A man from Lavaca County Texas heard his five-year-old daughter screaming from behind a barn. He discovered that his daughter was being molesting by a man. The father removed his daughter from the incident and then began beating the man to death. The father called 911 after pummeling the attacker with punch after punch.
“Come on! This guy is going to die on me!” the father can be heard on the 911 call. “I don’t know what to do!”
The 911 call was played on Tuesday during a court hearing that saw the Lavaca County district attorney and sheriff declare that the father was not going to be charged. The father, 23, killed Jesus Mora Flores on June 9. A grand jury ruled that the father was authorized to use deadly force in order to protect his daughter.
“It’s sad a man had to die,” said Michael James Veit, a neighbor. “But I think anybody would have done that.”
The attorney for the father, V’Anne Huser, said, “He’s a peaceable soul. He had no intention to kill anybody that day.”
The assault occurred on the family’s ranch between Shiner and Yoakum. A witness saw Flores forcibly carrying the girl into a secluded area and ran to find the girl’s father. The father followed the screams of his daughter until he found her. A report from an investigator said that the daughter was removed from the incident and then the father “inflicted several blows to the man’s head and neck area.”
The emergency responders found Flores lifeless with his pants and underwear pulled own from his waist. The daughter was examined at a local hospital after the incident. Heather McMinn, the Lavaca County District Attorney, said that evidence from the scene and the witness accounts matched with the story the father told to investigators. Flores was hired by the family to help on the ranch with the horses and was in the United States legally on a green card.
“Just like a regular kid, went to dances, drank beer like the rest of the kids around here,” Veit said about the father in the case.
Shiner has a population of around 2,000 people and is located 80 miles east of San Antonio. Over the past eight years, the Lavaca County Sheriff’s Office has investigated only eight homicides, with Flores’ included in that count. Shiner is described as ‘The Cleanest Little City in Texas,’ on its welcome billboard. One resident, Gail Allen, said the following:
“The father has gone through enough. The little girl is going to be traumatized for life, and the father, too, for what happened. He was protecting his family. Any parent would do that.”