New Walmart shooting case hearings scheduled in April, EPISD to lose 64 students amid campus closures
March 21, 2025
This is your weekly news roundup, which takes a quick look at some developments in government, politics, education, environment and other topics across El Paso.
Judge Schedules More Hearings in Walmart Shooting Case
Hearings into claims of prosecutorial misconduct in the 2019 Walmart mass shooting case will resume in April, according to orders this week from 409th District Judge Sam Medrano.
Defense attorneys made a number of claims in 2024 that prosecutors violated the rights of Patrick Crusius by listening to phone calls with his attorneys, obtaining records that courts had placed off limits, among other alleged actions. Prosecutors have denied that their efforts violated Crusius’ rights to counsel and a fair trial.
Medrano conducted several days of hearings into the allegations last year, when Bill Hicks was district attorney, but until this week hadn’t scheduled additional hearings after James Montoya took office Jan. 1.
Hearings on defense motions are scheduled for April 1, April 21 and April 22.
Montoya also has to decide whether to continue to pursue the death penalty for Crusius, who faces 23 counts of capital murder and 22 counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in the Aug. 3, 2019, mass shooting at the Cielo Vista Walmart.
As a candidate in the 2024 election, Montoya initially said he would pursue the death penalty. But he later said he needed to review evidence in the case before making a final decision.
EPISD to Lose 64 Students Attending Closing Schools
The El Paso Independent School District expects to lose several dozen students currently attending the six elementary schools set to close by the end of the school year.
Sixty-four, or about 6%, of the 1,132 students attending Carlos Rivera, Lamar, Newman, Putnam, Rusk, and Zavala elementary schools will be attending school in a different district next school year, according to priority registration data presented to the EPISD school board Tuesday.
About 47% (30) of those students say they are leaving the district because they are moving outside of EPISD’s boundaries, 23% (15) said they are moving outside of the city and 20% (13) said they are transferring to a charter school.
The district also plans to close Stanton and Travis elementary schools in the 2026-27 school year.
EPISD currently has over 48,000 students.
Priority registration for students being affected by the first round of school closures started in January and ended March 31.
Registration for all other students began April 1.
The district also expects to lose 28 (10%) of the 273 employees who currently work at schools set to close next school year. This includes teachers, clerical staff and food service workers.
Nineteen of the employees leaving the district resigned and the remaining 14 retired.
EPISD offered a $1,500 incentive for employees working in those schools who were already planning to retire to submit an early notification.
El Paso Electric Adds New Solar Farm
El Paso Electric this week announced the completion of a new 10-megawatt community solar farm in San Elizario that the utility’s customers can subscribe to and receive solar energy from.
Subscribing customers will pay about $15 for every kilowatt of capacity – meaning one kilowatt worth of production out of the 10 total megawatts the solar field can produce – that the customer essentially rents out from El Paso Electric. Then, a subscriber would receive a credit on their monthly bill based on how much power their portion of the solar farm produces.
El Paso Electric sees community solar farms as a way to compete with rooftop solar, which can be costly for individual homeowners and isn’t available for all homeowners or for renters. However, customers who buy and install their own rooftop solar systems own the asset and typically receive a bigger reduction in their monthly power bill than a customer subscribed to community solar.
El Paso Electric spent $23 million to develop the 70-acre solar farm, which the firm EDF Renewables built. Now that it’s constructed, 5,000 customers will be able to subscribe to solar energy from the site. Customers can submit applications to become subscribers to the community solar farm at epelectric.com/communitysolar.
And this solar field in San Elizario is not the only one El Paso Electric is developing. At the end of last year, El Paso Electric asked Texas utility regulators to let it build a $328 million, 100-megawatt solar farm and battery array in far Northeast El Paso, around the utility’s Newman natural gas power plant. That solar farm could start operating during summer 2027.
One megawatt is enough to power a few hundred homes, depending on the time of day and weather.
El Paso Electric is also in the process of adding four other major solar farms in and around El Paso – spanning from Deming, New Mexico, to Fabens, Texas – totaling 580 megawatts of capacity. El Paso Electric expects all four to start operating sometime in 2026.El Paso Electric has also laid out early plans to develop five other solar and battery facilities by 2029. The utility has said it must add new sources of electricity not only to replace outdated 60-year-old power plant units, but also because El Paso homes and businesses are using far more power than the utility previously expected, largely because of new data centers coming into the city as well as El Pasoans increasingly shifting to power-hungry refrigerated air conditioners. And rising average temperatures here mean a building requires more electricity to stay cool than in the past.
TTHEP Dental School Schedules Free Clinic for Senior Citizens
Senior citizens aged 60 and older can get free dental screenings and cleanings through the Texas Tech Dental Oral Health Clinic from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Fridays, March 21 and 28, at the clinic, 222 Rick Francis St.
The procedures will be done by dental students at the Texas Tech Health El Paso’s Woody L. Hunt School of Dental Medicine under faculty supervision. The clinics offer students hands-on training on procedures and working with patients.
The services are provided by appointment only. Participants can schedule their appointments by calling 915-215-6700. Organizers encourage patients to schedule their appointments as soon as possible.
Participants who qualify can work with clinic representatives to get financial assistance for follow-up services. Much of that assistance will come from the WellMed Charitable Foundation and the Dental Patient Fund, which was created through community donations.
Since it opened four years ago, the clinic has provided 18,000 hours of care to 10,000 patients to include 48% who are age 55 and older.
Event organizers suggest participants come early to get a good space in the patient parking lot off Rick Francis Street.
WellMed will sponsor these senior clinics. Future senior clinics will be scheduled as funds become available.
Foster School of Medicine Graduates to Participate in Match Day
The 116 students from Texas Tech Health El Paso’s Paul L. Foster School of Medicine will learn where they will serve as post-graduate residents on Match Day at 10 a.m. Friday, March 21, in the campus’ Medical Sciences Building II auditorium, 137 Rick Francis St.
These students, to include 15 who grew up in the Paso del Norte region, will spend the next three to seven years at a teaching hospital where they will specialize in their chosen field.
Among the 15 local students who will open one of the envelopes is Josh Torres, the first person to have graduated from the Foster School of Medicine, the Gayle Greve Hunt School of Nursing and the L. Frederick Francis Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.
Torres, a 2010 graduate of El Paso High School, plans to pursue a residency in internal medicine. If he gets his way, he will serve his residency at TTHEP.
A residency is the foundation of a medical education. It connects theory with practice. The completion of a residency program is needed to earn a medical license. As residents, the TTHEP graduates will work full time to provide direct patient care under the guidance of qualified physicians. They will be given more independence as they develop their clinical skills.
The history of this celebration dates back to 1952 when the National Resident Matching Program started Match Day. Today, this event involves more than 41,000 medical school graduates from 46 countries and almost 200 medical schools.
Last year, 12 graduates of the Foster Medical School were matched with Texas Tech Health El Paso. They joined another 128 residents from outside the region to work in 15 specialty programs.
