SEGUIN, Texas – Now a dispatch supervisor at the Guadalupe County Sheriff’s Office, Tracy Childress Albrecht was only 5 years old in November 1983 when her grandfather, Wilson County Sheriff’s Deputy Ollie Childress, was shot and killed in the trunk of his patrol car.
The two men he’d thought were having car trouble turned out to be bank robbers who took him hostage and stole his shirt, badge and gun. They then handcuffed Childress and locked him in the trunk.
He was shot once and then again after the robbers returned and discovered he was still alive.
Earlier this month, Albrecht said she was notified Pedro Sosa, the killer, had died in a prison hospital six years after his death penalty was finally thrown out, and he was given a life sentence.
“Forty years is a long time to try to get justice for somebody. But I think that’s as much justice as we’re going to get,” Albrecht said.
She said it had been an emotional ordeal “just to keep (Sosa) behind bars.”
Like most of the family, Roger Childress, Albrecht’s uncle and Ollie Childress’s son, said he has no sympathy for Sosa.
Roger Childress said when he’d seen Sosa in court.
“He looked straight at me with a big old smile. He wasn’t remorseful at all,” he said.
Roger Childress, who was 30 years old at the time of his father’s death, became a Wilson County deputy for a time and even drove his father’s patrol car after the trunk was replaced.
What happened to his father back then, he said, was unheard of, yet these days, “The way the crime is, and the way that people are, they shoot you in a heartbeat.”
Being in law enforcement, Albrecht said it’s been hard to deal with the fact her grandfather’s killer escaped execution and could have been eligible for parole.
“Believing in the law, believing in the system, but having such little faith in it. It let me down personally,” she said.
Yet she said Sosa’s death means their fight is over.
“It’s in God’s hands now,” she said. “He’ll meet his ultimate judge.”