Texas man guilty in ‘fight club’ scandal

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (AP) — A former state employee responsible for some of Texas’ most vulnerable residents was convicted Thursday of injuring them during orchestrated fights at a state facility for the developmentally disabled.

Jesse Salazar, 25, was the first of six former employees of the Corpus Christi State School who were charged in an abuse scandal that police described of as a “fight club” at the living center.

The jury found him guilty of intentionally causing injury to a disabled person, a third-degree felony, after deliberating for less than two hours. The trial immediately moved into the penalty phase, with Salazar facing up to 10 years in prison.

For more than a year, authorities said, staff on the night shift in one of the facility’s dorms staged regular fights among the residents. They instigated the fights with direct commands and pranks aimed at spurring the residents to turn on one another, police said.

Almost 20 videos of the bouts were discovered in March when a cell phone containing the images was found at a clothing store and turned in to police. The four videos shown to jurors in Salazar’s case were filmed in early 2008.

One video showed a resident terrified, screaming while running around a room as another resident tried to hit him. Salazar could be seen filming the melee with his cell phone. In another video, Salazar appeared to tell a resident to push another far-bigger resident to instigate a fight.

Salazar, testifying for the first time during the penalty phase, said he had grown close to some of the residents seen in the videos and was sorry for what happened. He began seeing the fights about two weeks after he started in August 2007.

“It was dumb,” Salazar said. “I’m sorry for what took place, and it shouldn’t have happened.” He blamed a lack of supervision at the facility that placed young, inexperienced staff in these positions and co-worker Timothy Dixon, who was older and physically intimidating. He also alleged that some supervisors were aware of the fights but did not report them.

More indictments could be in the works. Corpus Christi Police Detective Curtis Abbott testified Thursday that the number of suspects in the case had risen to 12.