TYC details, response are equally disgusting
March 10, 2007
Disgusting and infuriating revelations continue to spill out from the Texas Youth Commission scandals. We have learned, for example, that commission policy allowed the hiring of convicted felons and that one former supervisor accused of sexual relations with youths at the West Texas State School lived with a 16-year-old boy — on school grounds.
Written by the Editorial Board, Austin American-Statesman
Texas Ranger Brian Burzynski
Disgusting and infuriating revelations continue to spill out from the Texas Youth Commission scandals. We have learned, for example, that commission policy allowed the hiring of convicted felons and that one former supervisor accused of sexual relations with youths at the West Texas State School lived with a 16-year-old boy — on school grounds.
So far, the only state official to emerge from this shameful rot that the public can applaud is Texas Ranger Brian Burzynski, 37, who investigated reports of abuse by state employees at the West Texas school at Pyote in 2005. But he could not move the local prosecutor, the attorney general's office or anyone else to act on his findings.
After the local prosecutor, District Attorney Randall Reynolds, failed to file charges, Burzynski said, in February 2006 he went to the attorney general's office. But that office told him it could do nothing unless the local prosecutor asked for help.
The attorney general's explanation for not taking action then to help the Ranger is unacceptable. Even without the power to prosecute, the attorney general certainly had other powers to employ — primarily publicity — and he didn't.
Attorney General Greg Abbott has often publicized his office's detection and arrest of men using the Internet to lure minors into sexual relationships and trade child pornography. Just this week, his office posted a press release boasting that its Cyber Crimes Unit had arrested three men in Victoria County for using the Internet to prey upon or exploit children.
"Texas will not tolerate criminals who prey upon our children," Abbott declared in the press release. The state won't even tolerate those who try to prey on children but fail — two of the three men arrested didn't actually molest a child; they are accused of propositioning state investigators posing as 13-year-old kids.
Yet when a Texas Ranger told a lawyer in the attorney general's office of sexual abuse of minors by state employees in a state facility, he was told it could do nothing unless the local prosecutor asked for help.
That may have been the legally correct answer, but that's not good enough when youths in state care are involved. There was no follow-up.
The case didn't move until November 2006, when Allison Brock, an aide to state Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, got an aide to Gov. Rick Perry to get Abbott to intervene. Reynolds then requested help from the attorney general in January, and last month — a year after Ranger Burzynski had asked the attorney general for help — he and Reynolds finally met with Abbott's staff.
Burzynski told a legislative committee hearing on Thursday that he couldn't stop pushing to get charges filed: "I promised each one of those victims that I would do everything I could . . . that the Rangers would not fail them. I am here because I have a promise to keep."
At the end of that hearing, Ranger Burzynski was given a standing ovation by lawmakers and the audience. He deserved it. One Ranger, indeed.
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