A judge in Austin had three separate chances to send Jaheim Neal to prison before he killed Larissa Herold. She denied every one.
Neal was on plea-deal probation for a 2020 aggravated kidnapping and robbery. In the meantime, he picked up arrests for assault, drugs, and a bunch of other crimes. The DA filed three motions to revoke. Judge Chantal Eldridge denied all three.
One Saturday last fall, 26-year-old Larissa was stopped at a red light at Parmer and Mopac, driving home from volunteering at a community garden. Neal was on the service road - speeding with no valid license, on alcohol and cocaine and pot. He jumped multiple barriers and slammed into her car. She died at the scene.
Since 2021, Travis County judges have denied 68% (or 5,400) of motions to revoke probation or deferred adjudication. Occasionally, an Austin prosecutor will try to put away a violent offender, but it’s the judge who sends them back to the streets.
Larissa was a mechanical engineer with two UT degrees. Her father still keeps her plants in the front room of his house. "She was my daughter, she was my friend," he said.
Great reporting by @BriHollisNEWS and @hueyjayd - link in replies.
The judge who kept a criminal on the street -- until he killed 26-year-old UT engineering grad Larissa Herold -- was accused of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old Brazilian foreign exchange student living in her home.
In 2006, Chantal Eldridge gave the student alcohol and asked him to play strip poker with her, before they had sex in his bedroom. Her 8-year-old son was in the house.
The placement company banned her but the DA declined to prosecute, partly because the student had returned to Brazil. Eldridge won her judicial election that November.
Her first trial as judge (in 2019) involved a man convicted by jury of raping his cleaning lady. Eldridge declined to issue a jail sentence. A visiting judge ordered her off the case, finding a reasonable person would question her impartiality on sexual assault. She also employed a registered sex offender as her court coordinator.
As of now, Eldridge is running unopposed in November.
The Democrat Party mass imported monsters who are mass murdering Americans. And the Democrat Party and its corrupt judges are fighting relentlessly to keep them here.