Prosecutors Drop All Charges Against State Representative Dawnna Dukes: Your Texas Roundup

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“I’m giving away something huge at @UHouston tomorrow. I’m not gonna tell you what it is. (#WorldSeries tickets.).”

—Ellen DeGeneres on Twitter on Monday. Sounds like she might give away World Series tickets at the University of Houston on Tuesday.

BIG NEWS

Charges Dropped
State Representative Dawnna Dukes’s long legal saga may have come to an end after prosecutors dropped all of the remaining charges against the Austin Democrat on Monday. Dukes was indicted by a Travis County grand jury in January on thirteen felonies and two misdemeanors related to accusations that she abused her position as a public officeholder. Allegedly, she illegally tampered with travel vouchers to get money for expenses. But prosecutors struggled to bring a strong case against Dukes. Days before all of the charges against her were dropped, prosecutors decided to stop pursuing one felony charge after admitting that a botched analysis by the Texas Department of Public Safety and conflicting statements from a key witness had pretty much ruined their case. Travis County District Attorney Margaret Moore said the case fell apart due to conflicting statements given by Steve Adrian, a top official in the Texas House, who had told prosecutors that travel to the Capitol was required to earn the per-diem payments but later recanted before Dukes’s legal team. “It has been a long battle, but one in which I never doubted the outcome,” Dukes wrote on Facebook. “Many have asked why did I continue to fight to prove my innonce [sic] from malicious rumors instead of accepting a plea for something baselessly and without merit for which I was charged. Read the bible. 2 Timonthy [sic] 1:7 For God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of love, and power, and sound mind.” Dukes also said she plans to run for re-election.

MEANWHILE, IN TEXAS

HOU vs. LA
The Houston Astros take on the Los Angeles Dodgers in game one of the World Series Tuesday night, and the championship series should start off with a bang. Both teams are rolling out their staff aces, with the Astros starting Dallas Keuchel and the Dodgers giving the ball to Clayton Kershaw. Keuchel has been phenomenal this postseason, allowing just five runs over 17 1/3 innings after winning fourteen games with a 2.60 earned run average during the regular season. Kershaw, meanwhile, is one of the game’s all-time greats, but he’s had a “down” playoffs by his impeccable standards, with a 3.63 earned run average over three starts. He’s got a career 2.36 earned run average in nine seasons and is a three-time National League Cy Young winner, but he’s historically struggled in the playoffs, going 6-7 with a 4.40 earned run average in 106 1/3 innings. Both pitchers will have to deal with the heat, with temperatures expected to be around 95 degrees at the game’s start—the hottest temperature ever for a World Series game, according to USA Today.

Toddler Tragedy
The father of a missing three-year-old girl in Dallas was arrested on Monday, facing a charge of injury to a child, according to the Dallas Morning News. Wesley Mathews, 37, was arrested the day after the body of a young child was discovered less than a mile from the home of three-year-old Sherin Mathews. The girl went missing two weeks ago, after Mathews sent her outside to an alley near their house as punishment because she refused to drink her milk. Mathews told police that he went to check on the girl fifteen minutes after he sent her outside, but she was gone. When she did not come back, he told police that he went inside and did laundry while he waited for it to get lighter outside or for her to return on her own. He also told police that he knew coyotes had been seen in the alley. Police have said the body that was found is “most likely” Sherin Mathews.

And Other Things
Beloved Texan writer and all-around good guy Shea Serrano just got a sitcom on ABC, The Hollywood Reporter first reported. Serrano, a San Antonio native who authored two books—The Rap Yearbook and Basketball (and Other Things)—that both landed on the New York Times’s Best Seller List, will write the script of the pilot and serve as the show’s co-executive producer alongside Mike Schur, the guy behind NBC’s “The Good Place” and Fox’s “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.” The show will be a single-camera comedy based on Serrano’s life growing up in San Antonio in a family with five uncles, who all have different perspectives on manhood. “Got tired of waiting for there to be more Mexicans on TV so I asked @KenTremendous (Schur) to help me try & make a family sitcom for ABC about them,” Serrano, who now lives in Houston, said in a tweet on Friday after news of the pilot broke.