Thompson acknowledged his guilt and agreed to cooperate with federal investigators. Unwrapping it, they discovered a plastic container with a pound of methamphetamine inside. After going to law school, in northwest Indiana, he thought hed never return to West Texas, but it was Liz Rogers who persuaded him to come back. Instead, groups of up to two dozen Mexican nationals at a time, arrested for smuggling drugs or illegal entry, were marched in front of the judge throughout the day. 304 Dianella St, Wendell, NC 27591 MLS ID #2490539, Ryan Homes. The sheriff had also helped deliver various loads, the agency claimed, altogether earning him $70,000 to $80,000 in drug money. Urique had an anthropomorphic quality from here: the peaks on either side of the river looked like heads, with an evergreen blanket sloped across their chests and legs. They said the sheriff of that county was La Puerta, (the door), that he controls everything, he noted. Federal securities regulators sanction former S.A.-area See photos of a $4.5 million Dominion mansion on the market, UT-Austin blocks access to TikTok on campus Wi-Fi networks, President Ford's visit to San Antonio included culinary oops, Affair testimony may be kept from jury in McDonald murder trial, Once again, South San ISD is thinking about closing schools, Southwest ISD superintendent finalist a familiar name, Woman struck, killed while crossing dark road in Universal City. ), he added. He had escaped, but Silvino continued running through the night, slept half of the next day, and then ran through the afternoon and the next night. While the podcast features numerous sources, here are a few of the main players in the story. And when cocaine starts flowing across the Mexican border like never before, Robert dives in headfirst. I still wanted to see the town where he had spent time as a boy-where many backpackers make their crossing todayso instead, I went with Rogers. The six-foot-two Chambers towered over him by more than a foot. There was little shade, and he dropped down on a set of steps next to four old. For him, the bust was an unfortunate necessity that put a halt to their goals of a much larger bust of key players. Robert Chambers - Football Official - Texas Association of Sports Officials | LinkedIn Robert Chambers Environmental Engineer at Austin White Lime Company Austin, Texas, United States 735. He was 36, but people still remembered him from the summer of 1986 when he was 19. The journalist Christopher McDougall chronicled the race, and his ensuing bookBorn to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seenbecame an international sensation, igniting a global running craze. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents left him in Jurez without enough money for a bus ticket home. He was sentenced to 19 years behind barswhere he remains today. The next year, Chvez ran in the Boston Marathon (possibly the first Tarahumara woman to do so) and, while there, spoke on a panel about indigenous running traditions. The loss of a hero harms a communitys ability to believe in anything anymore, wrote the historians, Louise OConnor and Cecilia Thompson, no relation to the sheriff. View Robert I Chambers results in Texas (TX) including current phone number, address, relatives, background check report, and property record with Whitepages. Family and friends are welcome to send flowers or leave their condolences on this memorial page and share them with the . International runners and film crews descended on the Sierra Tarahumara. If circumstances once again drove Silvino to carry another drug load, hed be risking a potentially lengthy prison term. Hed run rarajipari as a boy, and, per Tarahumara tradition, gambled on the race from an early age, winning soap, pens, and sometimes even a chicken. (Courtesy of Presidio County Sheriff's Office) By Brbara Anguiano Buchmeyer gave him the max: Two life terms without a chance of parole. Jail Location Around the same time, federal defenders in Alpine had represented a pair of Tarahumara teenagers also recruited in Chihuahua. After walking for ten days in the harsh borderland, their guide had abandoned them that morning. Corrupt Texas sheriff soon to be released from prison. It was one of Thompsons more dubious associations, a local man named Glyn Robert Chambers, that apparently led to his downfall. (Robert Chambers was released in 2005 after serving 13 years. An agent on a dirt bike tore after him as the others scattered. . Location Bellevue, WA, US Work Localization Editor @ The Pokmon Company International QA Localization Tester- Bilingual German and English @ 2k Vegas Quality Analyst @ Teleperformance see more Education He grew up believing hed never see him again outside of prison. Four days later, he was ordered held without bond, shocking his supporters. Silvino followed the creek, skirting red-and-white fields of poppy. He passed the now extinguished fire pit and its dogs and cats, a fenced-in flock of garrulous turkeys, and local government officials eating breakfast inside the lodges small gazebo. Finally, after a few hours, Vega asked the translator if she could speak more slowly. Texas Department of Criminal Justice | PO Box 99 . The newspapers alleged mechanical failure, but people heard otherwise: it was said that traffickers had