Murder News

Jennifer Faith charged with murder-for-hire in Oak Cliff murder of her husband

Jennifer and James Faith.

GoFundMe

UPDATE 9-29-2021: The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Texas has indicted Jennifer Faith on a federal charge of interstate commission of murder-for-hire. "Ms. Faith's alleged murder-for-hire scheme was depraved and calculated," said Acting U.S. Attorney Prerak Shah in a release.

Her ex-boyfriend Darrin Lopez has been charged with murder.

The release says that Faith created fake email accounts, one under her husband's name, from which she emailed Lopez posing as her husband and "taunting Mr. Lopez with details of extreme physical and sexual abuse that never actually occurred."

Federal murder-for-hire carries a punishment up to the death penalty.

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Jennifer Faith, whose husband James Faith was shot and killed on an Oak Cliff sidewalk in Dallas on October 9, 2020, has been charged with obstruction of justice.

Faith, 48, was arrested at her residence in Oak Cliff on February 24 and charged with one count of destruction of an object with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation. The complaint was unsealed on February 25, and Faith will appear before U.S. Magistrate Judge Renee Toliver on February 26.

According to Acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Prerak Shah, Faith was communicating with the alleged killer, her ex-boyfriend Darrin Lopez, throughout and following her husband's death. Lopez has already been arrested.

"Even as she publicly claimed she was 'desperate for answers' regarding her husband's murder, Jennifer Faith was communicating with the alleged killer, actively urging him to destroy evidence and attempting to delete incriminating communications from her phone," Shah said in a release. "Thanks to the dedication of our agents and officers, Ms. Faith could not keep law enforcement from identifying her husband’s killer. Even so, we cannot allow her obstruction of justice to stand. We are determined to hold her accountable for her crime."

James Faith was an Information Technology Director for American Airlines. After his murder, Jennifer made a plea to help find his killer. She was also the recipient of a GoFundMe that accumulated nearly $60,000 in donations; GoFundMe is offering refunds to anyone who donated.

ATF Special Agent in Charge of the Dallas Field Division Jeffrey C. Boshek II said that the investigative team was not fooled.

"Special Agents and Detectives knew Mrs. Faith was hiding something and were able to expose her darkest secrets," Boshek says. "She was indeed entangled with the man we believe to have murdered her husband. Her cowardly attempts to utilize the media to conceal her involvement did not hamper relentless investigators. She will now face the consequences for her misdeeds."

According to the complaint, a search of Ms. Faith's phone revealed she was having what she described as "a full-blown emotional affair" with Darrin Ruben Lopez, 48, of Tennessee.

Lopez drove from Tennessee to Dallas on October 9, then allegedly laid in wait until the couple left to walk their dog. Faith was shot seven times, and Lopez fled in a black pickup truck.

Authorities found the gun used to kill Faith inside Lopez's home, as well as his Nissan Titan pickup, which matched witnesses' description of the shooter's vehicle.

In an interview with law enforcement in January, Jennifer Faith allegedly admitted that she communicated daily with Lopez via cell phone, but denied they were having an intimate relationship. Phone records show she texted him 14,000 times.

But an analysis of Lopez's cell phone revealed that they were involved. She updated Lopez on her efforts to collect on her husband's life insurance policy and also to coach Lopez on how to respond to police questioning.

She also told him to remove a distinctive "T" decal off of his truck that witnesses described.

"So I woke up in a little bit of a panic… something is eating away at me telling me you need to take the sticker out of the back window of the truck," she texted on December 3.

"I don’t want to just take it off all at once the girls would notice that, but I have been working on it," he texted back.

She texted the next day, "I have a bad feeling and I really think you need to get that sticker off ASAP….like today."

"Sticker done," he responded.

"Oh YAY!!! Thank you!! I feel SOOOOOO much better," she said.

On January 10, the day before she was supposed to be interviewed by the police, she texted him not to text her because she planned to wipe down the contents on her cell phone.

