A senior county official in west Texas has been arrested over cattle rustling in a case that has stirred up exasperate in the tiny community of Loving.
Skeet Lee Jones, 71, a mediate and chief elected official in the county, faces three counts of theft of farm animals worth lower than $150,000 and indisputably one of engaging in organized felony exercise after his arrest on Friday, the sheriff of neighboring Winkler county, Darin Mitchell, mentioned on Sunday.
Mitchell mentioned three other males were arrested alongside Jones and all four defendants had been released on bond. The arrests resulted from a 12 months-prolonged investigation by the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, which has commissioned law enforcement officers who investigate agricultural crimes equivalent to cattle theft, Mitchell added.
Mitchell mentioned the affiliation’s officers alleged that Jones and his accused accomplices took stray cattle and sold them with out obeying procedures mandated by the mutter agriculture code. Those procedures require folks to document stray farm animals to the sheriff and allow for a likelihood to search out the animals’ owners, he mentioned.
Jones didn’t straight acknowledge to a quiz of for observation on Sunday.
His cousin Brandon Jones is a constable, an elected law enforcement officer for the county.
“He’s had free rein to your entire time since he’s been the mediate,” Brandon Jones told NBC Files. “That’s given him a formulation of vitality and impunity that he can originate whatever he needs at any time when he needs. Even the feeling of self-righteousness. That he can originate no immoral.”
Susan Hays, an election lawyer who has clashed with Skeet Jones, told NBC Files that she couldn’t think he would “risk real grief” by allegedly stealing cattle.
“It’s a anguish in the ass to spherical up cattle and accumulate them to market,” Hays mentioned.
Jones has been the county mediate of Loving since 2007 and earns an annual salary of extra than $133,000. He has been re-elected extra than one cases with out opposition, illustrating his vitality and affect in his community.
Loving county – the build the oil and gasoline economies generate billions of bucks in taxes – sits along the Texas border with Unique Mexico and is the mutter’s least populated county, with correct 57 residents, in accordance to the US census bureau.
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In Texas, county judges are indisputably their local authorities’s chief executives, having big administrative as effectively as judicial powers.
No other particulars relating to the allegations against Jones were straight accessible. If convicted, he could well well receive as much as 10 years in penal advanced per farm animals theft depend and as much as 20 years’ imprisonment for organized felony exercise.