On an August day in Fort Worth, when the temperature will reach the high 90s before noon, Tiffany Burks is counting door hangers. Volunteers have gathered at Portico Coffee in the Northside neighborhood, and Burks, the Democratic candidate for Tarrant County District Attorney, is reviewing logistics before a block walk. Her choice of venue was strategic: In the 1930s, banks, insurance companies and housing authorities “redlined” Fort Worth, denying loans to people in neighborhoods like Northside based on race. The practice helped entrench racial and economic segregation in Fort Worth, with effects that continue to shape where people live and if they can accumulate wealth. 

As Burks sees it, the redlining also helped create long-term “disillusionment” in government. 

“I go and I talk to people and I ask them, ‘Who is your DA?’ And they have no idea,” said Burks. That’s why she and her volunteers are “going into areas where people don’t normally go, to try to let them know that we really do care about Northside.” While 40 percent of Tarrant County’s population is white, 92 percent of the death sentences sought by prosecutors since 2012 have been against people of color. The decision on which charges to file and when to pursue the death penalty lies with the DA’s office. 

Burks, who worked in that office as a prosecutor from 1999 to 2021, previously ran for the top job in 2022 against Republican candidate Phil Sorrells, who beat her by about 6 points. She says Sorrells is part of an “old boys network” that doesn’t work for the people they’re elected to represent. Burks wants to create a new diversion unit within the DA’s office that connects people struggling with addiction and homelessness to services rather than repeatedly jailing them. 

The DA hopeful frequently campaigns with fellow Democrats Nydia Cárdenas and Alisa Simmons, who are both running for spots on the commissioners court. Similar to Burks, Cárdenas meets many people who don’t know that the governing body handles county finances, elections, budgets and taxes. Voters will ask her, “Oh, is that the one where the guy kicks everybody out and he’s rude?’” She tells them, “yes, that’s the one.”

County Judge Tim O’Hare—the Republican leader of the court and the guy who “kicks everybody out”—has spent years making it more difficult for people to vote. That includes a September vote in which the judge and his two fellow Republicans on the five-person court approved just 224 voting locations, down from 316 in 2022. In a public meeting that ran over eight hours, incensed speakers pointed out that the move would adversely impact voters of color. The civic dissent that has arisen in response has often gone viral online, drawing new levels of attention to the oft-overlooked machinations of county government in the region. 

“Come November, you better find yourself a new job,” a man tells Republicans on the court in one video that earned over 87,000 likes on Instagram. Similar videos have darker endings: A local podcaster uses the word “bullshit” and is thrown out of a meeting (and later jailed). Lon Burnham, a former Democratic state rep, was dragged out of a meeting (and also jailed). 

(Shutterstock)

Burks and her fellow Dems know that translating widespread frustration into votes will be key to any wins they pick up in Tarrant County, where local politics are widely influenced by “the Fort Worth Way.” To people happy with their city, that old moniker conveys a folksy, tourist-friendly charm. To the people who feel like they are on the outside looking in, it conveys a conservative status quo.  

Now, the latter group may be angrier and more organized than ever. 

“In 2026, the numbers are just exponentially greater in the amount of people who are organized, who are active and who are on the ground working to bring about change in our leadership,” said Pamela Young, a local criminal justice organizer. “I think it’s a cumulative effect of all of the horrendous things that our current leadership has done, and the leadership that we’ve had over the last several decades in Tarrant County.”

There have been some signs of Democratic momentum. Beto O’Rourke won Tarrant County in 2018, as did Joe Biden in 2020, and Colin Allred in 2024. But the momentum rarely reaches further down the ballot to county government posts; in fact, a Democrat hasn’t served as county judge here since the mid-1980s.

At the same time, politicians like Bo French and institutions like Mercy Culture have helped turn Tarrant County into a hotbed of extremism.

Brian Mayes, a longtime GOP strategist, says “everybody’s looking at Tarrant County” as an example of how anger at Republicans could lead to Democratic victories. “Over the last decade, what you’re finding is every Republican is so worried about being primaried by the Tim Dunns of the world that they’re voting against their own interest,” Mayes said. 

Cárdenas says there was already momentum at the backs of local Dems even before Republicans on the commissioners court slashed voting locations and limited the time and topics allowed during public comment. These “crazy things,” as she calls them, add more fuel to what she describes as a highly collaborative campaign cycle for Tarrant Dems, where candidates up and down the ballot are co-hosting events and sharing volunteers and talking points. Candidates are focused on affordability, education and the argument that the current crop of leaders are answering to billionaire donors while Tarrant County deals with one crisis after another. 

For example, Burks has pledged to more closely investigate the high number of deaths in Tarrant County Jail. Over 80 people have died at the jail since Sheriff Bill Waybourn took office in 2017, and DA Phil Sorrells has argued that not every death needs an outside investigation. In an interview with the Observer, Cárdenas echoed Burks, criticizing how Tarrant County leadership uses the jail “as a hammer” to address crises like mental health and addiction. 

“Every time Tim O’Hare cuts our polling locations, or every time Bo French says something awful on Twitter, I get more volunteers,” said Allison Campolo, chair of the Tarrant County Democratic Party. The result is a record-breaking number of volunteers and, for the first time in eight years, more local precinct chairs than the Republican Party, Campolo said

Members of the Tarrant County Commissioners Court during a contentious public meeting on proposed polling location closures in August. (Tarrant County Commissioners Court livestream)

Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston, adds that there are other factors—beyond palpable anger—that bode well for local Dems. Tarrant County becoming more racially and ethnically diverse gives Democrats “an opportunity to build a stronger, more durable coalition,” he said. He also believes that “suburban political change” is working in Democrats’ favor. 

“College-educated and increasingly diverse suburban electorates in Tarrant County are less reflexively Republican than the Tarrant County electorate of 10 to 20 years ago,” Rottinghaus said. 