"If asked about you, you are an old friend going through a divorce," she texted him. "We talk every night because I am helping/giving support with the girls since you have sole custody. If it ever comes to it, I'll answer the same way. Just so you and I have the same explanations. Just thinking in case they [law enforcement] pulled phone records and asked."

Investigators were able to recover the deleted text messages from Lopez's cell phone.

Mr. Lopez has been charged by the state with murder and by the feds with transporting a firearm in interstate commerce. He faces up to 10 years in federal prison on the federal firearm count and up to life in a state penitentiary on the murder charge brought by Dallas County.

If convicted, Faith faces up to 20 years in federal prison on the obstruction count.

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Worm News

USDA is building fly factory in Texas to stop flesh-eating screwworm

U.S. Department of Agriculture/aphis.usda.gov

Screwworm fly

The U.S. plans to build a $750 million factory in southern Texas to breed billions of sterile flies, ramping up its efforts to keep flesh-eating maggots in Mexico from crossing the border and damaging the American cattle industry.

Secretary Brooke Rollins announced Friday that the U.S. Department of Agriculture hopes to be producing and releasing sterile male New World screwworm flies into the wild within a year from the new factory on Moore Air Base outside Edinburg, Texas, about 20 miles from the border.

She also said the USDA plans to deploy $100 million in technology, such as fly traps and lures, and step up border patrols by “tick riders” mounted on horseback and train dogs to sniff out the parasite.

In addition, Rollins said the U.S. border will remain closed to cattle, horse, and bison imports from Mexico until the U.S. sees that the pest is being pushed back south toward Panama, where the fly had been contained through late last year through the breeding of sterile flies there. The U.S. has closed its border to those imports three times in the past eight months, the last in July, following a report of an infestation about 370 miles from the Texas border.

American officials worry that if the fly reaches Texas, its flesh-eating maggots could cause billions of dollars in economic losses and cause already record retail beef prices to rise even more, fueling greater inflation. The parasite also can infest wildlife, household pets and, occasionally, humans.

“Farm security is national security,” Rollins said during a news conference at the Texas State Capitol in Austin with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. “All Americans should be concerned. But it’s certainly Texas and our border and livestock producing states that are on the front lines of this every day.”

The pest was a problem for the American cattle industry for decades until the U.S. largely eradicated it in the 1970s by breeding and releasing sterile male flies to breed with wild females. It shut down fly factories on U.S. soil afterward.

The Mexican cattle industry has been hit hard by infestations and the U.S. closing its border to imports.

Mexico’s Agriculture ministry said in a statement Friday that Mexico Agriculture and Rural Development Secretary Julio Berdegué Sacristán and Rollins signed a screwworm control action plan. It includes monitoring with fly-attracting traps and establishing that livestock can only be moved within Mexico through government-certified corrals, the statement said.

And on the X social media platform, Berdegué said, “We will continue with conversations that lead to actions that will permit the reopening of livestock exports."

The new fly-breeding factory in Texas would be the first on U.S. soil in decades and represents a ramping up of the USDA's spending on breeding and releasing sterile New World screwworm flies. The sterile males are released in large enough numbers that wild females can't help but mate with them, producing sterile eggs that don't hatch. Eventually, the wild fly population shrinks away because females mate only once in their weekslong lives.

In June, Rollins announced a plan to convert an existing factory for breeding fruit flies into one for breeding sterile New World Screwworm flies, as well as a plan to build a site, also on the air base near Edinburg, for gathering flies imported from Panama and releasing them from small aircraft. Those projects are expected to cost a total of $29.5 million.

The Panama fly factory can breed up to 117 million flies a week, and the new Mexican fly factory is expected to produce up to 100 million more a week. Rollins said the new Texas factory would produce up to 300 million a week. She said President Donald Trump's administration wants to end the U.S. reliance on fly breeding in Mexico and Panama.

“It’s a tactical move that ensures we are prepared and not just reactive, which is today what we have really been working through,” Rollins said.

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