James Dobbins, J. David Goodman and
SIERRA BLANCA, Texas — Jesús Iván Sepúlveda Martínez started his fateful journey to find work in the United States in his father’s car before catching a bus from Ceballos, Mexico, to the border. The 22-year-old soon slipped into Texas and, with a group of about a dozen migrants, began traversing the parched landscape east of El Paso on foot.
Three days after Mr. Sepúlveda texted his father that he had made it across the border, the group stopped for water at a small pond along a rural road. Around sunset, two men in a pickup truck drove by, and the migrants took cover in the brush. Suddenly the truck stopped, backed up and stopped again.
One of the men emerged with a gun and opened fire, fatally striking Mr. Sepúlveda, wounding a young Mexican woman and making the southern border region around Sierra Blanca a new focal point in the nation’s increasingly contentious immigration debate.
What inflamed the already combustible situation was that the men charged with the shooting were familiar local fixtures: Michael Sheppard, the warden of a deeply troubled private prison in town who works closely with the sheriff, and his twin brother Mark Sheppard, an employee at the county jail that the sheriff runs.
The Sept. 27 killing drew broad condemnation, raising questions about the rule of law in the cactus-studded high plains of West Texas and the real-world impacts of a bitter political divide over how to handle a record number of unauthorized crossings at the southern border.
During the recent debate in the race for governor, the Democratic candidate, Beto O’Rourke, said the killing could be traced to Gov. Greg Abbott’s “hateful rhetoric” on immigration. In a news conference last week, Mr. Abbott called the shooting “horrific” and “completely wrong” but blamed President Biden for the spike in arrivals and the need for Texas to deploy National Guard troops to the border and bus thousands of migrants to northern cities.
Days after the killing, yellow plastic evidence numbers still marked the dust near the man-made pond where Mark Sheppard told investigators that he and his brother mistook the men and women hiding in the brush for animals before opening fire.
“At this point, I don’t know what to think. They are good guys. They spend a lot of time outdoors. Mike loves to hunt,” the Hudspeth County sheriff, Arvin West, said in an interview at his office, where he displayed an autographed portrait of former president Donald J. Trump.
“I’ve never gone hunting with them. I don’t hunt animals. I hunt man,” he added in a grinning reference to the nature of his job in law enforcement.
The Sheppard brothers, both 60, were taken into custody late last month, and charged with manslaughter. The killing is being investigated by the Texas Rangers along with agents from the F.B.I.
In his interviews with investigators, Mark Sheppard said he and his brother had been out looking to shoot animals and thought they had spotted some javelinas, similar to wild hogs. Michael Sheppard fired two shots with a shotgun, according to the affidavits.
“Did you get him?” Mark Sheppard recalled asking his brother, in his statements to investigators, before changing the word “him” to “it,” according to the affidavit. They said they did not go to see if they had in fact hit a target.
But the migrants told investigators that the two men had taunted them in Spanish as they were hiding. They said the men used profanity as they shouted at them to come out and opened fire when they emerged.
Mr. Sepúlveda suffered a fatal gunshot to the head. Ms. Casias, 31, was shot in the stomach and, though seriously wounded, was expected to survive.
For days, relatives of the two migrants have been holding a vigil across the Mexican border in Ciudad Juárez, pleading for a full account of what transpired.
Napoleón Sepúlveda Moreno, 56, mourned the death of his son, who he said had hoped to meet up with his brother in Austin, stay a couple of years to make money to support his two young children and then return to Mexico.
“He always talked about going to work in Texas. And so I gave him my blessings,” Mr. Sepúlveda said in a telephone interview. Before leaving for the United States, his son received a small salary caring for farm animals and growing melons in their home of San Martín, several hours south of the border. “My son did not deserve to die this way,” he said.
Ms. Casias is from San José de Bellavista, a small town an hour and a half from San Martín. She met Mr. Sepúlveda on her journey.
Her aunt, Silvia Carrillo, shared an audio recording of a conversation she said she had with Ms. Casias shortly after she was shot. “I’m dying, really. They shot me,” Ms. Casias can be heard saying, then adding, “They are OK. It’s just me and another guy. They shot us. The guy died. And I think I’m next.”
Her aunt replied: “Where are you? Call 911 and the border agents will find you.”
“Please don’t tell Mom. I’ll see how I get out of this one,” Ms. Casias said.
The shooting stunned residents of Sierra Blanca and focused renewed attention on the West Texas Detention Center, a county-owned facility run by a private company, LaSalle Corrections, where Michael Sheppard worked as the warden. A spokesman for the company, which operates more than a dozen detention facilities across Texas, Louisiana and Georgia, said Mr. Sheppard had been fired after his arrest.