Mayes, the GOP strategist, echoed that point, saying that he’s long suspected Republican mothers would “start turning” when they see their local schools get underfunded. He says his firm’s polling on local school bonds has found that Republican parents in typically GOP-leaning districts agree that their schools need more funding.

Indeed, an anti-Republican backlash has already surfaced in Tarrant County school board races. In May 2025, all three Mansfield Independent School District (ISD) incumbents backed by the far-right Patriot Mobile lost their reelection bids, while conservative candidates suffered additional defeats in Arlington, Grapevine-Colleyville and Keller ISDs. 

Mayes said that parents don’t necessarily “compartmentalize” their frustration when it comes to public schools being affected. This means they may not turn out to vote Republican in races that ostensibly have little to do with education. “The issue isn’t whether a DA or county commissioner directly controls school funding,” he said. “It’s the extreme and growing intensity of the frustration brewing, and whether that frustration begins to affect how female Republican voters, moms and grandmothers, feel about the Republican Party more broadly.”

He argues that the people visibly energized by the conservative movement don’t necessarily reflect the younger parents who are most invested in their local schools. “If you look at these rallies with the far right, it’s never a 35-year-old mom. It looks like a casino on a weekday in Shreveport, right? It’s oxygen tanks and walkers, man.”

The first signal of a possible blue wave came in January, when local union leader and machinist Taylor Rehmet pulled off an upset over right-wing GOP candidate Leigh Wambsganss, a Patriot Mobile exec, in a special election runoff for an open state senate district. His 14-point win marked a 31-point swing from when Trump carried the seat by 17 points in 2024. Now, Rehmet and Wambsganss are facing off again to determine who will hold the seat for a full term.

At a recent fundraiser in Austin, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick—who handpicked Wambsganns for the seat—warned members of the Senate’s Republican caucus that polls had her trailing Rehmet by 5 points, according to Quorum Report. 

At his campaign kickoff in August, Rehmet laid out his plan: get schools and teachers more funding from the state by increasing the state’s share of the public education budget, which would also allow more sustainable property tax relief at the local level. “I know a lot of you are feeling the squeeze of this affordability, because I am,” he told a crowd of roughly 200 people at a union hall across the street from a Lockheed Martin facility in White Settlement, about 15 minutes west of downtown Fort Worth. 

(Texas Observer staff)

Emad Salem, a local precinct chair and member of the Muslim Democratic Caucus, said he believes Tarrant County residents are motivated, in part, by the “horrible things” the Trump administration and its allies are doing, including rampant immigration arrests of people with no criminal records. But he also believes Rehmet and other local contenders, including Burks, are strong candidates. “He’s talking about making life more affordable and taking care of our students,” Salem said of Rehmet. “It doesn’t get more ‘common-sense’ than that.” 

Despite the apparent wind behind Tarrant Dems’ backs, they are still underfunded compared to the county’s Republican machine. For instance, Cárdenas had roughly 5 percent—about $14,000 total—of Manny Ramirez’s cash on hand as of mid-July, the most recent campaign finance report available. At that same point in time, O’Hare had 10 times as much cash on hand as his Democratic challenger, Alisa Simmons, with more than $700,000 to Simmons’ $67,000. Among O’Hare’s many PAC contributors is the Accountable Government Fund, a PAC funded by the Bass family, who have held massive political and economic influence in Fort Worth for many decades. 

Karla Palomares, a local community organizer, said she has talked to many down-ballot candidates who don’t feel supported by the Texas Democratic Party. 

“A lot of money is still getting stuck at the top of the ticket, especially with Talarico,” she said. “Candidates further down the ballot on the Democratic side are struggling to raise funds. And there is still not enough support coming from the state party and the DNC overall.” 

For his part, Kendall Scudder, the chair of the Texas Democratic Party, says the state party itself needs more funding, even as the Democratic National Committee has invested more in Texas. Specifically, Scudder said TDP is receiving an additional $5,000 per month this cycle from the DNC, which increased its regular monthly allocation from $12,000 to $17,000. 

But that’s a drop in the bucket for a massive state like Texas. “So while I’m grateful for the investments that we have gotten, I will just say we’re going to do this on our own if we have to,” Scudder added. “And I’m not sitting around and waiting for the national folks to decide they’re going to swoop in and help.”

In an interview with the Observer, Simmons was bullish about the prospect of a “blue wave” because, as she puts it, “People are tired of the corruption we’ve been seeing here in Tarrant County under this current county judge colleague that I have.” 

She adds that everything about her and her fellow Dems’ campaigns has been “planned, strategic and intentional,” especially when it comes to collaborating with each other. She and her team have been working alongside Nathan Smith, a former Simmons staffer now running for district clerk, as well as county clerk candidate Lydia Bean and Jared Williams, who is running to replace Simmons as she vies for the top seat on the commissioners court.

O’Hare’s campaign did not respond to questions for this story, nor did Phil Sorrells. But there are signs O’Hare is trying to soften his public image. In a recent campaign ad featuring his daughters, he ditched the culture wars for a message about being budget-conscious. 

In mid-September, the county judge attended a meeting held by the far-right group True Texas Project to say that he is “sounding the alarm” on a possible rash of Democratic victories this November. 

“They’re not going to keep you safer,” O’Hare said of Democrats. “They’re not going to cut your taxes.” During his speech, two people stood up to protest O’Hare’s slashing of voting locations. 

“Why don’t you want people to vote, Tim?” one man asked. 

“Tim, is voter suppression your newest campaign tactic?” a woman chimed in.

Both people were promptly removed from the room. 

The post Inside Downballot Dems’ Effort to Flip Texas’ Key County Battleground appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The first thing you see when you walk in is a dark wooden dresser covered with a white lace cloth, dozens of family photographs lying among marigold flowers, a rosary, an old pair of glasses, and a small statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Some photos are black-and-white; others have faded with time. They are layers of memory built up across generations. This is how Casa de Cultura: The Living Archive begins, the residency of photographer Violeta Álvarez at the Fresh Arts gallery inside Winter Street Studios, a large art complex in Houston.

