Tri-County
When Matthew “Matty” Gray opened fire with his pistol on a woman and her car in the parking lot of Marfa Open in the early morning hours of August 7, 2024, it shook the small-town mentality of residents who hadn’t seen a brazen burst of gunfire on their streets in any time in recent memory. Things like that just didn’t happen, particularly not in a location like this incident, a small art collective house behind the Dairy Queen on Highway 90.
While authorities quickly arrested the alleged perpetrator—Gray, a 37-year-old Valentine resident––and charged him with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, the slow wheels of justice left many wondering whether Gray would face any criminal charges after he quickly left Valentine and returned to the East Coast. (Matty is not the same person as artist Matt Gray, who also lives outside Valentine.)
Almost two years after the arrest, Gray finally is facing proceedings in the 394th District Court after the judge on June 9 issued a notice to attorneys to set a date for a final plea deal or a trial.
One of the key elements slowing down criminal proceedings is a painfully slow indictment process, in which a grand jury formally issues charges, or declines to, in felony cases.
An annual report from the local public defender’s office states that the process is getting worse, or at least it is strained more to the point it is becoming a burden on all parties involved in cases.
“In the tri-county, the data shows that our caseload of indicted cases has decreased by over 50% while the number of unindicted cases grew by 10%,” reads the report from James McDermott, the lead attorney who heads the Far West Texas Regional Public Defender in Alpine. “The best conclusion is that we resolve cases quickly once an indictment is returned. The slowdown is from the rate of indictment. We do not get nor are we entitled to discovery pre-indictment, and so we are generally unable to resolve unindicted cases.”
Far West Texas Regional Public Defender is a nonprofit public defender’s office which serves clients who can’t afford private counsel in Brewster, Culberson, Hudspeth and Jeff Davis counties. It’s funded by the counties and state grants for indigent defense. In it’s annual report to its oversight board, it puts the blame for slowdowns on the 83rd District Attorney’s Office responsible for prosecuting felony cases across four counties: “Since 2023, felony and misdemeanor filings have increased substantially, with total new cases rising by more than 170 cases annually in the Alpine office alone. … Case data demonstrates that once cases reach indictment, they are resolved efficiently. The primary constraint on case movement remains delays in indictment and docket scheduling, largely driven by prosecutorial turnover and structural inefficiencies. These external factors—not defense performance—are the primary source of backlog, particularly in unindicted felony cases.”
The 83rd District Attorney’s Office—headed by elected District Attorney Ori White—covers Brewster, Jeff Davis, Pecos and Presidio counties. After a request for comment, White’s office did not address the increase in unindicted cases, but it did dispute some of the report’s assertions. An email statement said access to discovery is provided to public defenders pre-indictment on computer files accessible for each case. The statement also noted, “As per [Criminal Justice Information Services] requirements we maintain our 90% compliance completion numbers.” Under that compliance requirement, prosecutors must get a final legal disposition of 90% of all cases, on a five-year average, or risk losing state grant funding.
Defense attorneys interviewed for this article—who did not want to be named to avoid conflicts with the DA’s office—noted that delays are often seen as beneficial for their clients because passion around cases calm, witness memories fade, and it creates a more beneficial situation for a plea deal. However, undisposed cases for a public defender’s office, which handles the vast majority of cases, can skew the statistics of their efficacy and leave the public wondering what ever happened in serious crimes reported, they said
Tracking indictments
In Gray’s case, the indictment came fairly quickly—by tri-county standards—on February 26, 2025, about six months after his arrest. Generally, for defendants out on bond, prosecutors are required to indict by the end of the grand jury’s term or 180 days (six months), whichever is longer, after an arrest—although many other factors can change the required timeline.
But in an unusual twist in the Gray case, court records show that the Presidio County District Clerk’s Office did not send a “precept of indictment”—which formally notifies defendants and/or their attorney of the indictment—until almost a year later on January 20, 2025. It’s possible that a mistake in initially filing the case in Brewster County was the reason for the delay.
