A North Texas sheriff has won reelection amid a surge of deaths at his jail, allegations of misconduct and cover-ups among staff, and warnings from a state regulatory agency that his office has violated state law by failing to commission outside investigations into numerous deaths on his watch, Bolts Magazine reports. In Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, Republican sheriff Bill Waybourn secured his win over Patrick Moses, a reverend and retired federal law enforcement official, with 54 to 46 percent of the vote. The race had been dominated by the high number of jail deaths during Waybourn’s tenure, with at least 65 people dying since he came to office in 2017, compared to 25 deaths in the jail in the eight years that preceded him. Local advocates and family members have protested outside the jail and filled county commissioners meetings in recent years to demand action from elected officials and basic information about how their loved ones died. Waybourn’s local critics have long accused the Trump-aligned sheriff of neglecting his duties at home in pursuit of right-wing celebrity.
A campaign ad from Waybourn this cycle touted that he is “enforcing deportations, working with ICE, and building a wall around Tarrant County.” Waybourn’s win was part of a rightward shift in Tarrant County, statewide, and nationally. The most populous GOP-controlled county in the U.S. narrowly voted for Joe Biden in 2020, but lurched right again with the election in 2022 of a far-right county executive who has reshaped local government. Crisis conditions at the Tarrant County jail began to dominate local headlines under Waybourn, who first won office in 2016. The county has been forced to pay out millions of dollars in recent years to settle lawsuits alleging horrific treatment of vulnerable people in his jail—including a pregnant woman who gave birth alone in a cell to a baby who would later die, a man with seizure disorder who died in his cell and wasn’t found for hours because guards lied about doing mandatory cell checks, and a woman with severe mental illness who died of apparent dehydration after months in the jail. s.
Comments