Álvarez has built her career around music photography. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone and Pitchfork. Portraits of Bad Bunny and Willie Nelson hang in her studio. But this time she’s turned the camera inward, toward her own roots. Born in Texas to Mexican parents, Álvarez set out to explore the experiences that connect immigrant families, starting with her own family’s story.

(Violeta Álvarez)

The residency, which occupied the gallery for eight weeks in July and August, is built around two central exhibitions: Luz y Sombra (Light and Shadow), dedicated to her music photography, and Con Sangre y Corazón (With Blood and Heart), a series of portraits made during live sessions open to the community.

But the real heart of the project lies in what people left behind. Álvarez invited visitors to bring something that mattered to them to include in their portrait sessions, and a standing sign at the community shrine welcomes anyone to add a photo of a loved one who has passed away. A father’s hat, a childhood picture, a statue that belonged to someone’s mother.

“Some people never stepped in front of the camera. Instead, they brought personal items and shared their stories that way,” Álvarez says.

This has become a living archive of migration within the city.

Álvarez was 6 when her mother gave her her first camera, a Kodak 110. She says her mother came to the United States fleeing oppression and violence: “She wasn’t born here, but she belongs, just like anyone who comes to this country does.” For years, Álvarez’s mother worked as a house cleaner, while undocumented.

Meanwhile, young Violeta spent her days at the library searching for Latino role models, someone who looked like her behind the camera. She answers my questions in a loose, code-switching Spanish-English, sentences starting in one language and finishing in the other. “I always wanted to photograph our culture, you know? I wanted to go look for our history. But there wasn’t anyone like me—people of color, especially women—taking those kind of photos.”

She started photographing music performances as a teenager, but she carried that absence of a visual lineage with her for years, long before Casa de Cultura.

Álvarez says the idea for a project like this stayed with her for “her whole life,” but the project took shape during Trump’s first term, when she saw a “Mass Deportation” sign on TV during a Republican conference. “That made me very nervous,” she says. But she didn’t know how to channel it. She began applying for grants and residencies in 2018. Ironically, amid what many now call a migration crisis, this was the first time one of her proposals had been accepted.

Petite and dressed head to toe in black, Álvarez has almond-shaped eyes and an unassuming warmth. During the exhibition’s first month, she arrived at the gallery around 11 a.m. to set up the studio before the photo sessions, which she held on Saturdays and Sundays. People came in while visitors were touring the exhibition, so taking portraits itself became part of the public experience.

The day I visited, she was constantly in motion—greeting visitors, posing for a photo here, pulling out her phone there to capture people taking in the exhibit, imagery she said she uses for her Instagram.

When someone didn’t know what to do in front of the camera, Álvarez says she worked with them at their own pace: She’d ask them to dance or try a pose, and show them the photo right away so they could choose which one they wanted for the exhibition. One of those sessions, for example, was with a woman who had lost her hair to cancer treatment. They played music by her favorite band, and she gradually let go in front of the lens. She cried too.

“I think for some people, the photos were also a way of healing,” Álvarez says.

On an orange-painted wall, a sign reads “Community Shrine,” inviting visitors to bring a photo of a deceased loved one. Below it sits a wooden chair with a sign: “Reserved. In memory of the millions of lives lost to genocide & violence by [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] ICE & inhumane immigration policies.”

No one is allowed to sit there.

Among the photographs placed next to the chair is one of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the 52-year-old Mexican man an ICE agent shot and killed on July 7 in Houston while he was driving his construction crew to work. The case sparked protests across the state and remains under investigation.

A sign taped up in Álvarez’s studio states plainly that ICE is not allowed inside.

(Violeta Álvarez)

Meanwhile, the living archive of migration has slowly grown, drawing in local cultural figures as well. Isaac Rodríguez, founder of the cultural collective Chicano Boulevard, and collaborator Rob Apodaca brought turntables from Tejas Got Soul, a festival dedicated to preserving the golden era of Chicano soul music. Apodaca also added family photos and objects tied to his Yaqui heritage. Musician Nick Gaitan brought an accordion and an upright bass. On one wall, visitors themselves have left handwritten messages. Debora S.T.: “We deserve to be seen as more than headlines of tragedy.” Rosario: “I feel I walk away with a beautiful experience and with a peace I didn’t realize I was missing.”

Álvarez says: “Belonging isn’t just about being born somewhere. It’s about the stories and community you build and uncover along the way.”

That search for belonging sustains the whole project. Álvarez wants Casa de Cultura to humanize her community in the face of a public discourse that reduces it to numbers, laws, and headlines. “Art puts a face and a name where there’s usually just a statistic,” she says.

Unlike political discourse, she adds, art forces you to slow down—to sit with one specific person’s story, even if only for a moment. It’s an urgency she lives with every day, she says, starting with her own mother: Every time her mother, now a naturalized U.S. citizen, leaves the house, Álvarez fears something might happen, because “ICE doesn’t care if you’re a citizen or not.”

That’s why Álvarez doesn’t want the archive to end when the gallery closes. She hopes it finds a permanent home in a library, museum, or institution dedicated to Latin American history and that it keeps growing the way a family grows. She imagines that, 20 years from now, someone will find a portrait of their aunt there, or an object that belonged to their grandmother, and feel the same sense of belonging she set out to create in the first place.

“I hope it becomes proof that we were here,” she says. “That our joy, our grief, our music, our faith—all of it existed and mattered, even in a time when so much tried to reduce us to numbers.”

The post Houston’s ‘Living Archive’ of Migration appeared first on The Texas Observer.

