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Final youth columns - Pages 2 and 5

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Ex Missouri City cop receives 15 years in prison

Fort Bend / Southwest • Volume 51 • No. 13 • $1.00

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Farewell from the Fort Bend Star

By Ken Fountain KENFOUNTAIN1@GMAIL.COM

“Look at me! Hello?” During her victim’s impact statement to former Missouri City police officer Bladimir Viveros, who was convicted March 23 of three counts of aggravated assault by a public servant in the June 20, 2024 crash that killed her mother and brother and an unrelated man, Morgan Sims repeatedly scolded Viveros to look at her as he had been instructed. After about five hours of deliberations on March 26, jurors sentenced Viveros to 15 years in state prison for the third-degree felony. He faced from five to 99 years, or life, and was also eligible for probation. According to a spokesman for the Fort Bend County District Attorney’s Office, Viveros must serve at least half of his sentence before he can be considered for parole. Viveros, 29, was convicted in the deaths of Angela Stewart, of Stafford, and her son Mason,

SEE VIVEROS PAGE 2

Former Missouri City police officer Bladimir Viveros, 29, was sentenced last week by a jury to 15 years in prison for aggravated assault by a public servant in the 2024 crash that killed three people. Here, he is seen on the first day of the trial.

have some bad news to report. After nearly a halfcentury, the Fort Bend Star is closing. The move is not entirely unexpected. You probably know that the media industry, particularly the newspaper business, has been in dire straits for many years, and that has been accelerating recently. A while back, I read a story in which it was reported that two newspapers on average close every week in the United States. And it’s not just print media that is in trouble – oncecutting edge digital news

Ken

Fountain Editor

KENFOUNTAIN1@GMAIL.COM

sites like Buzzfeed and Vice have also felt the pinch. Just two weeks a ago, CBS News announced that it was shutting down its venerated radio service, which had been the home of such journalism luminaries of Edward R. Murrow, Walter

Cronkite and many others. The causes of this decline have been well-documented, including the loss of advertising revenue to the Internet, especially to the big digital players like Google and Meta (parent company of Facebook), and the failure of leaders of legacy media to anticipate those changes and act quickly enough to meet them. There’s no need to regurgitate them here. I came to the Fort Bend Star in November 2022. I’d been away from community journalism (with the exception of an occasional freelance piece) for about

a decade, working in business-oriented journalism, academia, and the nonprofit sphere. I was hired by two people with whom I’d worked before, and who were in the local leadership of the national media chain which bought the Star, and its sister paper The Leader in the Heights/ Near Northwest area, the previous summer. (Sadly, The Leaders also has been closed.) During my journalism career, I’ve been a reporter, a copy editor and an online producer, but I had never been responsible for an entire newspaper before. The

prospect was extremely daunting, and I wondered if I’d even be able to put out my first edition. But I managed to that week (just barely), and the week after, and I’m proud to say that I’ve been able to do it every week since. While I have had family connections to Fort Bend County for about three decades, I didn’t know much about the Star. Soon after starting, I began hearing stories about the paper and its founder, the late Beverly (“Bev”) Carter. I never knew

SEE FAREWELL PAGE 3

BASEBALL DREAMS Dream League offers thrills for all On a crisp early morning on Saturday, a couple hundred people filled the stands and surrounding area of two baseball fields at the First Colony Little League complex on Austin Parkway in Sugar Land. All the accoutrements of a Little League game were present: the crack of the bat, the yelling from the stands, people eating concessions, and the screaming when a runner makes it home. But these were no ordinary Little League games. This was the Dream Team League, part of the Challenger Division of First Colony Little League, where all the players are young people with developmental disabilities. Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, the Dream League provides a way for these players to have the a real-life, noncompetitive baseball experience that they may have seen their siblings or peers have, explained Sonny Johnston, one of the organization’s volunteer board members. “I like to tell people we offer the excitement of the seventh game of the World Series every Saturday morning,” he said. The

SEE BASEBALL PAGE 4

Sara Sugar, 30, of the Rangers, steps up to the plate during Dream League play on Saturday. Photo by Ken Fountain

Federal judge finds for citizen journalist against Sheriff's Office, awards $70K By Ken Fountain KENFOUNTAIN1@GMAIL.COM

A federal judge last week ruled that a Fort Bend County Sheriff’s deputy wrongfully arrested a self-styled “citizen journalist” for allegedly interfering during a welfare check while videotaping the incident for distribution on his social media channels. In a three-day bench trial in July 2025, federal District Judge George C. Hanks, Jr. hears about two 2021 incidents involving interactions Justin Pulliam and members of the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office. Pulliam, a Fort Bend County resident, has for many years been posting videos of encounters between county law enforcement officers and citizens and posting them on a YouTube channel called “Corruption Report” and other platforms. The videos often depict

Pulliam being confrontational with officers while in the course of their duties. In the fall of 2024, Hanks accepted the summary judgement ruling of a federal magistrate who found that Sheriff Eric Fagan violated Pulliam’s First Amendment rights when he ordered deputies to remove him from a July 2021 press conference at Jones Creek Ranch, which had been closed during the investigation of a body that was discovered there. In that portion of the ruling, Hanks was to make a ruling only on the amount of damages to which Pulliam was entitled. The majority of last year’s trial focused on whether then-Sgt. Taylor Rollins of the patrol division violated Pulliam’s rights when he placed him under arrest shortly after arriving at the scene of a confrontation with a man known to suffer from mental illness at his family residence in December 2021.

After his arrest, Pulliam did not go to trial for several months, which ended in a mistrial when one juror held out for conviction. Pulliam testified that he felt “humiliated” by his treatment by both Fagan and Rollin in the two incidents, leading to a loss of self-esteem. He also testified that he has lost income because of the chilling effect the incidents has had on his willingness to continue his reporting activities. At the conclusion of last July’s trial, Hanks, the judge, told the attorneys he expected to make a final ruling in fairly short order. But it wasn’t until last Thursday, March 26, that the ruling was issued. Hanks ruled that Rollins, now a lieutenant in the sheriff’s office, had singled

SEE LAWSUIT PAGE 3

Last week a federal judge found that a Fort Bend County Sheriff’s deputy wrongfully arrested Justin Pulliam, a self-styled ‘citizen journalist’, while he was filming a 2021 welfare check. Pulliam, center, is seen leaving the trial last year. File photo

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