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Terri Langford was born in Oceanside, California. Naturalized Texan. Comes by her tough love of government honestly. She majored in it at the University of Texas. First courtroom stories were in the Atticus Finch-like Lowndes County courthouse in Valdosta, Georgia, where two months into that first job for the Jacksonville-based Florida Times Union, she found herself covering a quadruple murder. Eventually moved to Jacksonville, covering social services and began unpacking the conflicted rules of government social work and public housing redevelopment for readers. Joined the Associated Press in Dallas and worked there and in Houston covering some of the state's biggest trials and complicated legal issues including the Branch Davidian standoff with ATF agents and the dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas as well as witnessing several state executions. Worked for the Dallas Morning News and the Houston Chronicle, where she covered everything from airport security, civil courts and the 9/11 attacks to the strains of the Texas Child Protective Services system, the state's removal of more than 400 children from their polygamist parents in West Texas, the Allen Stanford Ponzi scheme trial and the world of Medicare fraud in Houston's private ambulance networks. Langford was named Texas Reporter of the Year in 2011 for her work on the connection between private ambulances in Houston and the non-regulated mental health clinics there. Before joining the Tribune in March 2014, she tried her hand at public radio, working for WNYC in Trenton, covering New Jersey government.
A 16-year-old boy has died of an apparent restraint-related asphyxiation at the Daystar Residential Treatment Center, the same facility where children with disabilities were forced to fight each other a couple of years ago. Full Story
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Criminal records don't always exclude job applicants from working with the most vulnerable foster care children, according to a Texas Tribune/Houston Chronicle investigation. At Daystar Residential Inc., where workers forced developmentally disabled girls to fight each other, dozens made it through the state's background check process in the last three years despite records of arrests. Full Story
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Texas officials have halted the placement of foster care children at Daystar and have assigned the Houston-area residential treatment center a state monitor following revelations of a staff-instigated “fight club” incident two years ago and a new incident that has come to light this past week: a possible sexual assault of a girl living at the facility. Full Story
Workers at a center for distressed children in Manvel provoked seven developmentally disabled girls into a fight of biting and bruising, while they laughed, cheered and promised the winners after-school snacks. The fight was one of more than 250 incidents of abuse and mistreatment in residential treatment centers over the last two years, based on a Houston Chronicle/Texas Tribune review of Department of Family and Protective Services records. Full Story
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