On Patrol

In the days before Hurricane Beulah’s arrival in Brownsville in 1967, retired Brownsville Police Capt. Ruben Garcia was already making preparations.

Garcia, 86, said that although a considerable amount of people in the city were working as farmworkers in the northern states, those who remained watched the weather forecasts closely and were cautious of what was to come.

During the night of the storm, Garcia said he slept on a bench inside police headquarters, located at 404 E. Washington St. in Brownsville waiting for the storm to pass.

“The thing hit on a Tuesday morning at about two o’clock,” Garcia said. “When the eye came by, I went out and drove around. The amount of downed trees and stuff all over the place was just unbelievable.”

Garcia said that at the time, Brownsville was a lot smaller than it is today and speculates that the city had a population of just 55,000 people. Still, he said that the city received a considerable amount of damage and many agricultural crops in the area were ruined. Despite the storm’s intensity, Garcia said there were no reported deaths in the city, however police in the area soon realized they had another case on their hands.

“On top of everything we had a murder right in the middle of the hurricane,” Garcia said. “We never imagined that something like that would happen.”

Garcia said that it took up to seven days to restore power back to many areas in the region as residents scrambled to make sense of the Category 5 storm.

He said that although one person sustained minor injuries as a result of the hurricane, the memories that remain are embedded forever.