A Scandal-Plagued Sheriff Wins Another Term in North Texas

A North Texas sheriff has won reelection amid a surge of deaths at his jail, allegations of misconduct and cover-ups among staff, and warnings from a state regulatory agency that his office has violated state law by failing to commission outside investigations into numerous deaths on his watch. 

In Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, Republican sheriff Bill Waybourn secured his win over Patrick Moses, a reverend and retired federal law enforcement official, with 54 to 46 percent of the vote. The race had been dominated by the high number of jail deaths during Waybourn’s tenure, with at least 65 people dying since he came to office in 2017, compared to 25 deaths in the jail in the eight years that preceded him. Local advocates and family members have protested outside the jail and filled county commissioners meetings in recent years to demand action from elected officials and basic information about how their loved ones died. 

Waybourn’s local critics have long accused the Trump-aligned sheriff of neglecting his duties at home in pursuit of right-wing celebrity. A campaign ad from Waybourn this cycle touted that he is “enforcing deportations, working with ICE, and building a wall around Tarrant County.” He spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally after the 2020 election and last year helped form an “election integrity task force” with other far-right county leaders, despite there being no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Tarrant County. This year, he received an award from the Claremont Institute, an extremist organization tied to Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the election in 2020. At a rally for Ted Cruz this week, Waybourn told the crowd that Election Day was “our D-Day, we need to be loaded up and ready to go, locked and loaded and ready to go.” 

Waybourn’s win was part of a rightward shift in Tarrant County, statewide, and nationally. The most populous GOP-controlled county in the U.S. narrowly voted for Joe Biden in 2020, but lurched right again with the election in 2022 of a far-right county executive who has reshaped local government. Bud Kennedy, a longtime columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, wrote on Wednesday that Waybourn, who won a larger share of votes in the county than Trump or Cruz, “had it easy,” saying that the Tarrant County Democratic Party “​continues to exist on paper but rarely in public.”

Crisis conditions at the Tarrant County jail began to dominate local headlines under Waybourn, who first won office in 2016. The county has been forced to pay out millions of dollars in recent years to settle lawsuits alleging horrific treatment of vulnerable people in his jail—including a pregnant woman who gave birth alone in a cell to a baby who would later die, a man with seizure disorder who died in his cell and wasn’t found for hours because guards lied about doing mandatory cell checks, and a woman with severe mental illness who died of apparent dehydration after months in the jail.  

Last month, Bolts reported that the sheriff has also been flouting a state law requiring independent law enforcement investigations into all deaths in custody, instead having the Fort Worth Police Department simply review investigations done by the sheriff’s office’s own staff into more than 20 deaths over the last three years. The Texas Commission on Jail Standards, a state agency charged with regulating county jails, was not aware of the violation until informed by Bolts’ reporting, and has since told the sheriff’s office they must seek independent law enforcement investigations. 

Waybourn, who was defiant on the issue of rising jail deaths ahead of the election and has insisted he’s following state law, has previously tried to erode state oversight of jail deaths. As Bolts reported last year, Waybourn has previously pushed for legislation to gut a law meant to ensure that Texas sheriffs don’t investigate themselves after jail deaths—a key reform in the Sandra Bland Act that state lawmakers passed in 2017.

Jail reform advocates say those independent investigations, which regularly show dehumanizing and dangerous treatment that can lead to preventable deaths, are critical and often the only window into what really happened after someone dies behind bars. 

While Texas jail regulators have put Waybourn on notice for violating state law, the jail commission has been largely deferential to local sheriffs in the past. The governor-appointed commission has minimal staff and a shoestring budget but is tasked with inspecting more than 200 jails across the sprawling state. A 2021 state audit found that the commission fails to hold jails accountable due to limited enforcement power.  

Waybourn did not respond to a request for comment for this story, but he has repeatedly blamed the high number of deaths on people coming into the jail already sick. In an election night interview, the sheriff told WFAA that most people “really died in the hospital,” saying, “I can’t raise people from the dead and I can’t keep people from having bad diets and 30 years of heroin use and all of a sudden their heart can’t take it anymore and there’s not much we can do about that.” 

While county commissioners could exert influence over the sheriff through budget decisions, that hasn’t really happened, Democratic Commissioner Alisa Simmons told Bolts last month. Simmons accused Republican members who hold a majority on the commissioners court of trying to shield Waybourn from more scrutiny after they abruptly canceled their regular meeting scheduled for Election Day—during which officials were slated to discuss topics related to jail conditions, including hiring attorneys for jailers named in a lawsuit filed by the family of a former Marine with schizophrenia who was killed by guards in April.

Local advocates say they’ll continue pushing for changes at the jail under another term with Waybourn as sheriff. “We are in this work not because we thought we would win elections, but because it’s the right thing to do,” said Ryon Price, a pastor with Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, who worked with other local activists to file a complaint with the Department of Justice last year requesting a federal investigation into conditions at Tarrant County Jail. “We never set out to put all of our eggs in the basket of electoral politics,” he told Bolts, pointing to recent changes that he says followed public pressure and advocacy, like the resignation of the jail chief in the wake of the former Marine’s death this spring, and the indictment of two of his jailers on murder charges. 

“Public officials are ultimately accountable to the public, but they are also always to be accountable to the rule of law,” Price said. “There are courts, there are rules of law, there are state laws, there are the basic human rights as declared in the UN charter. All of these things should still hold the sheriff accountable.”