TJJD News & Announcements

EL PASO, Texas – Through collaborative efforts in 2011, between the Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD) and the Office of Acquired Brain Injury (OABI), the El Paso County Juvenile Probation Department began the process of identifying justice-involved youth who may have sustained or acquired a traumatic brain injury (TBI). The El Paso County Juvenile Probation Department has established protocol to screen eligible clients for brain injury. The Brain Injury Screening Questionnaire (BISQ) is used to identify youth who have suffered a brain injury and note if there were any residual effects of the injury on the child’s physical abilities, cognition and/or emotional or behavioral states. The grant TJJD secured allowed the El Paso County Juvenile Probation Department to develop a partnership with Dr. Wayne Gordon of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and supported Injury Control Research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai in New York. Through this collabo...

EL PASO, Texas – El Paso County Juvenile Probation Department Senior Officer Jimmy Olivas and his 14-year-old daughter were recently faced with a situation that called for quick thinking. On June 30, they were on I-10 East following behind an SUV that appeared to be exiting the freeway, but then the driver changed her mind at the last minute. The SUV hit the exit barriers, which caused the vehicle to flip over and as a result, two small children were ejected. Before he could bring his own car to a complete stop, Olivas’ daughter was out of the car, running across morning traffic to gather up one of the children from the freeway. This little girl, who was not more than four or five years old, was severely injured and would not have been able to move on her own. The second child, who had been thrown to the middle of the freeway, stood up dazed and confused, directly in the path of a semi-truck. Miraculously, at the last second, the child took a small step to the side and avoided be...