PASADENA (CA)
Courthouse News
February 13, 2020
By Erik De La Garza
Edinburg TX – John Feit, the former Catholic priest who spent more than five decades shrouded in suspicion for his involvement in the 1960 murder of McAllen schoolteacher Irene Garza, died in prison on Tuesday. He was 87.
Preliminary reports indicate that Feit, who resided in Scottsdale, Arizona, before being extradited to Texas in 2016 to face murder charges for Garza’s Easter weekend suffocation death, died of cardiac arrest, said Robert Hurst, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Hurst said Thursday evening that Feit was pronounced dead at 5:38 a.m. Tuesday at Huntsville Hospital after being found unresponsive just before 5 a.m. in his cell at the Estelle Unit.
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Terence McKiernan, president of the watchdog group BishopsAccountability.org who attended Feit’s trial in Edinburg called Garza a “saintly person” whose life and death inspired activists to bring Feit to justice. Feit preyed upon Garza’s devout Catholic beliefs, and her rape and murder “is especially important and heartbreaking,” McKiernan said.
“This case brings together many essential aspects of the clergy abuse crisis. Despite his crime, Feit was transferred away from McAllen, and he had a second career as an important priest of the Servants of the Paraclete in Jemez Springs, New Mexico,” McKiernan said.
In that role, Feit formulated and implemented a “disastrous” policy allowing pedophile priests in treatment with the Servants to work and reoffend in surrounding communities, according to McKiernan. That policy led to former Catholic priest James Porter’s sexual abuse of dozens of children, for which he was convicted of in the 1990s, with Feit in the center of a new phase in the abuse crisis.
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