“We’re operating pretty much out of asset forfeiture money because the counties don’t have enough money to cover all of our salaries,” Tonya Ahlschwede said three weeks ago as she stood in one of her two office spaces with the other three women on her staff. The small room, stacked full of files with color-coded markings that won’t fit inside the pair of rusty and battered filing cabinets, used to be a nursery in the old church building, before it was turned into the Eckert Civic Center of Mason County.
Two large desks and a Rubbermaid table serve as workstations for the three women sharing the space, two small windows set in the white painted wood paneling letting in light in each half of the room, separable by a heavy, old, brown curtain partition, which has been pushed back to open up the room.
Seated at a desk to the right of the partition, Asset Forfeiture Manager and Legal Assistant Darla Pape flipped through a file filled with black and white printout pictures of watches and other jewelry that had been slipped into sheet protectors.
“We’re operating off of our drug money to pay for all of the other costs, without rent,” the 452nd District Attorney said.
From Agricultural Science to District Attorney
Tonya Ahlschwede grew up in Mason, the daughter of a small town kindergarten teacher and a rancher, both of whom have now retired and still reside in the area. In 1994, she graduated Mason High School and went off to Texas A&M in College Station to study agricultural science. After she obtained her degree, she became a student teacher in Menard, where she decided she wasn’t meant to be an ag teacher.
“You know, it was just…there were so many issues that I could not fix,” Ahlschwede said pensively. “I’m a fixer, so I applied to law school and got into law school at Texas Tech and graduated from law school in 1999.”
In spring 1999, Ahlschwede aced the bar exam and then moved to San Angelo to work for County Attorney Chris Taylor, when he was first starting out. In Taylor’s office, the young attorney was trained as the office’s family violence prosecutor, taking lessons from current Justice of the Peace Kay Longest and retired prosecutor Gerald Fohn.
“I tried a lot of cases in San Angelo,” she said, recalling years working with a network of attorneys and judges who still hold positions within the community.
Having gotten her start under Taylor, Ahlschwede moved to the local District Attorney’s Office, as an assistant prosecutor to former 51st District Attorney Steve Lupton. She remained in San Angelo until she became pregnant with her first child and moved back to her family’s ranch in Mason, ultimately opening her own private practice as a criminal defense attorney.
Eventually, Ahlschwede began working for 198th DA Ronald Sutton in Sutton County, followed by his successor, Amos Barton.
Sutton’s office was seated in Kerrville, but part of his district also included Junction, the largest city and county seat of Kimble County. Interstate 10 cuts through both counties, a source of plentiful seizures in drug money and asset forfeitures as criminals sped up and down the interstate to deliver and pick up their product.
Ahlschwede explained that when she worked for Sutton, he used the forfeiture money to fund things like expert witnesses in jury trials and various other expenses that the office incurred on an irregular basis.
“Junction, Interstate 10, I mean, they had million-dollar seizure cases,” Ahlschwede said. “They had two or three, literally like $1 million in cash going down the interstate that they seized there. Well, when Ron left, I don’t remember how much money was left in the account, but it was well over $1 million, close to $2 million. When the 198th took Kerrville and Bandera, they kept all that money, so when we started we had zero.”
Starting From Scratch
Tonya Ahlschwede was appointed to the District Attorney position for the 452nd Judicial District on Sept. 1, 2013, when Texas legislature broke off five counties that formerly comprised the 198th and created a new district seated in Mason. The court handles cases in rural central west Texas, in Edwards, McCulloch, Kimble, Menard, and Mason counties.
When the 452nd Judicial District was established, Ahlschwede and Office Administrator Jana Ritter were the only members of the skeleton crew staff in Mason’s tiny civic center, while Assistant District Attorney Steve Lupton managed Brady a few miles up the road in McCulloch County.
Services were severely limited initially as the trio worked to manage the five-county caseload, gradually adding Legal Assistant and Asset Forfeiture Caseload Manager Darla Coffey to the team and applying for a grant to hire a Victim Services Coordinator Tamra Frey, who had been a juror on a trial that Ahlschwede prosecuted.
While Frey manages contact with all of the victims of cases arising from the five counties, Ritter is responsible for keeping up with the paperwork for McCulloch and Mason counties, while Pape handles those coming out of Menard, Kimble and Edwards.
Each of their roles is essential to keeping the office going so the attorneys can prosecute, however budget shortfalls and the administrative demands associated with starting a new office have meant that the team is held together by passion and duct tape.
“I had to start the office from nothing,” Ahlschwede said. “Most DAs inherit an office or something like that, and that was not the way with us. We started from zero, ground zero. That was a whole interesting process.”
Ahlschwede recalls being notified that she had been appointed district attorney on Aug. 28, 2013, and officially starting three days later. Because she had to build the office up from scratch, her casework was delayed a month as she, the McCulloch County Clerk and a deputy from the Sheriff’s Office drove down to Kerrville to pick up boxes of disorganized records and transported them back to their one-room space in the old church building in Mason.
