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pneumonia. Her condition was so bad the hospital couldn’t handle it, and they sent her on an emergency trip to the Methodist Hospital in Houston, where her illness was treated aggressively. Friends said she later referred to September 9, 1999, as a near-death experience. Kim later told others that this was the time she became a Christian. “I felt my ride would be downhill from that time,” she said. By “downhill” she meant coasting—as a Christian who’d put her faith in the Lord, she assumed it would be easy streets from here.
    But another significant event in her life marked an entirely different kind of downhill slide. At Fleetwood Transportation, she met an employee by the name of Mark Kevin Saenz, who went by Kevin.
    Kevin was a recent resident of the county. Previously, he’d lived in Harris County, Houston, but evidence suggests that he didn’t agree with Harris County or vice versa. On August 13, 1994, the Houston Police Department had arrested Mark Kevin Saenz for theft greater than $750 but less than $20,000—a third-degree felony. Records of this arrest show him to be a white male, five-feet-seven and a hundred and thirty pounds, with a date of birth of January 28, 1969.
    This wasn’t the last of his problems with law enforcement in Houston. On November 14, 1996, the Houston Police Department arrested him on another felony: possession of more than five but less than fifty pounds of marijuana. Yes, more than five
pounds
. (To put that into perspective, average recreational users buy their pot in Ziploc baggies. Five pounds is like a standard-size metal office wastebasket stuffed to overflowing with marijuana.) Quantities that large usually mean the person is dealing.
    Records indicate that Kevin Saenz pleaded guilty to this charge on February 3, 1997, and was sentenced to four years in the Department of Criminal Justice at Huntsville (the Texas prison system). He began his sentence on March 5, 1997, and was paroled to Angelina County, where his mother lived, on August 14, 1998.
    While on parole in Angelina County, Saenz was also pulled over for a traffic violation on October 13, 1999, in Wickenburg, Arizona (in clear violation of his parole). At the time, he listed his address as Green Sanders Road in Pollok, Texas. As it happened, that was the address Kim C. Hopper listed as her own, too. The ticket would have been minor and the last he heard of it if he’d paid it, but he didn’t, and the state of Arizona issued a warrant for his arrest on failure to appear.
    None of this dissuaded Kimberly Fowler Hopper, who married Kevin Saenz on June 10, 2000, six months pregnant with his child. Saenz was finally released from parole on November 14, 2000. (Whether or not Texas authorities knew that he had a warrant out for his arrest from Arizona is unclear, but Arizona finally got their pound of flesh—almost twelve years later. On August 22, 2011, they collected the money Saenz owed for his traffic violation and failure to appear.)
    With a young son and a baby on the way, Kimberly Clark Fowler Hopper Saenz quit Fleetwood Transportation on June 23, 2000, less than two weeks after marrying Kevin Saenz. She’d held the job for almost three years, and when she left, they would have hired her back. As things turned out, this distinction made them unique among Kim’s employers.
    Saenz gave birth to a daughter, Madison Grace, on December 22, 2000, and for the next year and a half, life seemed to have quieted down for the Saenzes.
    On July 24, 2002, Kimberly Saenz’s parents paid $14,000 to Angelina Savings Bank in Lufkin to pay off the loan on their property. The property then played Ping-Pong. They sold it to Kimberly Saenz for a $20 token fee. However, less than a month later, Kimberly Saenz sold them back that same property for the same fee.
    Then one month and three days after paying the loan off, Saenz’s family used that same property to borrow $24,225