When they found Adrian Martinez in his room at Schofield Barracks, his things had already been packed in boxes. His trip to Houston—paid for with government funds—was booked: United Airlines Flight 252, scheduled to depart Honolulu two days later on October 18, 2024, and arrive the following morning at George Bush Intercontinental Airport. His parents and brother planned to be outside Terminal C to welcome him home.

 He was only 22, with heavy eyelids, an angular face, and curly black hair. He stood 5 feet, 11 inches tall, but in photos, his slender body swam inside his dark blue uniform. Long sleeves covered tattoos, including the words “All my heroes are dead” on his left forearm.

Military police found him in the closet, “still hanging by his neck,” a report shows. He was wearing gray pants and a blood-stained white T-shirt.

By the time investigators arrived, emergency medical responders had already taken the body down and pronounced Martinez deceased. The building had no security cameras. Army investigators took photos and measurements, conducted interviews, and reviewed medical records, according to his family.

The Army’s investigation, completed seven months later and approved by a two-star general, concluded that Martinez had taken his own life. He was, the investigation found, “not mentally sound,” and his death occurred in the line of duty. Records show that the medical examiner in Honolulu reviewed information supplied by the military and performed an external examination, not an autopsy, before ruling Martinez’s death a suicide.

Other circumstantial evidence in Martinez’s military case file points toward suicide, but his relatives in Texas don’t believe he took his own life. They question why Martinez would have hanged himself from a rod so near the ground that he could have easily stood up to save his life. They fear he could have been the victim of foul play—and they hired their own expert to perform an autopsy.

He was a beloved brother and son, and they believe he was eager to go home. He had that plane ticket, a planned move, and ideas of helping his father with his apartment-repair business. He’d also talked about looking for work as a chef and had promised his mother they would bake a Russian cake together.

“He had many plans,” his mother, Verónica Zaldo, said. “And he had un chorro de ganas to cook.”

For two years, his grieving family has gathered information, and they immediately noticed that the military’s death investigation report omitted what they consider the most significant factor: Martinez was a whistleblower.

Medals, patches, and ribbons alongside family photos and cookbooks belonging to Martinez

He’d reported being sexually assaulted by another soldier in the Philippines in 2022, his relatives said, and that investigation was completed the year prior to his death. His complaint was found credible, an investigator told the family, and the accused officer left the Army. 

Yet, according to their report, death investigators hadn’t considered the possibility that Martinez could have been targeted for retribution—though in his wallet when he died, he had a note documenting an odd warning he’d received from a superior officer after going to a hospital for mental healthcare.

 The tragic sequence of events between Martinez’s reported assault and his unnatural death is documented in military records, along with text messages and other information painstakingly gathered by his family and shared with the Texas Observer. Those records provide a detailed account of how Martinez, previously lauded for his service, felt abandoned—and at times attacked—by the Army after coming forward about his assault. They don’t disprove the government’s conclusions about his cause of death, but they do raise serious questions about how Martinez was treated as he pursued military justice and, if he did take his own life, how and why he arrived at that precipice.

Martinez grew up in the Clear Lake area of Houston, between the eponymous lake and the massive NASA complex with his parents, Rafael Martínez and Zaldo, natives of Mexico, and his older brother, who shares his father’s first name and goes by Rafa.

At 8, Martinez once got bored of playing with a friend his age because the other kid “didn’t know anything about politics,” he told his mother. “That’s when I realized he wasn’t like other kids,” Zaldo told the Observer in Spanish.

 During his teens, he read more than 100 books, his father said. Then, through a culinary arts program at Clear Springs High School, Martinez studied under a chef who’d run a Michelin-starred restaurant. “I realized he had enough talent to become a great chef,” Rafael recalled.

 Then, at 17, Martinez suddenly decided to join the U.S. Army.

 His father objected. He was concerned partly because of what he’d read about Vanessa Guillén, another Mexican American and native Texan who’d joined the Army, then been sexually harassed at Fort Hood and killed in April 2020. The military’s failure to immediately investigate sparked a national scandal, cited by advocates as evidence of systemic failures that left young, lower-ranking soldiers vulnerable inside the Army, especially women, LGBTQ+ members, and those from working-class or immigrant families. 

No one talked about it openly, but everyone worried about how Martinez might be treated as a bisexual teenager. By the time he enlisted in mid-2020, the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy—the rule that long forced service members to hide their sexuality—had been gone for nearly a decade. On paper, nothing prevented Martinez from being himself. 

But the policy’s 2011 repeal didn’t eliminate prejudice. An analysis of Department of Defense Health Related Behaviors Survey data in 2015 found that LGBTQ+ service members reported higher levels of moderate or severe depression and self-harm than their peers. Five years later, similar patterns persisted. A 2020 study published in Military Medicine found that LGBTQ+ soldiers reported higher rates of anxiety, post‑traumatic stress symptoms, and suicidality.

Veronica Zaldo, mother of Adrian Martinez, in her Houston-area home in June

Martinez argued that what happened to Guillén was an isolated incident and that the Army would provide valuable experience. He wanted to go into politics, and serving his country would help. He added that if his parents didn’t sign the consent form, he’d enlist at 18.

Rafael signed. Zaldo signed. Rafael asked only that Martinez continue to cook, hoping that advice might keep him safe. “Look, if you’re going to go, at least go to the kitchen, because if something happens, there’s a better chance that they’ll keep you there and won’t send you to the front,” Rafael told his son. 

On the day his parents bid him farewell for boot camp, Martinez “was in tears,” Rafael said. “That’s when he started to feel that, well, his life was going to be different.”

For 10 weeks that summer, Martinez slept in the woods, threw grenades, and marched for miles carrying up to 35 pounds of equipment at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. He completed Basic Combat Training on August 27. 

Three months later, he finished the Culinary Specialist Course at Fort Lee, Virginia. The kid who’d learned to cook for four in a small apartment could now feed 800 soldiers in the field. He finished with a grade of 95.8 out of 100, one of the best in his class. The Army described him as having an “outstanding display of professionalism and … [a] high degree of technical skills.” 

