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STAFFORD – Dallas Garcia’s home in Fort Bend County is trapped between two realities: One where her son, Fred Harris, is still alive, and one where he was senselessly killed in the Harris County Jail two years ago.

Family photos still crowd the hallway outside her guest bathroom, but Fred’s slight stature was frozen in time as his sibligngs aged into new picture frames.

Fred’s eyeglasses still sit on the shelf next to his high school diploma, but clouds of dust have formed shadows around them – underscoring how much time has passed since they last sat on the bridge of his nose.

And Dallas – Dallas is no longer a woman stricken by despair.

She’s a woman driven to action by anger.

“The justice system has completely failed my son,” Dallas, 44, said, rocking back and forth on her couch as if the movement would evaporate the tears pooling in her eyes. “I don’t want to fail him any longer.”

The latest failure came earlier this month, when Michael Paul Ownby was sentenced to 50 years in prison for fatally pummeling and stabbing Fred, a 19-year-old with an IQ of 62, in October 2021.

To the outside world, 50 years sounds like a win – a level of justice that doesn’t often surface when a loved one dies in jail.

But to Dallas, the plea deal that brought Ownby’s trial to a screeching halt after just four hours feels like a slap in the face.

She wanted the trial to play out. She wanted the public to see the video of Ownby – a repeat violent offender who had a 6-inch, 140-pound advantage over the 5-foot 8-inch, 98-pound Fred – beating him until her son was unconscious, laying in a pool of his own blood.

She wanted 99 years.

It’s what Fred deserved.

Dallas plans to take her fight to the state capitol, the county commissioners court, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, which oversees county and privately operated municipal jails – anyone who will listen.

She plans to do everything in her power to prevent another mom from losing her son or daughter to a Texas jail – especially if that son or daughter has a disability.

The Harris County Jail has continued to struggle with caring for an influx of inmates with mental illnesses. A Abdelraoufsinno investigation, “Deadly Detention,” found that nearly 60 percent of the 62 people who died of unnatural causes in the custody of the jail between 2012 and 2022 had been identified as mentally ill. Yet many of the inmates hadn’t received desperately needed care.

“I’m not ever going to back down,” Dallas said. “I don’t accept it.”

“A loaded gun”

Never in Dallas’ wildest nightmares did she imagine Fred would wind up in a jail cell with a man almost twice his size.

Fred was always a sweet boy. He was diagnosed with intellectual and developmental delays almost immediately after birth, but neither he nor his mother let that get him down.

He went to school. He played sports. He took on life with such fervor that he garnered the nickname “Fearless Fred.”

But in high school, Fred started to struggle with depression and anxiety. He repeatedly ran away and ended up living on the streets.

When he was arrested in October 2021 for walking down the middle of Westheimer Road holding a 4-inch steak knife, Dallas thought this was the moment Fred would get his life back on track.

She called the jail, saying he shouldn’t be in the general population because of his IQ and his size. She even dropped off his Individualized Education Program, or IEP, paperwork from school.

But she let him stay in jail, hoping that this would be his wake-up call.

The guilt of that decision would haunt her for years.

During Ownby’s trial, a detention officer testified that she ordered Fred isolated to keep him safe, the Houston Chronicle reported.

But somehow, he ended up in a cell with Ownby, who had been involved in multiple fights with inmates earlier that day and had assaulted a guard two days prior.

It took Ownby just 36 minutes to start bashing Fred, both with his fists and a shiv, at one point smashing Fred’s head into the concrete floor nearly a dozen times.

By the time detention officers intervened, it was too late.

For years, Dallas had been blaming Ownby for her son’s death, ever since she got the phone call that Fred had been hospitalized.

But after hearing testimony from detention officers during the trial – about how overcrowded the jail is, how swamped the guards are, how Ownby had to repeatedly be moved that day because of fights with other inmates – Dallas has placed the blame on a much bigger entity.

The Harris County Jail.

The jail “gave (Ownby) an opportunity to do what he did. It’s like giving someone a loaded gun,” Dallas said. “What’d you think was gonna happen?”

The troubled Harris County Jail has for years struggled with overcrowding and has run afoul of requirements set by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, such as staffing shortages and failing to check on incarcerated people within required time windows.

The Abdelraoufsinno has found at least 52 lawsuits over the past 10 years that were filed by current and former Harris County Jail inmates, as well as their family members, about alleged poor conditions and treatment there, with one calling the jail “a place of torment.” One of those lawsuits was filed by Dallas.

Conditions have gotten so bad in recent years that a group of current and former employees in 2021 filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the county, members of the county commissioners court and Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, alleging that the county has intentionally refused to adequately staff and fund the jail, despite knowing of the “blatantly dangerous conditions” created because of it.

The case was dismissed last year by U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen. The employees appealed, but Judge Hanen’s decision was upheld earlier this month by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Jason Spencer, the jail’s spokesman, previously said that Harris County’s jail isn’t any more dangerous than other jails in Texas or nationally.

“The Harris County Jail has also experienced the same struggles providing health care services that jails and prisons across the nation have experienced since the pandemic’s onset,” Spencer said.

But the Landing’s investigation found that only four of Texas’ 10 largest counties had higher death rates per capita in their jails’ custody – with two counties, Tarrant and Denton, comparable to Harris County.

Only El Paso County Jail had a significantly higher rate per capita of mentally ill people dying in its jail. Travis and Collin counties had about the same rate.

For a long time after Fred’s death, Dallas wanted to stay out of the limelight. She didn’t want Fred to be a martyr for a greater cause.

Now she realizes he has to be.

“I want people to know what happened to Fred,” she said. “Because what happened to him is happening to other people.”

Using her voice

As Dallas stepped away from the microphones following a news conference last month, a woman with a look of sadness etched in her eyes approached her.

Her shirt had a young Black man’s face on it, topped by the word’s “Justice for Evan.”

Dallas felt a lump in her throat. She looked down at her own, nearly identical shirt: a young black man’s face, a plea for justice scrawled across it.

“I’m Jacilet,” the woman said to Dallas. “I’d like to tell you about Evan.”

Jacilet Griffin-Lee’s son, Evan, was one of 27 people who died in the custody of the Harris County Jail in 2022 – the jail’s deadliest year on record over the past 17 years. Evan, like Fred, was mentally ill and not getting the care he needed in jail. His death was later ruled a homicide.

Since Evan’s death, Jacilet has mobilized families like hers who have lost their loved ones in the state’s largest jail, participating in news conferences, hosting benefits and vigils and speaking to public officials.

“You can join us,” Jacilet told Dallas. “Here’s my information.”

Dallas wasn’t ready. With the trial looming over her head, she could think of nothing else. It had been delayed five times and each time, she had to go through the taxing effort of taking off work and preparing herself mentally to see her son’s killer.

It was finally over and she was exhausted.

But now, three weeks after she looked Ownby in the face and told him what he did to her family, Dallas is ready.

She’s ready for people to hear her voice.

“They took the fear out of my body and made it anger,” she said. “I have a voice, and I’m going to use it.”

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In 2022, Alex Stuckey and Mark Mulligan, who both worked at the Houston Chronicle at the time, spent months interviewing Fred Harris’ family after he was murdered in the Harris County Jail. Stuckey and Mulligan returned to Fred’s family home in early December, just days after his killer, Michael Paul Ownby, was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

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