A Harris County commissioner is pledging action on the county’s electronic monitoring program after two murder defendants cut off their ankle monitors and disappeared before their respective trials this month.
Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia, the county’s former sheriff, said he will bring a plan before the commissioners court to strengthen how Harris County handles GPS ankle monitors, specifically for violent offenders.
Garcia did not release the specifics of the plan, and a spokesperson for his office said the details will likely surface during budget discussions over the summer.
The most recent case involves 32-year-old Walter Pozos, who was scheduled to begin a second murder trial last Wednesday.
Pozos was out on a $25,000 bond for a July 2023 crash in north Harris County that killed his passenger, Hector Castilleja Correa, and injured another person, after authorities say he was fleeing from deputies at over 100 miles per hour when the crash occurred. His GPS monitor began generating a tamper alert early Monday morning, two days before the trial was set to begin. Pretrial Services left him a voicemail instructing him to report for an inspection, which he ignored.
The U.S. Marshals Service and Harris County Sheriff’s Office are both involved in the search, and Crime Stoppers is offering up to $5,000 for information leading to his arrest.
Crime Stoppers Director Andy Kahan has questioned the bond amount in the Pozos case. “It’s been over a decade, if not more, that I’ve seen someone get a $25,000 bond for murder,” Kahan said. “When I first saw it, I thought it was a typo.”
That case came just weeks after Lee Gilley, a capital murder defendant accused of strangling his pregnant wife Christa Bauer, cut off his ankle monitor and fled the country. Gilley was released on a $1 million bond in October 2024, was required to wear a GPS monitor, and was prohibited from leaving Texas without prior notification.
According to a federal criminal complaint, he cut off the monitor on the night of May 1, triggering a strap tamper alert, and was unreachable to authorities in the days that followed. Investigators believe he traveled from Texas to Canada before flying on to Italy, where he was detained upon arrival in Milan, reportedly carrying forged Belgian identification documents.
Gilley has since appeared before an Italian court, where he refused extradition and told the judge he is innocent. Extradition proceedings remain pending.
Following the Gilley case, Judge Peyton Peebles expressed frustration with Harris County Pretrial Services, the department responsible for supervising defendants out on bond. He said he had previously instructed the department to alert him immediately if there were any signs Gilley was not complying with his GPS restrictions, rather than waiting the standard 24 to 48 hours the agency follows.
Pretrial Services executive director Natalie Michailides said the department followed its current notification protocols but acknowledged those protocols could be improved. After the Pozos case, Michailides has not responded to media requests for comment.
Court records also show that while Pozos was actively a fugitive, prosecutors had to file a formal legal motion to compel a private tracking company to hand over his GPS logs to law enforcement.
In his statement, Garcia noted that the district attorney has been able to file additional charges in more than 200 tampering cases since a 2023 state law took effect. That law, Senate Bill 1004 by State Sen. Joan Huffman (R–Houston), created a criminal offense for knowingly removing or disabling an electronic monitoring device, a state jail felony. Before that bill passed, cutting off an ankle monitor was only a technical violation of bond conditions, not a standalone crime.
Kahan warned against treating electronic monitoring as a guarantee of public safety. “An ankle monitor is as good as the person who wants to honor it,” he said. “If they want to honor it, it’s the greatest tool in the world. If they don’t want to, guess what? There is nothing you can do to prevent them from removing, destroying, or tampering with that.”
Garcia, in his statement, said the county can still do more. “I know we can still do more to ensure compliance and accountability, especially from violent offenders,” he wrote.