He received a diploma with a gold seal that read “honor graduate.”

Near the end of 2020, Martinez, then 18, arrived at Schofield Barracks, a base on Oahu Island that’s surrounded by mountains and about 23 miles from Honolulu. It’s the Army’s largest base in Hawaii. He’d been assigned to the Hotel Forward Support Company, the support unit for the 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, known as the “Wolfhounds.”

Martinez spent two years as an enlisted cook, competing in culinary tournaments yet still dreaming of the special forces. Whenever he could, he sent home photos, mostly selfies of him cooking. In early snapshots, he looked happy—like his dreams had come true, his mother said.

 In April 2022, he received an achievement medal for “exceptional” performance: “His actions are in keeping with the finest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself,” it read.

Then, something occurred during a training trip to the Philippines that year that Martinez described to his relatives only in broad terms: A noncommissioned officer in his unit had sexually assaulted him. He offered no details and identified his attacker only by the nickname “El Chino.” 

Rafa remembers that when his brother returned, “He was like a different person.”

Martinez had lost his silly sense of humor. “He became very distant,” his mother said. In a phone call, Martinez declared he was not going to reenlist, without explanation. The official separation date for his four-year contract was November 8, 2024. 

“ADRIAN SHOULD HAVE HAD ACCESS TO A PROCESS THAT WAS INDEPENDENT, TRAUMA-INFORMED, AND TRANSPARENT.”

Military records suggest that after the 2022 trip, Martinez began suffering from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. He was drinking heavily and once mentioned the idea of swimming out to sea to end his life. On May 12, 2022, military police found him under the influence of alcohol, with a rope tied into a noose in his room. He had called a crisis hotline himself.

Martinez’s response was not atypical. Veterans with a history of military sexual trauma face a substantially higher risk of suicide. The risk is around 1.7 times higher for men and more than two times higher for women, according to a 2016 study of Veterans Health Administration records. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’s 2022 suicide-prevention report found that veterans with such histories also suffered higher rates of depression, PTSD, and substance abuse. 

 That May, Martinez was admitted to Tripler Army Medical Center, the largest military hospital in the Pacific, and diagnosed with alcohol use disorder. He reached out to his family days later.

In that call, he told his father he’d decided to blow the whistle. 

Despite everything, he kept pushing himself. Martinez completed substance abuse treatment in November. In December, he finished the Army’s Air Assault Course, which teaches soldiers how to load, move with, and rappel from helicopters, some of the Army’s toughest training.

His family believed he trusted the military’s investigative system to deliver justice.

In February 2023, Martinez filed a sexual harassment complaint against the noncommissioned officer. By then, reforms known as the I Am Vanessa Guillén Act had been in effect for more than a year. 

Guillén had been the victim of sexual harassment before being murdered, a tragedy that became the symbol of what happens when the military fails to protect a soldier from abuse. The law that bore her name was meant to reform and improve the process Martinez was about to go through.

Guy Womack, a veteran, former military judge, and defense attorney in Houston who’s spent four decades working on military justice cases, said the new law “took the investigation from the hands of the military commander and created the office of the chief special prosecutor.”

Under the reformed system, a neutral officer outside the complainant’s chain of command would investigate Martinez’s complaint, and a senior, independent judge advocate—not the unit commander—would decide whether to pursue prosecution. 

During that process, Womack said, a whistleblower and an alleged abuser are typically moved to different sections, different schedules, and sometimes different bases entirely: “They’re trying to keep them separate so that nothing more can happen, and also so that no witness could be intimidated.”

The law granted specific protections to Martinez as a complainant, protections that didn’t exist before Guillén’s case. He should have had access to victim support services and legal resources independent of his chain of command. And under the law, any adverse action against him that appeared connected to his report was supposed to trigger scrutiny.

“Adrian should have had access to a process that was independent, trauma-informed, and transparent,” said Josh Connolly, senior vice president at Protect Our Defenders and former chief of staff to U.S. Representative Jackie Speier, who helped spearhead the Guillén Act.

“TO WHOEVER READS OR HEARS THIS, I PRAY MY MEMORY DOESN’T FAIL…”

Instead, what happened to Martinez appears to fit a disturbing pattern, Connolly told the Observer. Too often, “a service member reports sexual assault, remains under the authority of the same institution that failed to protect them, and later faces adverse administrative or disciplinary action that can derail their career.”

Months after his death, Martinez’s parents were told that investigators substantiated their son’s complaint but never told them what his alleged attacker admitted to doing. A notice they finally received through the Houston office of U.S. Representative Sylvia Garcia said only that “appropriate action” had been taken. The letter, dated January 10, 2025, confirmed that both the command and the Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) had investigated Martinez’s complaint and closed the process in May 2023. The officer whom Martinez accused had, at some point, “separated from the Army.”

Based on the information his parents eventually received, Connolly said, “there are serious questions about whether” Martinez received the protections he deserved during that process. 

Martinez began to drink heavily in 2023 and later sought substance abuse treatment, according to the Army’s death investigation. Further, Martinez found himself the subject of a complaint months after the investigation into his report closed. 

In January 2024—just a month after he received an Army Achievement Medal for exceptional service—Martinez was accused of sending a text message to a fellow soldier “asking for inappropriate pictures” and of “wrongfully, without consent, grabb[ing] a soldier’s buttocks.” According to his family, he acknowledged sending the text but denied any non-consensual contact. 

On February 14, 2024, the Army issued a military protective order barring contact between Martinez and his accuser. On March 5, his brigade commander classified the harassment as “minor,” records show. His relatives, who eventually received those documents, were left to wonder whether Martinez had crossed a line with another soldier, perhaps under the influence of alcohol, or whether he’d been targeted for retribution because of his prior whistleblowing activity.