“When we went to pick up the files to get our files for our counties…we had to go to Office Max and buy file boxes, and I had to get Courtney from the Sheriff’s Office to pay for it because there was no way for me to pay for it unless I paid for it out of pocket, and I was paying for a lot of stuff out of pocket,” Ahlschwede recalled. “They didn’t even box up the files for us.”
The stress of starting anew was compounded by the office being severely underfunded, as the judges of each of the counties pledged the meager amounts they could afford to get the office going.
In July 2014, the 452nd Ahlschwede submitted her first budget, working on a set of estimations for what she would need as they hadn’t been in operation yet for a full year and didn’t have those numbers as a point of reference. Ultimately, her requested $293,869 budget fell short when the county judges sat down to pledge over their funding, resulting the office receiving $268,869 instead, and only partially funding Ahlschwede’s investigator and one full-time office position. The others required the shifting of monies from one threadbare purse to another, occasionally dipping into the personal finances of the DA herself or using asset forfeiture monies to keep the office going.
“It’s kind of like trying to keep the ship afloat and figuring out how to do that,” Ahlschwede said. “For me, that’s been a challenge because I can’t—you know, I have to be a working DA too. It’s not like I can be here in the office being an administrative person. I have to go to court and work too, so that’s been a challenge.”
Salaries and operational expenses have been coming out of asset forfeiture money for the past year and half, Ahlschwede explained, noting how risky that business can be.
“It’s not stable,” she said. “If you don’t have that coming in or if the legislature does away with it, then we will not have that resource. The reality of it is that we will not be as productive and we will probably have to get rid of somebody.”
The funds the DA is permitted to keep in asset forfeiture cases is based upon an interlocal agreement with law enforcement agencies. The 452nd DA currently keeps 30 percent of the assets, while the remainder goes to law enforcement agencies.
Despite monetary woes, Ahlschwede and her staff have been successful at building up her office, thanks to a broad network of support from the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, plus her own background an experience in prosecutors’ offices in San Angelo.
“Nobody, really, has had any experience starting a DA’s Office,” Ahlschwede said. “I’ve reached out to a lot of my friends and I have a really good network of people and they just help you. But I would call and ask them, like, ‘Do I have to have this account or that account,’ and they’re like, ‘I don’t know how to do that. When we got here, we already had that account,’ you know what I mean? Very few DAs get to start a new judicial district.”
Caseload
On average, Ahlschwede and her assistant DA Steve Lupton consistently work approximately 35 active cases on the Brady docket at any given time, plus another 20-25 cases in Junction, 15-20 cases in Menard and roughly five cases a month in both Mason and Edwards counties. The caseload is fairly regular, Ahlschwede said, and with the exception of cases handled by the border prosecutor, Perry Sims, she and Lupton manage them all.
Ahlschwede explained that the border prosecution unit is team of special prosecutors who address cases stemming from counties that are either on or close to the border with Mexico. Ahlschwede’s district runs from the heart of Texas down to Edwards, roughly 40 miles from the border, and she and 17 other district attorneys have a border prosecutor handling some of those cases.
“In order to address border crime, Rick Perry created the border prosecution unit,” Ahlschwede said. “It is a collaboration of all the DAs to talk about and get specialized training on border issues, because they’re not really like what you have going on in San Angelo, although border crime affects everybody in Texas. We have certain gang activity and information sharing that we do to try to address the border crimes. We also have agreements to assist each other.”
Sims only prosecutes border crime, which has a specific legal definition and is handled apart from the five or so cases Ahlschwede manages per month from Edwards County.
“We’re doing great as far as getting our cases disposed of. We’ve tried a lot of cases. Our first case was an arson case from Rocksprings,” Ahlschwede said, naming of murder, sexual assault and a few other high crimes one usually doesn’t associate with small, rural communities. “It’s kind of crazy when you think about it.”
Ahlschwede was not surprised to see the number of high profile cases, having prosecuted in the 198th before she took over the 452nd.
“We’ve got some horrendous cases,” she said. “All of them are very unique, very interesting, and it’s a challenge out in a rural area to have all the resources to get everything together.”
New Budget, New Year
On Friday, Ahlschwede met with the county judges of Mason, Menard, Kimble, Edwards and McCulloch counties to discuss her budget proposal for the next year. Although not all were on board with increases, the district attorney expressed a wave of relief as she relayed the results of that meeting.
“Three of my five counties have substantially increased my budget, so that will help my office overall a tremendous amount,” Ahlschwede said excitedly. “It means that we’ll get to move and get a nicer office space and I’ll get to keep my staff.”
Ahlschwede said that while the increases from McCulloch, Menard and Kimble will make an incredible difference in her office, she is still short approximately $27,000.
“It feels like a weight has been lifted off of me,” she said.
Subscribe to the LIVE! Daily
Required
Post a comment to this article here: