Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Texas Youth Commission officials would not say Monday whether they know who ordered the removal of a key portion of a damaging 2005 report on the West Texas State School sexual abuse scandal.

The agency's general counsel, Neil Nichols, declined to comment. And the commission's spokesman, Tim Savoy, said investigators would look into the change.

The Travis County district attorney's office is asking whether agency officials tampered with government documents. Gregg Cox, director of the office's public integrity unit, confirmed that an investigation was under way but declined to elaborate.

At issue is the "Summary Report for Administrative Review," a TYC investigation into the agency's handling of sexual misconduct allegations at the youth prison in Pyote.

The report found that TYC officials ignored signs that two administrators at the prison were suspected of molesting inmates. The assistant superintendent and the principal at the prison resigned after a Texas Rangers investigation found evidence of sexual abuse of inmates.

TYC's own investigator determined that, for more than a year, agency officials paid little or no attention to employees who tried to report the two men. The 2005 report was only recently released to news organizations, the governor and legislators.

But the document that the agency released did not contain a synopsis of actions by Melody Vidaurri, then a security coordinator. That passage had been part of one of the earlier versions of the report – one apparently confined to distribution within TYC.

In it, Ms. Vidaurri said she told an investigator, who had come to the West Texas prison after employee complaints about suspicious behavior, that there were numerous rumors about sexual misconduct.

Ms. Vidaurri informed the investigator of, among other things, a list that "students were compiling of facts about sexual abuse." But the investigator told her "there was nothing to it." The investigator, in her formal report, said she could find no evidence of sexual abuse.

Later, Ms. Vidaurri took her concerns to higher-ranking TYC officials, but she said she received no response.

Mr. Savoy, the TYC spokesman, said the agency removed that section from the report "because it couldn't be substantiated independently." He acknowledged, however, that Ms. Vidaurri has continued to work at TYC, so finding her to confirm it would present little challenge.

Ms. Vidaurri said Monday that she did not wish to comment on the matter until all investigations are complete.