TEXAS
The Monitor
Posted: Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Jacob Fischler | The Monitor
EDINBURG — The moment he heard the results of early voting, 32-year veteran Hidalgo County District Attorney Rene Guerra knew his career in elected office had ended.
“I’m shocked,” he said. “I didn’t expect the people to turn against me that much.”
Voters in the Hidalgo County Democratic primary, who had voted for him to be their chief prosecutor in eight consecutive elections, soundly asked him not to return for another term in January.
Ricardo Rodriguez, the former 92nd state District Court judge who was 9 years old when Guerra first took office in 1982, received more than 20,000 of the 32,000 early voting ballots cast. Guerra needed to win roughly 75 percent of the Election Day vote to pull even, but he lost that by a similar margin. The final tally was about 29,000 votes for Rodriguez and 16,000 for Guerra. …
The family of Irene Garza, a 25-year-old beauty queen from McAllen who was murdered in 1960, celebrated Guerra’s loss.
“We just got tired of year after year after year of the abrasive and insulted way that Rene had treated us,” said Noemi Sigler, a relative of Garza and the daughter of a sheriff’s deputy who originally investigated the case.
The 54-year-old case, which happened when Guerra was an eighth grader at an Edinburg school, became a campaign issue this year when Garza’s relatives campaigned on Rodriguez’s behalf, claiming Guerra bungled the 2004 reopening of the case. CBS aired an episode of the news magazine program 48 Hours on Saturday that delved into the case and highlighted the DA’s race as a possible path to attain justice for Garza.
Rodriguez has promised to take another look at the Garza case, but not to necessarily send it to another grand jury.
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