SPECIAL REPORT: Texas scrambling to find housing solution for sexually violent predators

There are more than a thousand registered sex offenders living and working in El Paso County. Some are in prison, some live in their own homes, and some are in monitored and controlled halfway houses. But there’s a category of particularly violent sex offenders that the state has been scrambling to figure out what to do with after the company providing the halfway-house service announced it no longer would.

Sheriff’s detective Eduardo Gutierrez works in the Sex Offender Registration and Tracking office, keeping an eye on the many registered sex offenders living and moving around our region.

“It’s just tracking and verifying their information, pretty much their life,” Gutierrez said.

Gutierrez and a handful of deputies spend hours every day registering, updating information, and checking in on the more than five hundred sex offenders the county has the responsibility to monitor. And for Gutierrez, it’s an important duty.

“Think about the offenses that these individuals have committed,” Gutierrez said. “About 90 to 95 percent of them are against children.”

But there’s a particular kind of sex offender so dangerous, and with crimes so vile that even for professionals like Gutierrez, it can be hard to think about.

“To put it into simple terms, they’re the worst of the worst,” Gutierrez said.

And there are 19 of them living right here in El Paso County, at a facility on Horizon Boulevard. They’re called sexually violent predators: sex offenders who are so dangerous that even though they’re out of prison, they can’t be let out into the general population.

That process, called “civil commitment,” was created in 1999 when the Texas legislature “found that a small but extremely dangerous group of sexually violent predators existed and that those predators had a behavioral abnormality that is not amenable to traditional mental illness treatment modalities and that makes the individual likely to engage in repeated, predatory acts of sexual violence,” according to a report by the Texas Civil Commitment Office that oversees this class of offender.

“You’re talking about very – sometimes very horrendous crimes,” said state representative Joe Moody (D) – El Paso. “And how do you handle that when someone’s released and back into the community?”

Moody dealt with this issue in the last legislative session, voting on an overhaul of the sexually violent predator program, which now has 347 offenders statewide.

While the numbers in the program grow, the state isn’t sure what to do with the violent predators it has now.

The facility in Horizon is run by Avalon Correctional Services, an Oklahoma based company. But in May of last year, Avalon said it would stop housing these dangerous predators on Aug. 31 of this year, leaving the state scrambling to figure out what to do.

Avalon declined to answer ABC-7 questions, and directed us to the state office that oversees sexually violent predators. Previously, Avalon has said the system became too expensive and it couldn’t afford to transport detainees to the only court that hears their cases in Montgomery County, just north of Houston.

The Texas Civil Commitment office wouldn’t answer ABC-7’s questions either, stating the office is evaluating proposals to take over those services, something they asked for just two months ago.

The state says it hopes to have a new company contracted as soon as tomorrow, July 24th.

But with just over a month until Avalon stops providing services, things will have to move very quickly as the state works to eliminate problems that plagued the program. One fix: allowing other courts to review the cases of these violent offenders.

“The idea that that needed to be in place isn’t changed,” Moody said. “But the way in which it’s delivered is definitely changed. This bill completely overhauls that system to make sure we’re doing a better job, and ultimately making sure our community is safe.”

While the state figures out this problem, if you want to see where sex offenders are in El Paso, you can search the information for your neighborhood.

To find registered sex offenders, go to https://records.txdps.state.tx.us/SexOffender/