Jefferson County, Beaumont | featured news

A Beaumont man allegedly assaulted and choked the former Beaumont ISD Police Chief while resisting arrest, according to Beaumont Police.

A 3-year-old from Texas has been missing for three days since her father sent her out alone to an alley at 3 a.m. -- her punishment, police say he told officers, for not drinking her milk. Sherin Mathews, a special-needs toddler last seen early Saturday morning in her family's back yard in Richardson, a northern Dallas suburb, is thought to be in grave and immediate danger. Her father, Wesley Mathews, was arrested and charged Saturday evening with abandoning or endangering the girl. He was released Sunday night on a $250,000 bond.

Friends of a Beaumont man found dead from a gunshot wound inside a wrecked pickup tried to grapple with the loss and the circumstances of Chase Taylor's death in a series of social media remembrances on Tuesday. "It's not fair that you left us this early," Garret Joseph Duhon wrote in a lengthy Facebook post about his friend.

On the first day of a 22-year-old Beaumont man's trial in the 2015 fatal shooting of a convenience store owner, a Jefferson County jury watched a video that prosecutors said showed the defendant shoot the victim in the chest twice. Chandler Kyle Ventress is accused of killing 52-year-old Metthananda Kuruppu, owner of the Pick-N-Shop store on South Major Drive, during a robbery on April 29, 2015. "Today is going to be a very difficult day," assistant district attorney Ashley Molfino told the jury of six men and six women in her opening statement. "Today you will watch someone die.

Our cameras were at the volleyball game between Port Neches-Groves and Nederland on Tuesday night. Did we see you there?

Faced with the prospect of hundreds of residents leaving the city rather than rebuilding, Bevil Oaks City Council members made the decision to drop a city ordinance that required construction more than two feet above floodplains.
The change allowed for hundreds of houses to be rebuilt without elevating them, City Attorney Dru Montgomery said.
"We didn't want to lose anyone," said Ward 1 City Councilwoman Martha Vautrot. "Let's let people go back to their lives. These older people can't handle that."
Communities across Southeast Texas are facing the question of whether to elevate.