Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Deceleration, a nonprofit online journal of environmental justice. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Last summer, Jessica Witzel collapsed, convulsed, and died in the unshaded driveway of a San Antonio gas station during one of the hottest days of 2024, itself the hottest year on record in San Antonio. Her death was reported by area media at the time, based on the accounts of first responders, as the likely consequence of the heat dome that blanketed much of the state under excessive heat warnings all that week. Shortly after her death on August 22, scene investigators recorded an ambient temperature of 106 Fahrenheit and 30 percent humidity—or a heat index of 114F—and logged her body temperature at an unimaginable 126 degrees, according to the autopsy report released to Deceleration by public records request.
The day before she died, the San Antonio Police Department encountered Witzel, who had been living unhoused for 18 months at that point, after a homeowner called to report seeing her on their property “attempting to drink water from an outdoor water spigot.” She’d been sick, Witzel told officers, according to SAPD records included in the autopsy report; she’d “been dealing with a fever.”
