A Frightening New Diversity of Crime
Before all the change, crime mostly consisted of a few white country meth-heads, two local police investigators who work in the area told me privately.
But now the crime is so different in the view of local old-timers like Rollins and Walker that they welcomed news that their grown children would flee Liberty County.
The Rollins’ two grown children sold out in 2020 and fled with their own young families as part of an exodus of originals chasing the quiet to just about anywhere else “because of the traffic, the people, the shooting, the wrecks, and the thieving”, Rollins said.
“They got scared,” he said of the kids. “They wasn’t raised in all that.”
In June 2022, a Liberty County dog
brought home a human hand, which led to the discovery of a badly decomposed body of a man who had been buried with his gun. Police couldn’t identify the corpse and were left to post photos of the clothing in hopes someone would recognize them.
In September 2022, passersby in Colony Ridge found the body of a 16-year-old Honduran girl who’d been shot to death and dumped in a ditch by the side of a road, still wearing her uniform from her
work bussing tables at a local restaurant. Gang unit police
arrested three foreign nationals, all under 21, and charged them with the murder of Emily Rodriguez-Avila,
citing “gang overtones” as a motive. The family shipped her body back to Honduras for burial.
Some crime has proven especially twisted relative to the area’s past.
In 2020, for instance, an illegal alien from Mexico who settled in Colony Ridge chained two house cleaners to a bed and sexually assaulted them in a blackmail scheme during which he took nude photos. The nightmare ended when one of the women attempted an escape in her vehicle but didn’t make it; her assailant managed to shoot her to death and set her car on fire with her inside before fleeing back to Mexico. Border Patrol caught him trying to cross again in California a short time later.
In 2016, owners of a Colony Ridge lot who were clearing it of brush discovered the decomposing remains of a single mother of five children named Esmeralda Pargas-Nunez, 42, who’d been reported missing a month earlier. It took two years, but homicide detectives tracked down her alleged killer to Houston in 2018, another woman named Sabrina Olarosa Garcia, and charged her with murder. This was evidently part of a kidnapping scheme in Houston where the alleged murderer first lured her victim to a meeting.
Mexican Cartels Come to Town
The Gulf and Sinaloa Cartels invested in Colony Ridge from its earliest inception, they said, financing lots for local operatives to run safe houses through which they move smuggled drugs and people from the border to interior America. They were using them still to smuggle people coming in under Biden.
Evidence of cartel involvement dates to the earliest days of the illegal-alien settlement boom. To at least 2013, when federal, state, and local investigators raided a Mexican drug cartel’s marijuana grow operation on 300 acres in Liberty County, finding explosives, 6,000 marijuana plants, worker bunk houses, and guard towers. Local police at the time called it the “largest and most sophisticated marijuana-growing operation” in the county’s history.
In July 2021, the DEA broke that dubious record with the new biggest drug bust in Liberty County history with a raid that broke up a multimillion-dollar methamphetamine manufacturing lab operating inside one of the Colony Ridge dwellings.
During a recent trip, a police investigator drove me around several town neighborhoods pointing out high-end brick homes where cartel management figures lived before they were busted or moved away.
This kind of criminality grew so problematic by 2021 that the fearful town leaders of Plum Grove established a first police department that works in concert with two county-paid bilingual constables that Liberty County funded to exclusively patrol Colony Ridge.
The addition of several police officers amounts to a drop in the ocean, one officer from the region told me. Drive-by shootings, stealing, and drug trafficking are rampant, victimizing mostly the new community.
“It’s a cluster f**k over there and it’s only getting worse,” said the officer, who was not authorized to speak publicly. “It’s its own closed community out there, and the Salvadorans, Ecuadorans, South Americans ... they really clique up.”
Indeed, a five-month-long gang and narcotics investigation by the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office came to a dramatic end in December 2021 with the arrest of two 15-year-old boys and a 17-year-old boy who were part of a violent drug-trafficking racket in Colony Ridge.
After three or four months where the boys would engage in gun battles with drug buyers who wouldn’t pay on time, local police had to investigate. When the day came to make arrests, the armed 17-year-old rammed a police car during a pell-mell car chase near Plum Grove, fled home, and barricaded himself in his house until a SWAT unit had to extract him and a girlfriend inside, who also was arrested amid drugs that were found.
There’s no letup in sight. In April 2023, local deputies
found the bodies of two middle school students riddled with bullets in a car near Plum Grove, evidently the latest victims in a spate of drug-trafficking-related violence. Their names were Cesar Christopher Trochez-Maravilla, 15, and Adiel Garcia Aguirre, 14.
If those who committed these crimes were in the country illegally, none of this should have happened. In that vein, Liberty County also is a microcosm of a vast scale of unnecessary crime that is already here with much more on the way to communities across America.