Martinez began working as an operations assistant in the battalion’s S3 section, under the command of Sergeant First Class Jacob T. Girard. The reassignment followed the protective order—the Army apparently followed protocol and gave him another assignment to separate him from his accuser.

Girard, his direct supervisor for nine months in 2024, defended Martinez in a September 5 letter. “In January of 2024, SPC Martinez was accused of sexual misconduct,” Girard wrote. “He has not shown any evidence of this type of behavior while serving directly for me.” He also praised Martinez’s “attention to detail and exceptional work ethic.”

On April 19, 2024, Martinez was hospitalized again, this time for mental distress and alcohol withdrawal. Tripler Army Medical Center admitted him for three days of treatment. Upon release, he was confronted by a superior officer whose behavior he found threatening, according to notes Martinez recorded on a piece of paper that he carried in his wallet until his death.

Martinez’s handwritten summary, based on a blurry photo of the original and a redacted Spanish translation provided to his family, says the higher-ranking officer claimed Martinez was faking his symptoms. The officer asked how it was possible that the hospital had discharged him if he was so sick. The officer also asked what exactly Martinez had told the doctors, which Martinez interpreted as a violation of medical privacy laws.

Martinez presented medical documentation to prove he wasn’t lying, including records of his diagnoses of alcohol withdrawal and his appointments with a counselor and the Army’s Substance Use Disorder Clinical Care program.

“Yes I did wrong in drinking this heavily, but I self-reported—I wanted help. Why did [name redacted] hammer in my problems!?” Martinez wrote, according to a photo of his summary.

Then the officer asked Martinez if he wanted to stay in the Army. If not, he said, he could get him out quickly.

“He obviously wanted me to state I wanted out the Army. [I don’t know] his intentions but I feel they were not pure,” Martinez wrote. 

Martinez continued that he believed the officer misused his position to extract this information in a hostile manner, causing him great emotional distress. “To whoever reads or hears this,” he wrote, “I pray my memory doesn’t fail—there are witnesses to this, and I may bring it to a higher level of the chain of command so that no one else suffers this indignity.”

In interviews, two military justice experts described such confrontations as common, though questionable, tactics. Although the Guillén Act requires independent scrutiny of any adverse action linked to a complaint, nothing in the family’s documents suggests this episode was reported or investigated prior to Martinez’s death.

Instead, Martinez folded his note and placed it in his wallet, where it was found six months later on his body. 

Rafael at his son’s grave in June

Medical instructions issued in April 2024 stated that Martinez should not be deployed, transferred, given temporary duty, or separated from the Army, and he should remain near a facility with behavioral health services. On July 19, a behavioral health provider confirmed that his alcohol and mental health issues were continuing.

Around that same time, the Army initiated proceedings to force him out before his term of duty ended in November.

On August 21, his company commander, Captain Cole Jacobs, handed Martinez an involuntary separation form, effective immediately. The Army was separating Martinez under an Army regulation for commission of a serious offense, related to the complaint filed against him in January 2024. 

On September 18, 2024, he was informed by letter that a superior would recommend his discharge be general, under honorable conditions. But his family has no evidence such a discharge was granted.

On that same date, Martinez signed a separate form called an Election of Rights, a document through which soldiers facing separation choose which legal protections to exercise or waive. The form included a right to consult an attorney. Martinez could have requested a military or civilian attorney paid for by the government. He could have requested a hearing and presented statements in his defense. Instead, he waived everything. 

It also read: “Have you filed an unrestricted report of sexual assault within 24 months of the initiation of separation action?” Martinez checked “No.” Perhaps he misunderstood the question. Or perhaps he knew that under Army regulations, an “unrestricted report of sexual assault” is different from the sexual harassment complaint he’d filed 19 months earlier.

Given his mental health, the Army’s acceptance of his decision to waive his rights appears improper, Connolly said. 

“Before a soldier waives legal rights in a separation proceeding, the Army should ensure the soldier understands the consequences of that waiver and has a meaningful opportunity to consult counsel,” Connolly said. “That is especially important when the soldier has a documented mental health diagnosis, has expressed suicidal ideation, and has previously reported sexual assault.” 

Martinez’s refusal of an attorney and his omission of his prior complaint, Connolly said, “raise serious concerns about whether the process was reliable, informed, or fair.”

The battalion’s physician assistant, Captain Kyle Mogensen, conducted Martinez’s official separation physical on September 9. He checked a box “normal” for a psychiatric evaluation field and another that said “is medically qualified.”

A separate mental health evaluation conducted the same day found “no evidence of mental defect, emotional illness, or psychiatric disorder of sufficient severity to warrant disposition through military medical channels,” per the Army’s investigation.

But on September 10, Martinez told the brigade psychologist that he “had a desire to fall asleep and not wake up.” On September 11, Martinez again expressed a desire to commit suicide to another soldier, who reported it. His last visit to behavioral health was September 12.

The Army’s Suicide Prevention Program requires commanders to identify soldiers at elevated risk and intervene. In principle, Womack said, the expectation is straightforward. “We expect all the services to immediately address any kind of depression, suicidal tendencies, any kind of behavior that could be self-destructive,” he said. “We expect the command to identify that and act on it immediately and try to get aid.”

But in the critical weeks prior to his departure, Martinez does not appear either to have been monitored or hospitalized.

On September 27, Martinez sold his car. Then he went on what the military calls “terminal leave” from September 29 to October 18.

On October 1, the Army issued new separation orders, accelerating his planned departure date by two weeks, to October 18, the date of his Houston flight. Those orders included a new instruction: The unit commander was supposed to assign a noncommissioned officer of grade E-5 or above to “escort Martinez while out‑processing.”

 The Army’s Line of Duty investigation, completed seven months after his death, documented a command failure during those weeks: “No accountability or check-in procedure was in place for SPC Martinez while he was on terminal leave.”

On October 2, the rest of his unit deployed to the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center on a different island; Martinez was assigned to stay behind. But the officer in charge of that rear detachment did not know Martinez and later told investigators he received no information and no instructions about him.

