By KERA News & Wire Services
Dallas, TX – More than 200 law officers swept through El Paso today -- picking up suspected members of the Barrio Azteca gang. "Operation Knock Down" is meant to find new leads into Saturday's shooting deaths of three people with ties to the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez.
FBI Special Agent Andrea Simmons says law enforcement came together to locate members of Barrio Azteca, which started as a Texas prison gang.
Investigators also want info on the leader of the gang's Juarez operations, Eduardo "Tablas" Ravelo. Gang members with outstanding warrants were being arrested.
Consulate employee Lesley A. Enriquez and her husband, Arthur H. Redelfs, were killed in Juarez when gunmen shot into their SUV after they left a birthday party. Jorge Alberto Salcido, the husband of a Mexican employee of the consulate, also was fatally shot after the same event.
Country music impresario Johnnie High dead at 80
Johnnie High, the north Texas country music showman who gave such performers as LeAnn Rimes and Boxcar Willie their early exposure, has died at the age of 80. The impresario of "Johnnie High's Country Music Revue" died Wednesday at the age of 80 after battling heart disease, according to daughter Luanne Dorman.
High began his Saturday show in 1974 after converting an old movie theater in Grapevine, a Dallas-Fort Worth suburb, into the Grapevine Opry. There, he gave Boxcar Willie and Rimes, then a child, some of their first stage experience.
Since 1995, High's revue has been a weekly fixture at a former Arlington movie theater that later served as a Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall. It now airs nationally in syndicated television.
Fake cop sought after Fort Worth rape
Fort Worth police are looking for a man who falsely claimed to be an officer to gain entry into a woman's apartment and rape her. Investigators say the woman was sexually assaulted by a man wearing what appeared to be a dark blue uniform with patches on both sleeves.
Police say the attacker knocked on the woman's door before dawn Monday to say he was looking for a fugitive. Police say the man threatened to arrest her if she did not allow him to search her home, so she let him in.
Police issued a news release Wednesday warning of the bogus lawman who claimed to have a weapon, but did not use it during the sexual assault.