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More Texas Politics

by KTK

April 25th, 2006

Molly Ivins reports on a tragic and shocking political crime in the town of Lajitas, TX:

[T]he mayor of Lajitas is an alcoholic goat named Clay Henry.

. . . If you give the mayor a longneck bottle of beer, he’ll swig it — just like most of his constituents. The Sober Party ran a canine against him in the last election, but it didn’t have a dog’s chance.

So first thing one morning just a few months ago, Steve Houston, the county attorney, gets a call from Richard Hill, constable in Lajitas, announcing they’re dealing with a serious situation: Someone castrated the mayor. A vet is en route at high speed from Alpine, but it’s unclear whether the goat will live or not. Local feelings were running high against the perps. Some felt there was danger of a possible lynch mob. Constable Hill got right on it.

As it happened, there was a Mexican maid cleaning one of those houses in Lajitas owned by some rich guy who lives in Houston, and while cleaning the fridge, she finds a bag containing what looks like a pair of huevos. Thinking nothing of it, she puts the evidence in the garbage, which goes to the dumpster. But after hearing of the dastardly attack on the mayor, she reports the suspicious occurrence to the constable, who then heroically goes through the garbage in the dumpster until he finds the smoking goat gonads. . . .

The main alleged perp is from a nearby town with a bad reputation (not Terlingua), and this is where a certain class element enters the story, giving it Dreiserian overtones.

[T]his rich guy asks the perps if he can get a beer from their stash, and they oblige. Then he takes their perfectly good green-bottle beer and gives it to the goat, which the alleged perp feels is an insult. Why he decided to take his revenge on the goat is unclear, except they were all pretty drunked up, according to several sources.

The perp is charged with torturing an animal and possession of a deadly weapon. County Attorney Houston and District Attorney Frank Brown tried to figure out a way to charge the guy with injury to a public official,  . . . but they couldn’t get Clay Henry fit the legal definition of “person.”

Of course, she manages to see the big picture as well:

We now pause for a point of border law enforcement that needs to be made more forcefully to the nincompoops at the Department of Justice in Washington. There is some pressure from up there for the local laws to get involved in immigration enforcement. The reason this is a terrible idea is because if calling 911 is the same as calling La Migra, illegal workers won’t call to report crimes, leaving them even more vulnerable to human predators than they already are. The case of this upstanding non-citizen who found the mayor’s privates is but one example of what wouldn’t happen if the fools in Washington had their way.

“Dreiserian overtones” . . . God, I love Molly Ivins.

UPDATE:

After a day and a half of deliberations, a 12-member jury  of Brewster County residents deadlocked today in the trial of a  Del Rio man charged with performing a drunken castration of the  honorary mayor of Lajitas, a goat known as Clay Henry III.

Officials with the 394th District Clerk’s office in Alpine announced the deadlock today in the trial of Jim Bob Hargrove, who was charged with the castration of the goat last fall, after a beer he had been drinking was reportedly given to movie actress Anne Archer to feed to Clay Henry at the Lajitas Mercantile Store.

Hargrove will have to be re-tried, since the three-day trial ended up with a “hung jury” according to a spokesperson in the District Clerk’s office. . . .

District Attorney Frank Brown, who is prosecuting the case, said Lajitas resort owner Steve Smith got a beer from Hargrove . . . . Archer then reportedly fed the beer to the goat.

Hargrove was said to have gotten mad at the transfer of suds and “stewed all day” over the insult, only to return later with a paring knife.

“He want to damage Smith,” said Brown in his closing comments to the jury. “It was like a cat bringing home a bird and leaving it on the back porch.”

“It was done to hurt Clay Henry, the icon and mascot of Lajitas,” said Brown.

These charges were supported by Eleanor Webb, an employee for the Lajitas Mercantile, who said she overheard Hargrove say the “goat ought to be castrated.”

In an effort to clear his client from the animal cruelty charge, Comstock attorney Martin Underwood . . . painted Smith as vindictive schemer intent on driving Hargrove out of the resort community, which is located along the Rio Grande west of Big Bend National Park. The defense sought to establish that Hargrove was framed by Smith and that Smith’s operatives castrated the goat and attempted to implicate Hargrove by means of circumstantial evidence.

Ah . . . Texas.

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