pressed to fault anyone—immigrants included—for voting for anyone other than Mack and his acolytes. It would seem citizens’ literal safety might depend on making different choices.