Free Republic

A 5-year-old boy has been mauled to death by two dogs at the home of a family friend in Southeast Texas. The Orange County Sheriff's Office said in a statement that the dogs attacked Tanner Smith on Sunday evening at the home in Vidor (VY'-dur). Tanner was taken to a hospital in Beaumont where he died. Authorities say the boy and his mother were visiting a friend. The mother thought her friend's father was outside watching the boy. When the woman learned the father was not at home she went outside and found her injured son.

A teenage babysitter was arrested Tuesday and charged in the death of a 5-year-old Texas boy who accidentally shot himself with the babysitter's gun while she was napping, authorities said. Melissa Ann Ringhardt, 19, of Vidor was being held in the Orange County Jail on a felony charge of abandoning or endangering a child, the county sheriff's office said in a statement. She could face a sentence of six months to two years if convicted. The sheriff's office said Ringhardt, who lives with the boy's family, left her semiautomatic .40-caliber handgun on a coffee table when she went into a...

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — White supremacist gang member Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed Wednesday evening for the infamous dragging death slaying of James Byrd Jr., a black man from East Texas. Byrd, 49, was chained to the back of a pickup truck and pulled whip-like to his death along a bumpy asphalt road in one of the most grisly hate crime murders in recent Texas history. Brewer, 44, was asked if he had any final words, to which he replied: "No. I have no final statement." He glanced at his parents watching through a nearby window, took several deep breaths and...