H Published For Orange Countians By Orange Countians H
County Record TheRecordLive.com
Vol. 58 No. 32
The Community Newspaper of Orange, Texas
Week of Wednesday, December 7, 2016
County seeks ‘Hail Mary’ in lawsuit Dave Rogers
For The Record
After last week’s negative finding in its appeal of damages awarded in a jail death lawsuit, Orange County is hoping for a last-gasp ruling. County commissioners met in closed session for 90 minutes at the end of Tuesday’s commissioners court meeting to discuss the Nov. 29 ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. That decision not only rejected the county’s appeal of the 2015 jury decision that awarded $1.5 million in damages to his family for pain suffered by Robert Montano while in custody prior to his death; it also reinstated a $900,000 “wrongful death” award that the 2015 trial judge had stripped from the verdict. Jody Crump, Commissioner Precinct 4, said in a Tuesday evening interview the county could be on the hook for as much as $3.1 million
Crump
(counting $440,000 for plaintiff’s attorney’s fees plus interest) in as soon as 60 days. Commissioners took no official ac-
tion Tuesday. But Crump said they had previously retained appellate lawyer David Gaultney, a former Texas Court of Appeals justice, and he is already working on another appeal. “He’s our counselor,” Crump said, “and he started an appeal the day (Nov. 29) the judgment came down. I think he’s going to file it Thursday.” Crump said the county would ask for an en banc appeal, which would be a rehearing before all 15 judges of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider the decision made by the three-judge panel of the court. BP asked the Fifth Circuit
for an en banc rehearing of its oil spill settlement and the state of Texas was granted an en banc hearing by the Fifth Circuit, which in turn ruled against its Voter ID Law earlier this year. More than legal maneuvers, there’s a sense of concern around the courthouse as to where the $3.1 million
might be found to pay the judgment. At the time of Montano’s death in 2011, the county did not have liability insurance in case of such lawsuits. It does now. The county struggled for months to put together its operating budget for 2017, skimping on raises and trim-
ming future employee and retiree benefits along the way. “If the appeal doesn’t come forward, we’re looking at about 30 to 60 days (to pay),” Crump said. Asked where the money would come from, Crump said: “That’s what we have to figure out now.” Asked if county employees
should worry about job security, Crump skirted the question. “We have to figure out where that $3.1 million is coming from,” he said. County Judge Stephen Carlton missed Tuesday’s meeting because of a commitment to the Air Force Reserve.
Toy Coffee brings in toys, cash donations
Fans’ prayers go to hometown hero Earl Thomas Dave Rogers
For The Record
NFL All-Pro Earl Thomas missed his team’s game two weeks ago with a hamstring injury, then broke his leg in Sunday night’s return and finally told his Twitter followers he was considering retiring. Whaaaaaat? It’s been a crazy couple of weeks for Earl’s fans, who number quite a few in his hometown of Orange and even more across Longhorn
“The LORD, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing” Zephaniah 3:17
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Nation and millions across the NFL. Thomas, the 2015 Person of the Year for the Record Newspapers, was all-state in high school football for West Orange-Stark, All-American for the University of Texas and now a four-time Pro Bowler for the Seattle Seahawks. Toby Foreman was among many who couldn’t recall the Seahawks free safety ever missing a game before the Nov. 27 game at Tampa Bay. “The only injuries I can recall him having in high school was with the ankle,” said Foreman, now Beaumont Central’s head coach and formerly West Orange-Stark track coach and football assistant. “He had ankle injuries a couple of times.” Then Foreman recalled how Thomas dealt with them. “His sophomore year he hurt his ankle right before the district track meet, but he gutted it out and ran,” the coach recalled. “The hurricane (Rita, 2005) year, he was a junior, and we had to play three games in eight days” to make up for games missed. “I remember the Orangefield game was the one in the middle, and we were careful with him. But he played in all three. “In my opinion, he can definitely handle pain. I remember he waited until after the Super Bowl a couple of years ago to have shoulder surgery a couple of years ago.” Terry King, who was WO-S trainer when Thomas played for the Mustangs, recalls the town’s favorite son playing a tough two-sport doubleheader. “One time, we’d gone pretty deep in the football playoffs and were playing the same weekend there was a EARL THOMAS Page 2A
The Service League of Orange hosted the 60th Anniversary of the Toy Coffee on Thursday at the home of Chris and Micca Riedel in Orange. The annual tradition of bringing a new, unwrapped toy or cash continued with donations going to the Salvation Army for less privileged children. The Service League of Orange said that 478 people attended the event at the Riedel home where 474 toys and $4,300 was donated for the cause. RECORD PHOTO: Lawrence Trimm
Pearl Harbor offers lessons at 75 Dave Rogers
For The Record
Robert Rothrock remembers exactly where he was late Sunday afternoon Dec. 7, 1941, when he heard about the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor. “Me and some kids had been down to the creek and we were (walking) on the Cotton Belt Railroad tracks coming home,” says the 91-year-old Little Cypress resident, a native of Fort Worth. “This boy I was with had two little sisters and they came and told us they heard it on the radio.” Alice, Rothrock’s wife, was just 7 and living in Port Neches on the date President Franklin D. Roosevelt said “would live in infamy” -when Japanese planes flew out of the early-morning sky to bomb and strafe the Hawaiian naval base, claiming more than 2,400 lives and pulling the United States into World War II. “That was the first time I ever heard newsboys in the street screaming, ‘Extra! Extra! Extra!’ about the bombing,” she said. Cedric Stout didn’t need mainstream media. The news reached him first-hand via a couple of Japanese torpedoes that sunk his battleship, the USS Utah. The Bridge City man, 95, is
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941, almost immediately changed the lives of Orange’s Robert Rothrock and his wife, Alice. Rothrock enlisted in the Navy as soon as he could and sailed the Pacific for three years while Alice kept track of gas ration coupons in her family’s Port Neches filling station. RECORD PHOTO: Dave Rogers
a rare find these days, a man who survived the hail of explosive ordinance from the sky and the hellfire that was flaming oil floating atop the harbor’s waters and is still walking among us on the 75th anniversary of what’s become known as Pearl Harbor Day. He’s the only Pearl Harbor survivor surviving from a list of Golden Triangle men who
were there that day provided by the Southeast Texas Veterans Group and published in this paper 10 years ago. Bill Stephenson of Vidor, 93, who was aboard the USS Honolulu during the attack, died a week ago at a Beaumont hospice. Like most stories from Pearl Harbor survivors, Stout’s begins with breakfast in the mess hall of his ship.
Then he heard the first bomb explode. Initially, the newly minted sailor thought it was a drill. “I saw all the commotion going on and thought, somebody’s having some fun,” he said as part of an oral history prepared for the Pearl Harbors Survivors Association. “But then a bullet went ‘phew’ right over the top of my head and I knew it wasn’t no fun.” A World War I battleship that had once carried president Herbert Hoover on a diplomatic mission to South America, the USS Utah was being used for target practice by the Navy in 1941. At Pearl, it was berthed on the opposite side of Ford Island from Battleship Row, where most of the attack’s damage was inflicted. Within minutes of the first shots being fired that morning, torpedoes fired by divebombing Japanese planes slammed into the Utah’s hull and the ship began to list. Just 10 minutes later, the ship snapped its mooring lines, rolled over and capsized. In those 10 minutes, Stout said he received an order to abandon ship and complied -eventually. At first, he said, machine gun fire from the attacking warplanes kept him from running across the deck. “When it became apparent SURVIVING Page 2A