On October 6, a fellow soldier spoke with Martinez outside the shop on base. Martinez said he was upset about his separation but eager to return to Texas. 

The night of Sunday, October 13, in Hawaii—early Monday, October 14, in Houston because of the five-hour time difference—Martinez made five phone calls between 10:23 and 10:41 p.m. to Texas.

Neither his family nor public or military records explain why. Martinez seems to have been under the apparently mistaken belief that he was in some kind of trouble in Houston.

The first call went to the Houston Police Department (HPD). The second to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. The third, again to HPD, lasted four minutes. In a recording the family later obtained, Martinez asks about a supposed criminal case or warrant—though no criminal case in the Harris County district clerk’s database names him.

The operator directed him to HPD’s Clear Lake Division. He made two more calls, one that lasted seven minutes.

Close to 11 p.m. Hawaii time—4 a.m. in Houston—Martinez texted Rafa, who was still up watching a boxing match. “[Not gonna lie] man, I’m anxious [as fuck] about getting out, haven’t even done my resume yet. Can’t seem to focus,” Martinez wrote.

Rafa told him that was normal, and after leaving the base in Hawaii, his anxiety would disappear.

“Yeah, I figured as much,” Martinez replied.

“Anxiety is a virus, let’s do things right this time around,” Rafa wrote.

“True, you’re right,” said Martinez.

Shortly after that, Martinez stopped responding. Rafa noticed first. “At first the phone would ring, then go to voicemail. By Tuesday it went straight to voicemail,” Rafa recalled. Martinez, he thought, would never have cut him off like that. “He knew how much it would hurt us.”

Martinez’s brother and father started tracking him, like bloodhounds following their instincts, from 3,000 miles away. The Red Cross gave them the number for the military police at Schofield. Rafa finally reached military police on October 16.

Later that same night, close to midnight, two military officers knocked loudly at the door of the Houston apartment where Rafa and his father live. Rafael was awake; he’d barely slept in two days.

The officers told them to sit down. “They told us they found my brother in his room,” Rafa said. “And that they had tried to resuscitate him, that they tried to give him medical attention, but it was too late.”

Rafael found their tone rude and told them to leave. Rafa told his mother the next day. She seemed numb.

Months later, in a phone conversation with the Army Criminal Investigation Division, the family learned more details—and they pieced together more information gradually as documents arrived. Military police had arrived for a welfare check and found Martinez’s room locked, and they had to obtain a master key to get access. They entered at 10 a.m. and found him still hanging in his closet. Emergency Medical Services attempted resuscitation and pronounced him dead at 10:38.

One officer who searched the room reported finding empty alcohol containers and a note on the dresser that appeared to have been written by Martinez, which contained personal reflections about God, death, and greeting St. Peter in heaven. 

The chief medical examiner of Honolulu County, Dr. Masahiko Kobayashi, reviewed marks on Martinez’s neck and a belt found with his body, as well as information from the military, to reach a conclusion. Cause of death: asphyxia by hanging. Manner: suicide.

The U.S. military has its own medical examiner system, specifically designed to handle violent, unnatural, or suspicious deaths under federal jurisdiction. A Department of Defense instruction states that a forensic investigation of such a death is incomplete without an autopsy. It is unclear why one wasn’t conducted in Martinez’s case. 

The Army didn’t respond to the Observer’s requests for comment.

The family, which obtained a death benefit from the Army, used part of it to pay for the burial and part to hire an independent medical expert, Dr. Albert I. Chen, a forensic pathologist in Kingwood, who performed the first autopsy and also concluded that the most likely cause of death was hanging, with no obvious signs of foul play. But he found the manner of death to be undetermined.

On January 16, the family met again with Army representatives. According to Zaldo, when she raised the issue of the sexual assault her son had reported, a colonel said he knew nothing about it.

The Army denied Martinez military funeral honors. On November 1, Brigadier General Adam D. Smith, the Army’s adjutant general, signed a letter informing the family and citing a section of U.S. code that prohibits such honors when they “would bring discredit upon the United States Army.” He did not specify what justified that conclusion.

What the family does know is that Martinez had a documented history of mental illness and suicidality that had been tracked for weeks and was seemingly ignored in the days before his death.

The last time Martinez spoke with his mother, he was crying. He told her he felt alone, that no one wanted him there. Zaldo told him that other people’s opinions don’t define a person. She told him his family was waiting.

“You’re coming home,” she said.

“Yeah, Mama. Almost.”

The family has never seen photos of the death scene.

But they know investigators found the note that Martinez folded into his wallet. It was addressed simply “to whoever reads or hears this.” Near the end, Martinez described one of the last things he’d told the officer who confronted him outside the hospital after his breakdown.

Martinez tried to explain to the unnamed officer who confronted him that he’d told the doctors: “I did not have, nor do I have, suicidal or homicidal thoughts.”  

An ofrenda made by Martinez’s parents

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Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Heading into election season, leaders in Corpus Christi face a puzzling question: what to do with $235 million from the state of Texas for a seawater desalination plant that was never built. 

This month, officials in the Gulf Coast city declined to pursue the flagship water supply project for the second time in a year over cost concerns. Now Corpus Christi may have to return the money, including $50 million it already spent, plus $72 million in interest.

“That’s going to be a painful experience if the State of Texas calls our notes due,” said City Council member Mark Scott at the Sept. 1 meeting before the vote that rejected the desalination project. “I think we are dangerously close.”

Returning the money would “seriously damage our relationship with state leadership, negatively impact any future loan applications and continue to put downward pressure on our credit ratings,” Scott said in a follow-up statement. 

For almost a decade, city officials in Corpus Christi have debated the desalination project’s location, cost, development model, benefits to residents and potential environmental impacts, even as a regional water shortage grew increasingly likely. State officials in Texas have also pushed to develop seawater desalination plants for nearly 25 years with little to show for their efforts.

