Texas News Briefs

Paroled burglar set to die Thursday for strangling Fort Worth man during home burglary

HUNTSVILLE (AP) — Renee Harris Toliver remembers her uncle as a 65-yearold mentally ill man living with her grandmother until the woman's own health problems confined her to a nursing home, leaving Otis Flake home alone.

That left Flake and other elderly people in the near downtown Fort Worth neighborhood vulnerable to the likes of Elkie Lee Taylor, a paroled burglar, who was spotted with a buddy leaving Flake's home. A woman who knew Flake found the front door to the home open, the house ransacked and Flake dead.

"He was an animal who preyed on the weakest of people," Toliver, now an assistant federal prosecutor, said this week of Taylor. "He was an ex-con basically preying on them at will."

Taylor, 46, was set to die Thursday evening for Flake's April 1993 slaying.

He would be the 15th Texas inmate executed this year and the first of six scheduled for lethal injection this month in the nation's most active capital punishment state.

4-year-old found safe, police arrest suspect who allegedly stabbed ex-girlfriend

DALLAS (AP) — A 4-year-old girl was rescued by police Wednesday night, hours after they say a man who allegedly stabbed her mother kidnapped the child in his exgirlfriend's car.

Police had issued an Amber Alert for Yareli Nava who they said was taken by 26- year-old Cipriano Tinoco Wednesday afternoon after he surprised his ex-girlfriend as she was putting Yareli in the vehicle.

Late Wednesday, police in undercover cars helped arrest Tinoco after he allegedly "rammed a police car with the child inside but the child was not hurt," Lt. Robert Hinton said. Police used a Taser on Tinoco, who was taken to a hospital for treatment.

The abduction began when the girl's mother discovered Tinoco hiding inside her car and she was stabbed in a fight with Tinoco, said Hinton, commander of the Dallas police youth services section.

Obama taps UTB-TSC's president for his transition team, report says

BROWNSVILLE (AP) — President-elect Barack Obama has looked to South Texas where he selected University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College President Juliet V. Garcia to join his transition team, officials said.

Garcia, the first Mexican-American to head a four-year U.S. university, will serve as one of the president-elect's advisors.

"I consider public service to be our highest calling; so I am greatly honored to have been invited to take part in the historic transition of our young democracy," Garcia said in a written statement to The Brownsville Herald, the newspaper reported Wednesday in an online story.

UTB-TSC's Jose Bocanegra, who lectures on American political institutions and economic and public policy, said that Garcia, "will be an advocate for the area."

Obama and Garcia have met. Obama visited UTB-TSC in February during his campaign. Also that day, he surprised revelers at the annual Sombrero Festival.

Brownsville native Federico F. Pena, former U.S. secretary of transportation and energy and former Denver mayor, was national co-chair of Obama's campaign.

No-kill animal shelter in Dallas stops accepting surrendered animals due to financial hardship

DALLAS (AP) — Financial distress that includes a 75 percent drop in donations since last year has caused the Humane Society of Dallas County's shelter to stop accepting surrendered animals for the first time in its 30-year history, officials said.

Furthermore, the no-kill shelter, Dog and Kitty City, has seen a 25 percent drop in adoptions as fewer people are willing to take on the extra cost of caring for a new pet.

The shelter is about $2,000 short of meeting its monthly budget of $12,000 for November, leaving it financially unable to spay and neuter cats, said Sandra Mustafa, the shelter's director.

"We live on donations, but right now, they aren't coming in," Mustafa said in an online story Wednesday for The Dallas Morning News.

James Bias, president of Texas' Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said a slumping economy doesn't always affect pet adoptions and shelters.

"There isn't a correlation that we have seen," he said.