MISSION — A lot of people in Mission have decided over the past two years that Johnny Hinojosa must be insensitive, dumb, stubborn or just crazy.
He bought an old chemical plant site notoriously contaminated with toxic pesticides, then for two years refused to tear down the dilapidated warehouse on-site — despite public pressure and a cleanup of the property by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
But Hinojosa saw the warehouse as a way to help his drug-addicted teenage son and thousands others like him.
He wanted to convert the hulking, graffiti-covered structure into a residential drug-treatment center and boot camp for troubled teens.
Hinojosa hoped to use a tough-love sort of approach — plenty of discipline but also drug detox services and spiritual and career counseling. He imagined the facility housing between 50 to 100 boys and girls.
“They need different opportunities, different chances,” Hinojosa said. “Just because they mess up one time doesn’t mean they’re going to be bad the rest of their lives.”
So it was with a heavy heart that Hinojosa finally gave the EPA permission last week to tear down the warehouse.
The city of Mission was threatening legal intervention. Neighborhood residents who claimed diseases like cancer from pesticide exposure were fed up. And U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, had staffers trying to mediate a demolition deal before the EPA left for good.
The collective, sustained pressure was just too much, Hinojosa says. He still thinks the dream was realistic, but now he knows it will never happen.
FAVOR FOR A FRIEND, HELP FOR A SON
Hinojosa has always maintained he bought the Holland Avenue property in South Mission as a favor for the widow of an old friend who had just died. The property officially changed hands in January 2005.
At that time, Hinojosa’s son, then 19, was facing several criminal charges — including car theft — that Hinojosa says stemmed from a drug binge months earlier. Johnny Hinojosa Jr. pleaded guilty to those charges in March 2005.
So with his son’s drug and legal problems on his mind, Hinojosa says, it occurred to him in February or March that he could convert the warehouse and outbuildings into a complex for troubled teens like Johnny Jr.
He figured he’d pay back the money he still owed his friend’s widow by selling off the used machinery, furniture and other assorted inventory that came with the warehouse.
Then, he hoped, he could work to build a private teen boot camp and rehab center partially funded with government money.
Hinojosa never got as far as selling the inventory, though, because the building didn’t meet city code — and because the city and U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, were also lobbying the EPA hard to clean the property. The EPA’s cleanup began late that summer.
Johnny Hinojosa Jr. had been addicted to drugs since he was 13, overdosing three times. He’d gotten kicked out of or quit almost every halfway house where his father put him — Del Rio, San Antonio, Pharr.
And every time he left one facility, there was a waiting list of a few months to get into the next one, his father says.
While waiting for a spot to open, Johnny Jr. would start hanging out with his old friends again, and pretty soon he’d overdose or get in trouble with the law, Hinojosa says.
It seemed to Hinojosa that if halfway houses and rehab centers all over the state were so full, the Rio Grande Valley desperately needed a place for its drug-addicted youth.
And Johnny Jr. wasn’t the only one with the problem. Hinojosa’s friends and business associates — everyone, it seemed — had a son or daughter, a niece or nephew, with similar problems, Hinojosa said.
“A lot of people would come to me and say, ‘Where can I put my kid?’” he said.
STILL A NEED, NO LONGER A WAY
Hinojosa admitted it would have taken a couple of years to get his dream off the ground.
And it’s not clear neighborhood residents would have taken kindly to having a residential facility for troubled youth across the street.
Mission’s Planning and Zoning Director Sergio Zavala, who handled Hinojosa’s rejected business license application two years ago to sell the warehouse inventory, said the property’s zoning would likely permit such a facility, but he doubted community sentiments would favor having drug-addicted juvenile offenders — violent or not — so close to their homes.
A couple of neighbors, though, said they would probably have had no serious problems with Hinojosa’s plan.
Steve Baugus, who lives within a block of the warehouse and complained a year ago that the structure’s bad condition was hurting property values, said he didn’t think a boot camp and rehab center would pose any real risks or inconveniences.
Drug abuse in the Valley is a serious problem and needs to be addressed with such facilities, Baugus said.
“They’ve got to get help somehow,” he said. “At least somebody’s trying to do something for them.”
Adolf Braunstein, a junior at Mission High School who also lives within a block of the warehouse, agreed. He said he knows “quite a few” kids at school who could use drug rehab.
Hinojosa doesn’t have hard numbers on local demand or waiting periods for rehab or boot camp services. But he knows his son, Johnny Jr., could have used yet another chance.
After pleading guilty to various charges in March 2005, Johnny Jr. spent a year at the Hidalgo County Adult Boot Camp in Edinburg. That straightened him out, but he eventually relapsed, going on another partying binge last November that led to him to skipping a parole check-in, Hinojosa says.
A judge sentenced Johnny Jr. to two years in prison in January, but good behavior could get him out of Newton County Correctional Center in East Texas by November, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Hinojosa is hopeful for his son’s future but says there’s no telling. In the meantime, he has his hands full working out the details of the demolition with the EPA.
He recently took a series of pictures of the warehouse and arranged them in panoramic views on a whiteboard he had propped against a wall in his dining area Thursday.
Hinojosa says he wants to remember it — for all the trouble it caused him and all the potential he once believed it had.
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