Full Notification

Greetings,
We have uploaded the weekly report to our website, feel free to call or email if you have any questions.

www.lytletx.org/police

It was somewhat of an unusual week; one of those I don’t look forward to repeating. Monday went really well, we had made a lot of progress on cases and investigations and I thought to myself that if we keep this up by midweek we could be in great shape. That should have been the first sign trouble was coming. A little after 6:00 pm I got the call that Sgt. Mark Montgomery had been shot during a pursuit (I was about to mow the yard so I won’t look much like a Chief of Police in the crime scene photos). I was quickly able to determine that he was okay, the suspects got away, but as far as we knew nobody got hurt. The next several days were somewhat of a blur, filled with numerous calls and emails from tipsters to area law enforcement agencies. By Wednesday morning S.A.P.D. was on to something, by lunch they said they had our suspect and the car (which had been reported stolen) in custody. Lt. Dear and Texas Ranger Sgt. Shane Staley headed to S.A.P.D. to interview the suspect. By that night he was in jail in Atascosa Co. charged with Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon against a Public Servant. We were relieved to see this guy off the streets. Now comes all those long reports and the follow-up to prepare a case to submit to the District Atty’s Office in Floresville.

I settled in Thursday night hoping for a peaceful night of sleep when at about 2:30 am (Friday morning by now) I got a call from dispatch that Cpl. Gamez was on the interstate and he was out with a deceased person that had been struck by a motor vehicle. Captain Reyes and I responded to the scene. It was a tough scene, both in victim’s situation and the constant flow of traffic; we had one lane of traffic shut down for about 3 hours. By 5:45 am we were able to open the road back up. If it hadn’t been for the Lytle FD assisting us with traffic we never could have done it.

So now we have this nice new Police Station with room for interviews, a nice conference table in my office, plenty of parking and our own break room. I didn’t think that we would need all of it so quickly. After moving in we have all sorts of stuff occur. We had a pipe bomb found at the salvage yard, a string of car thefts and Mark gets shot at. It is like the criminals got on some sort of social networking site and one of the big topics was “Lytle has a nice new police station so let’s make sure they get some use out of it”. They could be using something like “fellontwitter” or maybe “thiefbook”. With all that was involved in the case last week it would have been very challenging to operate it out of our old office, we had lots of activity going on over here, our phone lines were busy and the conference table in my office got a real workout as we met with various law enforcement officers and developed our operational plans. It has been so busy over here at our new building that the Mayor even warned me not to “wear it out in the first year”.

I was on the news in San Antonio a lot, even did some radio interviews. All this exposure led to rumors about me being offered my own TV talk show by one of the major networks and an offer to model a line of spandex swimwear. Let me clarify that I am not moving off to LA or the Big Apple. (Though I made it clear I would be interested in a reality show).

Tonight there will be a regular city council meeting at 6:30 pm at City Hall. You can access the agenda from the main page on the city website (www.lytletx.org) on the left hand side of the page you will see “agendas” click on that and you can pick from there.

Hoping for nice slow week,
Chief Richey Priest