A Dallas County juvenile detention officer is still recovering 10 months after he says he was attacked by a detainee while on duty.
Hector Garcia, who had been on the job less than one year, said he intervened when a 15-year-old male resident tried to assault another juvenile last April.
The teen began hitting Garcia, shattering bones in his face, according to medical records.
"He broke my nose, he broke my jaw bone," Garcia told KERA in an interview. "I might have passed out a little bit, but I was mostly aware and I'm not sure how much time passed, but it might have been like two minutes."
When he got up, he said he tried to help the other boy out of the shower before help came.
Covered in blood — holding his eye — Garcia says he waited about a half-hour before a supervisor spoke with him.
A nurse put him in a wheelchair and took him from the fifth floor to the third.
"I lost a lot of blood," he said. "I couldn't walk. I was a little too woozy."
Garcia is among the thousands of staff members at juvenile facilities who have been attacked in recent years.
Serious incidents must be reported to the Texas Juvenile Justice Department. That agency's data indicates more than 1,400 juvenile assaults on staff were reported statewide from 2022-2023, more than 1,900 in 2024 and nearly 900 from January to August 2025.
After the attack, Garcia, 37, was taken by ambulance to Parkland Hospital.
"Honestly, I kind of felt like someone should have been there, not just me by himself in the ambulance," he said. "I feel like someone should have gone with me. They just put me in an ambulance and I just went with the paramedics."
He was treated as an "assault victim" with facial lacerations, abrasions, contusion, and fractures, according to hospital documents.
Parkland discharged him at 6 a.m. the next day, April 29.
"I requested from the hospital, like an Uber, to get me back over there so I can get my car, and I had one eye closed," he said. "My eye was all swollen. They told me they were going to give me a bus pass at first and I asked them can I get an Uber because I can't see."
Almost a month after the incident, Garcia underwent corrective surgery on his face at Baylor Hospital.
He remains on leave while being treated for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and surgery after-care for a metal plate under his eye.
Loss of income
Garcia receives some pay and medical coverage through Dallas County, but without a full-time employment paycheck, he's unable to afford all his bills and set up an online fundraiser to help.
His monthly income dropped from about $4,000 to $1,400, he said.
Dallas County Juvenile Department administrators have not yet commented after multiple requests from KERA.
Garcia, who earned a social work master's degree from the University of Texas at Arlington, said the teen who assaulted him is usually a "good kid."
The offense he's accused of isn't violent or serious, he said. But the teen spent some nights in Garcia's disciplinary section because he was allegedly defiant to guards in his regular area.
"There's a lot of good kids and they're just in bad situations," Garcia said. "He was in the honor section. It's like the ones that behave the most they get extra privileges. They can stay up later, they get extra snacks. Sometimes they go to the gym more."
"It's just easier to still see them as kids rather than the crimes they did," he said.
Brett Merfish, attorney and Texas Appleseed Juvenile Justice Project director, said it's not uncommon for juveniles in custody to become aggressive after being bullied or "pushed to the edge."
"I don't know the details here, but we need to be careful about making generalizations or jumping to conclusions in these kind of instances," she said. "They horribly injured someone. We shouldn't make excuses for them, but we also need to have a holistic picture of the situation."
Garcia said he had learned that his attacker's family was broken apart and his home life was unstable.
"Some of the best-behaved kids are actually the ones that are in there for murder, and they'll tell you that they regret doing that," Garcia said. "Now they're going to spend their whole childhood in juvie. They don't want to be there. Sometimes they don't care. Sometimes they enjoy just being in there and just getting in trouble just to go back because they don't have a good home to go back to."
Understaffing at the juvenile detention center is an issue, Garcia said. He was one officer supervising 12 juvenile residents.
During a separate incident, he broke up one fight between two juveniles and while restraining them, another fight started on the other side of the room before help arrived.
"So what can you do about that?" he asked.
He said assault-on-officer incidents at the detention center often were accidental — officers were hit while breaking up fights or trying to restrain a resident.
While attacks may be relatively rare, Garcia is not the only Dallas County detention officer who's been seriously injured on the job recently.
In another case, a female Dallas County juvenile detention officer was put in a coma at Parkland Hospital after a juvenile resident allegedly assaulted her last April — before Garcia's incident.
Juvenile Executive Director Lynn Hadnot said at the time that he is committed to staff safety and juvenile justice.
More accountability?
"We're trying to figure out some measures to balance rehabilitation, but also make sure kids who may attack staff, there's got to be some level of accountability," Hadnot said.
State Senate Bill 1727 had aimed to address violence involving detainees at juvenile facilities during the last legislative session, but ultimately failed.
Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, authored the bill, which targets procedures for delinquent conduct committed by someone in custody at a juvenile facility. Neither Perry nor his staff returned multiple requests for comment by KERA.
Merfish said "horrible" intentional assaults on staff happen, but a whole picture of contributing factors should be considered.
"Obviously no one should feel unsafe showing up to work either at the state or the county level," Merfish said. "The part that I want to caution is making policy rules based on outlying incidents. We need to be careful about how we react. We need to make sure there are consequences for those kind of things, but we need to also be careful when we're crafting them that we don't have an over-inclusive consequence."
Garcia said he wants to continue working with and guiding youth, but likely won't return to Henry Wade Juvenile Justice Center as an officer. His dream job is a public elementary school teacher in his native neighborhood of Oak Cliff.
"He didn't feel any remorse about that," Garcia said of the boy. "It was painful. Not just physically painful, but emotionally painful. You go there, try and build trust with them, and then they break the trust."
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