San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
‘I DON’T WANT TO DIE’
Abusers exploit gaps in the system to strike again
The emergency dispatcher could hear a child screaming in the background. The caller, a woman, said a man was choking her sister-in-law.
Then the line went silent. A 911 call about a domestic assault is supposed to mobilize first police, then prosecutors and ultimately judges, social workers and others to protect the victim and hold the suspect accountable.
In Bexar County, the justice system breaks down repeatedly in dealing with family violence, a San Antonio ExpressNews investigation found.
From 2011 through 2020, Bexar County had the lowest conviction rate for domestic violence assaults and the highest dismissal rate among the state’s major urban counties, an Express-News analysis found.
Innovative approaches that have proved effective in Texas’ other big cities — such as intensive surveillance of alleged abusers and a focus on building strong prosecutions despite victims’ reluctance to testify — have been slow to take hold here.
The result: Time and again, battered women get lost in the shuffle, and abusers remain free to strike again.
“Victims are left in limbo, sometimes going many months without hearing from anyone in the criminal justice system,” said Bexar County District Court Judge Velia Meza, who frequently presides over domestic violence cases. “A lot of things can happen, and then the state can’t find them, so they can’t move forward and you have a dismissal.”
That’s what happened to Karla Ornelas, the woman whose sister-in-law called 911 that evening in 2018.
TIME AFTER TIME
An El Paso native, Ornelas had moved to San Antonio in her early 20s and enrolled in classes to become a paralegal. She wanted to give her son a stable home and the security she’d lacked as a child.
She was waitressing at a sea