Boy, 16, charged in Brownsville girl's slaying

BROWNSVILLE — Tiffany Galvan had a passion for singing.

She played the guitar at church on Sundays and would sometimes compose her own hymns, her mother said Friday from her home in northeast Brownsville. She said her daughter was smart and energetic. She liked to speak her mind but was not aggressive or confron-
tational.

She never saw her drink or smoke. She followed house rules and made curfew.

“I had a feeling, the kind of feeling mothers get when something goes wrong,” Maria Esther Galvan said in Spanish of the night Tiffany did not come home. “I knew something was wrong.”

Galvan, a 17-year-old senior at Los Fresnos High School, was found dead Wednesday afternoon in a wooded area near Benavides Park, two days after she had celebrated her birthday on the first day of school. Investigators said they believe her ex-boyfriend fatally stabbed her at least 23 times.

Sheriff Omar Lucio said the suspect is 16 and a student at Lopez High School. He has been charged with murder and appeared before a judge Friday in a detention hearing at the Darrell B. Hester Juvenile Center in San Benito. His name is not being released because he is a minor.

Tommy Ramirez, chief of the juvenile justice center, said the judge at the hearing denied the boy the right to go home with his parents. He will remain confined in San Benito for the next 10 days until his next court date, in which the Cameron County District Attorney’s Office will seek to charge him as an adult.

Drugs or sexual assault have not been detected in the case, according to preliminary reports. Investigators said they have not found the weapon.

Galvan’s family reported the girl’s disappearance Wednesday morning to the Brownsville Police Department. Her mother said she last spoke to Galvan about 8:30 p.m. Tuesday. Her daughter had told her she was at the park with her ex-boyfriend, authorities said. Earlier that day, Maria Esther Galvan remembers, Galvan had been excited to meet the boy.

“I told her to be back in an hour,” she said. “When I spoke to her an hour later, she sounded sad. She did not sound like herself.”

Maria Esther Galvan said she called her daughter again later that night and received no answer.

“The phone would ring and ring and no one would pick up,” she said. “Then her phone was off.”

Her daughter had met the boy, a football player at Lopez High School, on an online social networking site, the mother said.

She had dated him for about four months before breaking up with him less than three weeks ago, the mother said.

He seemed like a good boyfriend until her daughter began complaining that he was no longer calling and that he was seeing other girls, Maria Esther Galvan recalls.