Corpus Christi should return the state’s money and lay the project to rest, said City Council member Sylvia Campos, an opponent of the desalination project.

“That is the only way we can finally finish this,” she said. “We need to once and for all kill it and move on.”

Other city leaders say that won’t happen, even if it means reviving the controversial desalination project for another political cycle. The city has requested an extension of its funding agreement with the state, but state leaders haven’t publicly addressed the question, leaving Corpus Christi an uncertain path forward.

“This is very much the first time this has ever happened,” said Perry Fowler, executive director of the Texas Water Infrastructure Network, a construction and engineering trade coalition. “They’re having to figure out how to unravel what they’re in right now.” 

Fowler said Corpus Christi would be the first party to return funding awarded through the State Water Implementation Fund of Texas, a $2 billion program lawmakers created in 2013.

The office of Gov. Greg Abbott did not respond to requests for comment. 

The $235 million that Corpus Christi would have to return represents cash the city has drawn to date through a $757 million financing agreement with the Texas Water Development Board for Corpus Christi’s Inner Harbor seawater desalination plant, which was envisioned to produce millions of gallons of freshwater per day from the Gulf of Mexico. 

“Other projects could already be well underway with this funding,” Fowler said. “It’s just really unfortunate.” 

Plans for the desalination plant in Corpus Christi date back to 2014, when operators of the region’s sprawling refineries and chemical plants formed a special committee to evaluate the feasibility of treating seawater for industrial use. 

Corpus Christi received its first $2.8 million through the SWIFT program in 2017, $11.4 million in 2020 and $211 million in 2024, while its Inner Harbor desalination project became mired in delays, political indecision and steep cost inflation. The state approved Corpus Christi’s application for another $535 million for the Inner Harbor project in 2024, but those funds were never withdrawn.

According to KIII News, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick criticized city leaders during a campaign event last week at Valero’s Corpus Christi refinery—the region’s second-largest water user. “We will send hundreds of millions of dollars to Corpus to help you through this water crisis, but we need a local government that says ‘yes,’” Patrick said. “They’re turning their back on this money.”  

Corpus Christi’s City Council first canceled the Inner Harbor project contract, estimated at $1.2 billion, in a 6-3 vote in 2025, then declined to issue a new contract in a 5-3 vote at its meeting Sept. 1. But the project isn’t dead yet, said Corpus Christi City Manager Peter Zanoni, and there are currently no plans to return the loans to the state, a process called defeasance.

“The city is kind of on hold right now,” he said. “There’s no rush to cancel anything. There’s no rush to try to talk about defeasance.”

Every seat on Corpus Christi City Council is up for election in November and a new slate of leaders might view the project differently, Zanoni said. The debate over water supply and desalination is driving the campaign season, he said, especially after the region narrowly avoided a water emergency this year.

“The Inner Harbor desalination project is a foremost policy item to be considered with the new council,” he said.

Corpus Christi Mayor Paulette Guajardo, an advocate for the project and a candidate for a third term in November, also hasn’t given up. 

“We have invested years in the Inner Harbor desalination project, secured the major environmental permits, and preserved critical infrastructure and financing,” Guajardo said. “We should take advantage of that opportunity and move the project forward.” 

One of the project’s leading opponents, City Council member Gil Hernandez, is also running for mayor. 

Hernandez has challenged the city’s plans over financial concerns since he joined City Council in 2018. In 2020, he cast the only vote against the city’s plan to apply for $222 million from the TWDB 

“We should not have borrowed that money at that point in time,” Hernandez said. “I saw the mistakes that we’ve made, I’m trying my best to correct it.”

He said the city should ask TWDB to apply its funding to other water projects like groundwater. However, he acknowledged that the city made that request to use the funds in other ways in 2025 and the TWDB denied the request. 

“It’s still entirely the choice of the water development board and ultimately the governor to allow us that flexibility,” Hernandez said. “So far there hasn’t been any indication of that flexibility.”

In March this year, as reservoir levels fell below 10 percent, Gov. Abbott said that Corpus Christi had “squandered” its $750 million in state funding commitments.

“Corpus Christi is a victim not because of lack of water, they’re a victim because of lack of ability to make a decision,” Abbott told KXAN News. “We can only give them a little time more before the state of Texas has to take over.”

Following Abbott’s statement, Mayor Guajardo called an emergency meeting to approve the desalination project, but it was repeatedly rescheduled. 

Meanwhile, major rainstorms in May and July refilled the reservoir system well above critical levels before the City Council reconsidered and rejected the project in September.

“We already spent $50 million and basically have nothing to show for it,” said City Council member Roland Barrera, a supporter of the desalination project. “We’re gonna have all these additional costs associated with canceling the project.”

Defeasance of the city’s loans would require it to pay 10 years of interest, some $72 million additional dollars. That’s one reason why the city’s business and industry groups are currently mobilizing in support of local candidates that promise to push the project through.

Also on the ballot this year: a petition put forth by activist groups that would levy millions of dollars in fees on the region’s industrial giants the next time reservoirs drop below 30 percent. 

Meanwhile, as Corpus Christi tries to decide what to do about its longstanding Inner Harbor desalination project, the Nueces River Authority, a small water agency in the city’s hinterlands, is pursuing its own plans for a much larger desalination plant that, if built, could render Corpus Christi’s plans irrelevant.

The Nueces River Authority is working with an Israeli company, IDE Technologies, a global leader in desalination technology, but construction has yet to begin on an island in Corpus Christi Bay and it is unclear whether the project can attract the necessary financing.

Barrera, a City Council member since 2018, has reached his term limit and plans to retire. But his political machine is working as hard as ever, he said, ahead of a high-stakes election.  

“I’ve never seen a more concerted community effort to get, in my opinion, the right people elected, pro-business people,” he said. “We can get back to a point there’s sensible decisions.”

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