Kind Gesture by Sheriff Omar Lucio, But No Flowers for Mary Tipton

No Flowers for Mary Tipton

Those who swear to protect us, the police, also protect themselves and their brothers. Almost weekly, our national news outlets share shaky video from handheld cell     phones showing police firing bullets into fleeing, unarmed black men, then facing wrist slaps from the judicial system.

Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio

82 year old Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio understands the wherewithal needed to maintain the so-called thin blue line.  His men must know he has their collective backs. Rumors that old man Lucio suffers from dementia or some other old age infirmity are overrated, simply wishful thinking by someone not getting a promotion or the mother of a suspect roughed up in jail.

Gus Reyna (Photo by Jason
Hoekema of the Brownsville Herald)

This blog has detailed how Lucio's right hand man, Gus Reyna has wrecked police vehicle after police vehicle in drunken binges, gone through rehab, but still functions at the top of the sheriff department's food chain.  Lucio is loyal to his boys.

Considering that Sheriff Lucio has kept nearly 400 employees  in the Cameron County Sheriff's Department relatively content, is it any wonder that, when he learned that the mother of one of his deputies, Marin Hernandez,  had allegedly been involved in a hit-and-run accident, he sent a floral arrangement to comfort the man and his mother? The card with the flowers may as well have read: "Hernandez, we have your back!" 

Remember, Mrs. Hernandez heard this huge "thud" as she traveled southbound on FM 803 back on February 28, 2015.  

"Perhaps, it was an animal," she may have thought to herself.  Her deputy son speculated later, in responding to a Brownsville police officer, that his mom may have hit a skunk.  Dozens of police photos show Mrs. Hernandez hit an object tall enough to smash her windshield, but whatever.

While the deputy son was answering questions from BPD, Mary Tipton was lying face down in a ditch just across FM 803.  Her body was under a street lamp.  Who knows where Deputy Hernandez searched that night with his flashlight, but he evidently didn't search across the street.

Mary Tipton got no flowers.