Kristina Salinas: Texas bail law prevents personal bond, harms wrongly jailed

(Kristina Salinas is a former Fort Worth resident who now lives in Mississippi.) My youngest sister, Kelly Masten, turned 39 in September. One of my birthday presents for her was Baby Alive. It’s her favorite doll. She carries it everywhere, lovingly taking care of it like a real-life baby. The other was a trip to the beach. She had never seen the ocean before. She fell in love with seashells and sand castles. After Kelly spent nearly 8 weeks in a medically induced coma on a ventilator at John Peter Smith Hospital, every moment on the beach was a miracle. When she was 2, Kelly was diagnosed with a rare seizure disorder. She suffers daily seizures that necessitate constant monitoring. Due to frequent oxygen loss, her brain has not developed beyond that of a 4-year-old. She can neither read nor write. She has almost no capacity to understand numbers.

Grandma needed help transporting Kelly to JPS Hospital. Instead, Kelly was arrested, handcuffed and taken to the Tarrant County Jail. Repeated pleas and explanations of Kelly’s rare medical condition and developmental disability were met with the response: “Don’t worry. We’ll get her to JPS within a few hours.” What followed were hours of confusion that turned into nightmarish days. The Fort Worth police department, the sheriff, jail officials, the prosecutor, the court-appointed attorney, even the mayor — no one could help us or even share basic information about Kelly’s condition. We repeatedly took Kelly’s essential anti-seizure medications to the jail, only to be turned away. We were told that her cash bail for “assault on an elderly person” was set at $25,000. We could free her by paying 10% to a bondsman. If we had had the money, we could have saved Kelly from all that followed. But we didn’t have $2,500 to buy her freedom. I learned later that the first magistrate who saw Kelly could have approved a personal bond to divert her from the jail had it not been for a new law known as SB 6. Passed last year by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott, SB 6 strips away judges’ discretion and prevents a wide range of people from being released on personal bonds. I’ve been told very little about what happened to my sister while she was caged in the county jail for 11 days. On the one occasion we were allowed to briefly visit, she barely recognized us. She had a split lip and dark bruises around her eyes. I imagine she was petrified, lonely, hungry and sick.