The West Texas facility has had a reputation among some within the company as a difficult assignment in part because of its struggles to provide sufficient water supplies for its hundreds of inmates. “That is a hellhole place,” said Gregory Johnson, a former assistant warden at a different LaSalle prison in Texas, describing the West Texas Detention Center. “They always have problems with the water at the facility.”
During Mr. Sheppard’s time as warden there, the facility had a contract with the federal government to house hundreds of detainees for the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
In 2018, some of those detainees complained of abusive treatment including assaults and racial insults, according to a report by researchers from Texas A&M University School of Law, the University of Texas School of Law and Raices, a nonprofit focused on immigrant legal services. The detainees, mostly men from Somalia who were in the process of being deported, told the researchers that they had been mistreated by staff members, including the warden. One detainee accused the warden, who was Mr. Sheppard at the time, of hitting and kicking him; another said he had used racial insults.
A subsequent investigation by the Office of the Inspector General for the federal Department of Homeland Security could not substantiate the detainees’ claims.
“I think there’s often a credibility bias toward law enforcement,” said Fatma E. Marouf, one of the report’s authors and a law professor at Texas A&M University. “One of the reasons we filed the report is that it wasn’t just one person complaining. It was dozens of people complaining.”
By 2021, the detention center no longer housed any migrants for federal authorities, according to inspection records. The company spokesman, Scott Sutterfield, said the detention center currently did not have I.C.E. detainees. He did not respond to the allegations in 2018 about mistreatment at the jail, nor did he say whether any action had been taken against Mr. Sheppard as a result of the complaints.
County officials said the I.C.E. contract had been ended because of the water issues, which stemmed from a problem obtaining adequate supply from a nearby town. A spokesman for I.C.E. did not respond to a request for comment. The facility still holds inmates for the U.S. Marshals, county records showed.
Around Sierra Blanca, the detention center was known as a good job, paying more than double what was offered at the local jail. On at least one occasion, Sheriff West filled in as warden at the facility when Mr. Sheppard was out of town, according to the inspector general’s report, and some of those who worked with them described the two men as friends.
“That warden always had a good relationship with that sheriff down there,” said Mr. Johnson, the former LaSalle employee.
Hudspeth County, which sprawls over an area nearly the size of Connecticut, has faced a larger number of migrants trying to cross through the dangerous desert terrain, as the number of people seeking refuge in the United States has climbed sharply over the past few years. “We’ve had a lot of serious problems with the illegals coming across getting lost and dying in the desert,” said Thomas Neely, 95, the Hudspeth County judge.
Joanna Mackenzie, the county administrator and also its emergency manager, said officials found more than 15 bodies of migrants in the desert last year, an increase from two or three a year in previous years. “We’ve gone from you see a few a week to hundreds crossing property — it is like nothing anyone has ever seen,” she said.
On the evening of the killing, both Michael and Mark Sheppard attended a meeting of the local water board. They arrived around 7:30 p.m., roughly 30 minutes after the shooting. Sheriff West was there, too.
“I saw them that same night at the water board, nothing out of the ordinary,” the sheriff said. “We were finishing the meeting when the call came in,” he added, speaking of the 911 call about the killing. “And I didn’t see their demeanor change.”
Word of the shooting spread rapidly through Sierra Blanca, a pit stop for truck traffic along Interstate 10. The sprawling surrounding county, home to some 3,200 people, is more than three-quarters Hispanic. Some people in town have expressed shock, saying the brothers had never displayed any sort of racial animus.
“I have a Mexican-Native American background, but Mike was never ugly to me,” said Paula Barrios, 39, who lived near the two brothers. “Once you get to know them, they are nice people.”
Others recalled interactions that seemed to take on new meaning in the wake of the arrests.
“We were speaking Spanish, and Mark said, ‘Don’t speak Spanish around me,’” said Bill Addington, 65, a longtime resident who volunteered at a local food bank where Mr. Sheppard would supervise county inmates on work detail in striped uniforms. Waitresses in town also remembered Mr. Sheppard objecting to hearing Spanish spoken in his presence while eating.
Michael and Mark Sheppard were transferred from the El Paso County jail, where they had been taken last month, to a jail in Hudspeth County, and then released last week after each posted bond of $250,000, according to the chief deputy sheriff in Hudspeth County, Lasaro Salgado. Neither responded to requests for comment.
They were then rearrested the following day, Deputy Salgado said, after the Texas Rangers issued a warrant on new charges related to the shooting: aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. As of Tuesday, both men were again in custody, this time closer to home at the Hudspeth County jail. The deputy said Mark Sheppard no longer had a job there.
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