Sheriff Who?

At dawn, Plinio left with his five older children and took the family's only car. He gave his wife one last chance to change her mind, but she was resolute. A heartbroken Tere cried as her husband drove away, not sure how a single woman and two young children could manage in their tough neighborhood. But after less than a month Plinio returned early one morning. He didn't have a lot to say, although the older children were overjoyed. As if she expected their return all along, Tere fixed everyone a breakfast of beans and potatoes with fresh tortillas. Plinio found work as a ditch digger for the city, where he stayed until he retired.

"This uneducated Hispanic woman took a stand on behalf of her children," says Ramiro, who has a doctorate in social welfare policy and works as the director of patient services for a local health care network. "She never went to school, she couldn't read or write, yet somehow she developed an appreciation for education. She was an amazing woman."

As a high school student, Lupe volunteered with the San Antonio Neighborhood Youth Association, helping troubled teens. She later worked her way through Bethany Nazarene College in Oklahoma City. After college she joined the Army Reserves and took a job as a county jailer in Kansas City. In 1978, she moved to the Dallas area, working at a federal prison in Seagoville before moving to a job as an investigator with the General Services Administration. According to a Dallas Morning News profile, the future sheriff investigated drug trafficking, money laundering and white-collar crimes.

Martha Cortez is the polite, soft-spoken niece of Lupe Valdez, whom she calls her "guardian angel." Dallas elected an honest, hard-working sheriff, she says with obvious pride. Cortez describes her aunt as joyful, an animal lover who takes in sick dogs and "always gave 100 percent at work" throughout her career. Now that she is the highest elected law enforcement officer in Dallas, Valdez apparently relishes her important role.

"She loves what she's doing now," Cortez says. "When we do get to visit, she always has this excitement on her face when she talks about being sheriff."

Valdez's one obvious deficiency as sheriff is her preference to keep a low profile even when times demand she stand up and take charge. Last February, when the county debuted the Adult Information System, a disastrous computer program that lost track of inmates and forced many of them to languish behind bars weeks after they should have been released, many of her advisors urged her to say something, anything, about the emerging crisis. The Morning News ran a front-page story detailing the agonizing plight of inmates who were forgotten in the jail and suffered without their medication or contact with their friends and family. Other media outlets quickly snatched up the story, but Valdez remained, more or less, out of sight.

The sheriff was not to blame for the malfunctioning program, although Commissioner Ken Mayfield has said that her clerks sloppily entered bad data, contributing to the crisis. Regardless of whether Valdez deserved even a smidgen of blame for the chaos at the jail, it is her jail and many urged her to speak about the problem and offer an apology, but according to at least one of her advisors, Valdez didn't grasp the gravity of the situation, much less the responsibilities of her office.

"I suggested to her that she have some type of public statement during the AIS scandal," Plata says. "She said something derogatory about the public. I said, 'You better remember who put you there.'"

Plata wouldn't reveal what exactly Valdez said, but he's clearly soured on his friend and former client. "She's closed the door to a lot of folks. She's very hard-headed," he says.

But while Valdez was avoiding the public eye, she was doing what she could to deal with the mess behind the scenes. At the height of the AIS foul-up, when the county might have been better served recording its criminal information on Post-It Notes, Valdez was working alongside first-year deputies, relocating inmates whose information was lost in the system. "She just stepped up and said, 'What needs to be done?' And someone said, 'Well, these guys need to be moved to the West Tower,' and she just did it," says Ben Roberts, the president of the Dallas Sheriff's Fraternal Order of Police. "There were guys who had been there for 15 years and they couldn't pick Bowles out of a line-up."