Rural Texas sheriff, responding to story about son's arrest, threatens to arrest reporter

When the 42-year-old son of the sheriff in Duval County, Texas, was arrested on charges of public intoxication and resisting arrest, the Alice Echo-News Journal did what it should have done: reported it. And the weekly paper put the story on its front page.

When reporter Christopher Maher interviewed Sheriff Santiago Barrera at the hail about another arrest, the sheriff did what he shouldn't have done. He told Maher, "If you guys keep interfering with my business, I'm going to have you arrested."

So then Managing Editor Nicole Perez wrote County Attorney Ricardo Carrillo, saying, "I am bringing these remarks to your attention in the hope that they will remain as such, just remarks. However, considering the volatile political atmosphere in Duval County I have no doubt that Sheriff Barrera would carry out such a threat."

Asked how Barrera, 67, had stayed in office for 20 years, Carrillo said, ""He's a great politician and a terrible sheriff," according to The Associated Press. Barrera lost in this year's primary election, but "is accustomed to things being done his way in a part of South Texas where elected officials don't easily fade into the woodwork," AP reports -- noting that a deputy in adjoining Jim Wells County shot and killed a radio reporter in 1949. (Read more)

In 1955, Caro Crawford Brown of the Alice Echo, right, now of Corpus Christi, won the Pulitzer Prize for general local reporting for a series of stories about the one-man political rule of George Parr in Duval County. The series "brought decades of corruption and terrorism to an end," according to Texas Women's University, where Brown studied journalism in 1925. (Read more)