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Bexar County has the highest Adult Protective Services intakes and completed investigations per capita in Texas, despite being only the fourth most populous county.
Many of those investigations center around caretaker or family abuse of a senior who is 65 and older.
That's according to the Elder Abuse and Exploitation Task Force co-chairs who helped create the Bexar County Senior Justice Assessment Center—Probate Court 2 Judge Veronica Vasquez and State Sen. Jose Menendez.
They shed light on local elder abuse during a presentation to Bexar County commissioners this week. The scale of the local problem is made clearer in a comparison of local elder abuse intake cases to those in Harris County in 2024.
"By number, on intakes, Harris County has about 16,916 and Bexar County has 10, 624," said Vasquez. That is not that far off, considering they're twice as large as us."
Those figures also include abuse of disabled adults.
Bexar County had 121 validated cases of exploitation, while Harris County had 160. Democratic State Senator Jose Menendez told commissioners that exploitation is often financial.
"Sometimes this abuse comes from a caregiver, a family member, and it may start innocent," he told commissioners. He said it can start with a request to borrow a little money and then a little more and more. "And then it never gets paid back," he said.
The county's Senior Justic Assessment Center (SJAC) recently won a nearly $187,000 grant to fund two full-time case managers within the county's Preventative Health Division of the Public Health Department to assist individuals 65 and older to ensure early intervention and to stop elder abuse before it starts.
SJAC is made up on a local team of law enforcement, non-profit groups, Adult Protective Services, financial institutions, and others who will meet weekly to discuss elder abuse cases to provide a coordinate approach to resolve such cases.
Bexar County's population is the oldest among the state's most populated counties. Bexar's total population of more than 2.2-million residents includes more than 305,000 who are 65 and older or more than 13% of the county's total population.