When a grand jury meets and hands down indictments, by law they are to be made public after the judge signs off on them to make sure bond amounts and charges are correct, unless the defendant is not in jail or out on bond, at which point the indictments are sealed from the public to prevent a defendant from fleeing. The indictments are supposed to be filed in the district clerks’ offices within days, at which point they receive case numbers and are available for public inspection.
Many DA offices put out a media release listing the indictment and/or list them on their websites, but the 83rd District Attorney’s Office does not. The Presidio County district clerks then take an additional step of mailing out a certified letter to the defendant and waiting for a return signature card from the post office before making them public—a process that can take months. (If the defendant never signs for receipt of certified mail, eventually initial court hearings like an arraignment would make the records public.)
Big Bend Sentinel surveyed six district clerks in similarly-sized Texas counties who said they had never heard of that extra step, and a spokesperson for the County and District Clerks Association of Texas hadn’t either and added this process was not in their training. Presidio County Clerk Carolina Cataño said it was merely a procedure in place before they were elected that they naturally continued to follow. Brewster County District Clerk Sarah Fellows Martinez said her office used to also require a return receipt that a notice was given to defendants or their attorney before making the indictments public but that her office no longer follows that procedure. (Jeff Davis County District Clark Jennifer Wright has not responded to repeated requests for information on its process.)
Since the return receipts could come in at any time, and since computer searches at both courthouses don’t filter specifically for indictments, reporters tracking cases are forced to continually search for the defendant’s name to see if an indictment finally is listed or try and get that information from the district attorney’s office, which hasn’t responded to inquiries for six months. Last year, Assistant DA Bill Parham said he was unaware of the mailings and discussed that he would be putting out press releases in the future listing indictments—something that has not happened.
Take the case of Justin Lara Vega, an Alpine man who was 37 at the time of his arrest in April 2024. He wasn’t indicted on the charge of indecency with a child, sexual contact, until July 16, 2025, 15 months after arrest. With no comment from the DA’s office and public defenders routinely not commenting on their cases, it’s unclear why. Vega was of particular public interest due to a previous incident where a man opened fire on him in an Alpine neighborhood, and he had a brother arrested for smuggling fentanyl after other family members had overdosed on the drug, one brother dying. After his first charge, he was arrested for continuous family violence, and after a warrant was recently issued for his arrest, he was discovered in Fort Davis in November and led police on a high-speed chase through the Davis Mountains before being detained. A pre-trial hearing for fleeing police was held in Fort Davis Tuesday, but court records were unavailable to see if the case has any new settings.
Texas’ Office of Court Administration (OCA) tracks the number of indictments—reported each month by counties—but does not track the time from arrest to the time of indictment, so no official statistics are available.
Difficulty in scheduling grand juries
Another key factor in extending timelines for indictments is the difficulty in scheduling grand juries in rural areas, where the pools of potential jurists and county staff to arrange the panels are much smaller. With no set schedule for grand juries to meet, dates are often canceled and rescheduled.
The Presidio County grand jury was scheduled to meet last Wednesday. Sources with information from the DA’s office told the Sentinel that the case of Juan Martinez, the Marfa ISD teacher arrested on September 17, 2025, for indecency with a child and improper relationship between educator and student, was scheduled to be presented to that grand jury. However, the grand jury was canceled, and Cataño said a new grand jury would be empaneled in July, at which point a new date would be set. That likely means another case that extends about a year from arrest to an indictment decision.
In general, Brewster and Presidio grand jury members serve about six months before new members are empaneled. The panels include 12 members of the public and four alternates. Grand jury proceedings, in which prosecutors present their evidence seeking an indictment, are closed to the public. Thus, with delays in meetings, lengthy times until indictment and lack of immediate public records, the public is often left with no clue for a lengthy period of time on whether an arrest they read about has ever proceeded to an indictment.
Brewster District Clerk Martinez said the Brewster grand jury has met six times since last June. Cataño said the Presidio grand jury only met once in the past year, in September.
