An inadequate septic system and large dose of homophobia closed one couple’s business

DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
taffet@dallasvoice.com

After stints at companies like American Airlines, Gary Garcia was tired of corporate America, tired of the bureaucracy and the politics. He was ready to step out on his own and follow in his family’s restaurant tradition.

“My family has owned restaurants in Colorado since 1960,” he said, adding that any time he would take tacos he made to work, “everyone always told me to open a restaurant.”

So Garcia and his husband, Chad Pritchett, looked for a location near their Wise County house. They found a new food truck yard opening, but they wanted something more permanent. Then, in nearby Aurora, they found a developer putting together sheds built around a common seating/patio/picnic area. It was just what they were looking for.

Like the rest of the city, the restaurants in these sheds would be on a septic system. That worried Garcia, but Pritchett assured him it was normal in a small town.

So they built a 500-square-foot shed for their new business, Atomic Taco. They worked with the city to make sure they were compliant with all the relevant codes, and the building inspector assured them they were, in fact, over-compliant.

They picked up their certificate of occupancy and opened on Jan. 17, 2020.

Within two weeks the septic alarm went off. The area, Garcia said, “smelled like sewage.”

So they called the city. They were assured it would be fixed. But that’s when they learned the patio was built on top of the septic system.

Things were fixed, at least temporarily, and Atomic Taco began getting good traction. They were even written up in Texas Monthly.

But the septic problems continued.

Gary Garcia

“The Texas Commission of Environmental Quality came out and said [the set up] this wasn’t legal,” Garcia said. So the landlord installed sprayers — which, Garcia said, “sprayed the building, customers.

They were spraying sewage.”

That’s when things got ugly.

Garcia said workers at one of the other businesses began telling customers to avoid Atomic Taco, saying things like, “Don’t go over there. Two fags own the business.”

Actually, Atomic Taco was a very family-friendly restaurant. Garcia and Pritchett have a son who’s now 6½ years old, and they started a non-profit to help children going through organ transplantation.

Then Garcia and his husband were blamed for causing trouble for having called TCEQ, which wrote up a violation. That’s when the local health inspector began harassing them, Garcia said. He said he told them if the problem was the septic system, they’d help pay to fix the system. By July, he said, it had gotten so bad that sewage was coming up from underground.

So, Garcia said, “I called a lawyer. We wanted to continue doing business here.”

Garcia again said they’d help pay for the needed septic system upgrade, and their attorney sent a letter about getting it fixed. But then things got weird with the landlord, Toni Wheeler, who was also Aurora’s city administrator at the time.

They received an email that the property was sold to someone in Aurora, Colo. — an odd coincidence in Garcia’s mind, that an Aurora, Texas, property would be sold to someone in another city with the same name.

Then Garcia and Pritchett received a letter, with a return address for a UPS store in Aurora, Colo., from Luis Martinez, the new owner, raising the monthly rent from $400 to $6,000. When they tried getting in touch with Martinez through the UPS store, they were told by that store didn’t have a box with that number.

Chad Pritchett

When Garcia and Pritchett asked other shed owners if they also received the notice about the rent increase, the other owners said they had received it and were just going to pay the increase. But Garcia and Pritchett knew that a $6,000-a-month rent wasn’t economically feasible; they concluded the other restaurant owners were in on what they were beginning to think was a scam.

They contacted the Southlake company listed in the letter as the new property management company, and were told the company didn’t represent anyone named Luis Martinez. Then, when they traced the UPS letter supposedly sent by Martinez back to its source, they found it had actually been sent by Wheeler.

Garcia said they contacted “Martinez” in October 2020 about their intent to vacate the premises due to multiple breaches of contract as well as repeated slurs from Aurora officials who referred to the couple as fags whenever they contacted the city. Four days later they learned a report had been filed against them with Child Protective Services.

When the CPS worker contacted them, she confirmed a report had been filed, but said she believed it had been filed with malicious intent.

The Department of Family Protective Services cleared the child abuse charges within a month because the report was obviously false and made with malicious intent. And the couple filed a report with the Wise County Sheriff’s office.

They also filed open records requests for information on Wheeler and her supposed sale of the property as well as her connection to the CPS reports. But the city of Aurora never responded. Then, on June 1, 2021,

Aurora City Hall caught on fire. Before there was even an investigation, city officials posted on social media it was an electrical fire.

On July 8, the attorney general’s office ordered the city to respond to the open records request, an order with which city officials still have not complied. Garcia suggests any incriminating paperwork was probably — and suspiciously — lost in the fire.

In October 2021, Wheeler was fired from her position with the city of Aurora, and, in December, she was arrested for embezzlement. While out on bail, Wheeler moved to Colorado, Garcia said.

In February, Garcia was prevented from speaking at an Aurora city council meeting on grounds he didn’t live in the city, even though he had operated a business within city limits. So, in May, Garcia and Pritchett filed a federal lawsuit against the city for violating their free speech rights as well as discriminating against them based on their sexual orientation.

The Wise County sheriff claimed there’s no hate crime law in Texas. While there is, it’s a penalty enhancement law, but sexual orientation is covered under the federal hate crime statute, and Garcia and Pritchett filed a federal lawsuit enumerating the ways the city had conspired against them because of their sexual orientation. During health inspections, they noted, the inspector made repeated derogatory comments about the legally married couple.

The couple charge in their lawsuit that Wheeler, in her position as city administrator, conspired with the health inspector to shut down Atomic Taco. They say Wheeler falsified government documents in exchange for approval of other city projects. As part of the proof of discrimination the couple claims none of the other (heterosexual) vendors in the restaurant development were subject to similar inspections or treatment, violating their equal protection rights.

Garcia and Pritchett are suing the city for physical and emotional damages based on Aurora officials having violated their constitutional rights.

Garcia said he doubts Wheeler will ever be prosecuted, since no attempt has been made to extradite her from Colorado, and he was told by the D.A.’s office any arrest warrant filed would only include immediately surrounding states, which doesn’t include Colorado.

In a text, Garcia asked if Wheeler would be charged with a federal hate crime for filing a false CPS report.

Causing he and his husband to lose their business was one thing, he said, but attacking their young child took things to a completely different level. A false CPS report was filed for homophobic reasons, he said, and they were getting no assistance from any elected official in Wise County.

By text he received his answer from the Texas Ranger investigating the former city administrator: “There is no crime like that in Texas,” he wrote. “It is a false report.”