A former probation officer and his wife tried for decades to help a convicted killer. Texas authorities say that didn't stop the man from confessing to fatally stabbing the retired officer last month in an admission that linked him to another slaying.
Meza was arrested in Fraga's killing on May 29, nine days after authorities discovered the 80-year-old's body inside a closet at his home in Pflugerville, just north of Austin.
In the 2012 lawsuit, Meza, who served 11 years in prison for the 1982 sexual assault and killing of an 8-year-old girl, was identified as “John Doe” to protect the Fragas from public backlash, Harrington said. The Fragas invited Meza to Bible studies and helped him find housing and work, the suit says. Eventually, the couple came"to love him like a son, and appreciate the hard work he was doing to change his life," it says.
In 2010, when Jesse Fraga went to the facility to give Meza $20 to buy a pair of pants to wear to a job interview, an official with the state parole division asked the parole board to ban all contact between Meza and the Fragas, according to the suit. "Then there was a deeper discussion about, are you sure this is the right thing to do? There's all kinds of danger," Harrington recalled."He knew the risk."
Harrington, who retired from the civil rights project in 2016 and is now an Episcopal priest and the director of a Christian outreach mission in Austin, said he felt awful after hearing about Fraga's death.
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