murdered them in the middle of the night and pushed their car into the canyon. Vega and his family had fled the canyons to find work in Chihuahua, and though he got a job as a brickmaker, it barely sustained them. Cook, a native of Alpine, knew the area well and helped manage the surveillance of Chambers and cultivating their informants. The drug lord known as El Zorro de Ojinaga (The Ojinaga Fox) was a mentor to Chambers and played a significant role as The Plaza who controlled all drug movement through the region into the U.S. Acosta, who was gunned down in 1987 by Mexican federales (with the assistance of the FBI) is featured in the recent Narcos Mexico series and the book Drug Lord, by former El Paso Times reporter Terrance Poppa. Unable to afford lawyers, each defendant was assigned one by the court. A pair of uncles on his moms side also went to prison for drug offenses, and so did a paternal uncle. He was the town favorite, recalled Carl Robinson, 85, a former longtime school superintendent who retired in 1992. He looked up at the stars and thought about curses, as older Tarahumara runners tend to do before a race. Silvino remembered the women in Huisuchi who used to weave baskets out of the pine needles. Thompson was very popular in Marfa, which back then was a gritty, down-in-the-boot-heels ranching town of about 2,500 people, a far cry from todays hip cultural mecca, popular with wealthy New Yorkers and Californians. His attire was perfect pressed jeans, starched shirt, Stetson tilted and a gun on his hip, they noted. When Border Patrol agents arrested this group of six and weighed the marijuana bricksall 256 poundsthey realized that one felt different. He found a friend to front him enough to get to Janos, the first town on his route back. Tall and lithe, his skin browned from years of laboring under the desert sun, he strode through the darkness. I thought about Silvino, and I told Rogers about his case. Still, of the dozens and dozens of clients hed defended, it was Vega, and the plight of the Tarahumara, that stuck with him. When he met Vega again, Chambers jokingly asked, If you could run like that, why didnt you escape? Vega said he never could have evaded the agents in their trucks and helicopters. sation, igniting a global running craze. Mounds of melon-size rocks blanketed every grave. Silvino, with his farmland afflicted by unrelenting drought, was one of the desperate ones, so he signed on to tote drugs. In the middle of August, Silvino and seven others cleared eight acres of weeds by hand amid a plague of red ants, tarantulas, bees, gnats, flies, scorpions, snakes, floods, and 125-degree heat. We drove up a small bluff, and Rogers led me to the grave of Boyd Chambers. The object of their intense interest was a red horse trailer parked at the county fairgrounds east of town. The Chambers' gift creates the J. Robert Chambers '89 and Kimberly A. Strapped to his back were two homespun burlap packs, one filled with 45 pounds of marijuana bricks and the other with enough burritos and gallon jugs of water to survive another week in the wilderness. Chambers thought about how Vega wouldnt be there for his two sons as they grew into their teens. Below are the results we could find for Robert Chambers. She worried about Tarahumara children losing their running traditions, so she regularly put on races in the region, including all-female events called ariweta. There was little to give away his roots. Had he been arrested the second time in New Mexico, she said, he would have faced a mandatory five years in prison. Traditionally they ran as a form of religious ritual, such as to celebrate the harvest, in two-team races called rarajipari. See the links below for more info. There were comments like, I wonder how much he kept?, the sheriff said. Silvino flung his bags into the sand and began to run. It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Robert Stanley Chambers (Seagoville, Texas), who passed away on February 4, 2022, at the age of 69, leaving to mourn family and friends. Robert Chambers was born in New York City on September 25, 1966, to Robert Chambers, Sr. and Phyllis Chambers. But in the nineties, as Mexican cartels rose in power relative to their Colombian counterpartswho preferred to traffic through South FloridaWest Texas became even more essential. Either barefoot or in sandals (called huaraches) made from old tire treads and goat hide, they were able to traverse seemingly super-human distances. Last summer, according to a courtroom interpreter, one witness in a backpacker trial in Pecos said that smugglers in Ojinaga told him they only wanted to work with Tarahumara, because of their strength and endurance. Thompson started as a deputy sheriff in Presidio County, which covers 3,856 square miles and shares more than 150 river miles with Mexico. MLS# 22079698. Robert Stanley Chambers August 10, 1952 February 4, 2022 Robert Stanley Chambers, of Talty, Texas, passed away on February 4th, 2022, at his home in Talty. He had grown up on the ancient tales of men who sprinkled bone dust on the course the night before, thought to induce fatigue in your competitors. Silvino, a farmer with four children, knew the canyons the way urban dwellers know city streets: every rock, cactus, and river bend was a sign. He accompanied