People Named George

In some of my previous posts I've written about a man whose first name is George. Now it's time for me to write about two people with the last name of George.

On 3/27/03, a woman named Clara Cortez George, 27, died at the Gillespie County jail in Fredericksburg. The official version of her death as reported in the newspapers at the time was that she had been arrested when she made a planned appearance at the county courthouse at 11:30 AM and was found dead in a jail cell at 12:45 PM with her blouse tied around her neck. Her death was ruled a suicide by hanging.

However, a local insider with ties to law enforcement told me Ms. George had actually been raped and strangled by a jailer. The person who told me this said the police chief didn't want any negative publicity and "ran the jailer out of town" instead of prosecuting him. I was (and still am) shocked to hear this--but not surprised, given many of the other things that go on within local law enforcement.

In February of 2007, I ran across another Ms. George. I'd driven down to San Antonio to meet with my lawyer at the time (whom I later had to fire when I discovered she'd misrepresented me). When I arrived at her office, my attorney asked me to wait in her conference room while she took an important phone call. While I was sitting there waiting, it was impossible not to notice a large number of legal documents that had been left on the conference table in plain sight, but I tried to ignore them because I knew they were probably confidential. However, when my attorney finally came in, she actually pointed them out to me and said they were from the case of a female client of hers whose last name was George. Rather than repeat what my lawyer told me about them, I'm posting an excerpt from a 2/15/07 email I sent to Diop Kamau (whom I also believed to be working for me at the time, although I learned differently later) in which I described what I'd been told in detail shortly after I was told it.

This incident bothered me right from the start for a number of important reasons that had nothing to do with the last name of this woman and the earlier fail victim being the same. For one thing, it was obvious my attorney wanted me to see the documents (by leaving them out and then seating me right next to them). In fact, I later realized that my lawyer may have finally come back into the room only after it became apparent to anyone who might have been watching from nearby that I was not going to examine the documents on my own. For another thing, it did not seem professional or even proper for my attorney to discuss someone else's case with me in such detail. The biggest red flag of all for me, though, was the fact that so many of the same people (lawyers, document expert, and judge), places (Boerne and Kerrville), and circumstances (fraudulently obtaining real estate, wills, and trusts) were involved in both my case and Ms. George's case. My discomfort at having been given all this information about someone else's case without being able to understand why was the reason I emailed Kamau about what had happened. I was hoping he'd be able to explain what was going on, but he didn't.

I do not know either of these women named George personally, and I have no idea whether they or their cases relate to each other. It would certainly be extremely interesting if they do turn out to be related--but it doesn't matter if they're not, since each deserves to be mentioned here in their own right.


Update: Clara Cortez George's sister, Maricela Cortez Rosa (44), died on April 29, 2010 (shortly after I posted this!) in Fredericksburg of unknown causes.



Update: Another sibling has died suddenly and too young.