her to court as an intern. That part of the state was out of control, said Dale Stinson, head of the DEA regional office. At approximately 1:15 a.m., Agent Fort observed a green Chevrolet Suburban driving east on the Fairgrounds Road with the lights off, DEA Agent Dale Stinson testified at a later court hearing. His wife, Barbara Jean, worked at the Marfa National Bank. True wondered how they would fare against the Tarahumara, and he sought to revitalize these local traditions. He grew up believing hed never. When they arrived at the orchard, there were no pecans. But unlike Chambers, who was beating down the door to make a plea deal, Thompson initially hung tough and it cost him dearly. It was still dark when Silvino woke two hours before the big race in Cerocahui last October. The next day, he drove two hours with Liz Rogers, a thirty-year former federal defender known for pulling out long-shot victories, to the West Texas Detention Facility, in Sierra Blanca, to see Vega. There are unanswered questions, he added. Makawi had also met with the wives of those who, like Sebastian Vega, were in prison in the U.S. Word was spreading that the sicarios wanted to eliminate the two. He read about races that went on for several days and about the ultramarathon that now brought the best long-distance runners to the Sierra Madre. He recalled his 62-mile ultramarathon victory in Costa Rica, where hed felt he might collapse. Chambers also was involved in several gun battles on the border, saved six hunters from a fiery plane crash in the desert, and was shot three times in the back in an assassination attempt on a Mexican fishing boat. There were hairpin turns where the drop-off was thousands of feet, and he passed several roadside memorials. Robert Chambers in Texas 442 people named Robert Chambers found in Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston-Galveston-Brazoria and 20 other cities. In a bizarre news conference held just days later, Thompson admitted the ton of cocaine was his, but he claimed it was part of a one-man reverse sting. Thus began a shocking small-town drama that quickly turned Marfa on its head and sent the sheriff to federal prison. It operated along the Rio Grande from El Paso to Alpine, from 1988 to 1992. Escuders client had been sentenced to eighteen months in federal prisonsix months longer than others in his group because hed had the misfortune of appearing before a different judge. He read about villages that had no electricity or running water and that were full of ex-felons. Paul Chambers was sitting in his Alpine office when he got an email about a new client named Sebastian Vega Genoveva waiting for him in jail. Wearing sandals and swigging beers at the final aid station before the finish, the Tarahumara runners captured first, second, and fifth place and left behind hundreds of mesmerized competitors and fans. During the day, they slept beneath frayed creosote bushes, concealing their bags nearby, and at night they trudged north toward the freeway, avoiding rattlesnakes, coyotes, and most of all, la migra, the Border Patrol. ClustrMaps. He and his cousins would be paid 15,000 pesos ($825) apiece. And, he said, it is often misunderstood: Thompson never was the primary figure in the investigation of a 10-year drug conspiracy. His mother had been a running champion in her day, and one of her sisters was the mother of Arnulfo, his greatest competitor. At 7:48, Silvino spotted the worn arrow that directed runners to take the footpath to the scenic overlook called El Mirador del Cerro del Gallego. He became frustrated with the legal system, which he felt was too focused on punishing his family members for their addictions rather than helping them. In 1986, Chambers led a raid on the municipal jail in Ojinaga, kidnapped an inmate wanted in the United States for rape, brought him back to Texas and chained him naked to a tree for authorities to find, according to popular lore. Rather than face starvation, Silvinos cousins had approached him with an idea: they could go on a drug-running mission across the border. You can view 1 entry, complete with personal details, location history, phone numbers, relatives and locations for Robert Chambers. Two weeks earlier, sicarios, or hit men, had stopped in Rejogochi to ask for Chvez, the young activist, and her father, Makawi. A month later, Chambers stood next to Vega againthis time in an El Paso courtroomfor a second and final hearing on his slightly improved sentence. There was no sewer connection in their trailer, and electricity came from an extension cord that stretched from his grandparents house. Connect with the definitive source for global and local news. He laughed at the memory of a. But by the time he arrived, what he found was troubling: because of years of drought, famine, and encroaching cartel violence, in some areas the tribes running traditions were almost entirely dormant. While Thompson, 72, is unlikely to return to Marfa, the painful story of his fall from grace soon will be told here again. . It had once served as an outpost for tourists exploring the natural beauty of the surrounding canyons, which helped keep it relatively tranquil until a Sinaloa bosss nephew was murdered there, in late 2014. 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