East Harris County man charged with murder after wife’s fatal shooting
Three children hid inside a Cloverleaf home after Jose A. Romero called 911 and said he shot his wife. He now faces murder charges in east Harris County.
A domestic argument over back pain turned deadly in a Cloverleaf house on Texarkana Street, where a 43-year-old man called 911 and told dispatchers he had shot his wife. Deputies said the shooting happened around 1 p.m. Saturday in the 14200 block of Texarkana Street in east Harris County, a neighborhood where three children were inside and had to hide as gunfire erupted.
Harris County deputies identified the suspect as Jose A. Romero and said he was booked into the Harris County Jail on a murder charge. The victim was identified as 39-year-old Yanira Marin de Romero, whom ABC13 also identified as Yanira Nafin. Investigators said Romero told detectives he shot his wife because he believed she was not taking his back pain seriously. The children, ages 3, 8 and 13, were not hurt.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office said the case was possibly linked to domestic violence, a threat that remains stubbornly high across the county. KHOU reported a 34% increase in Harris County homicides tied to domestic violence between 2023 and 2024, and FOX 26 reported that domestic-violence-related killings rose even as overall violent crime declined. The Harris County Domestic Violence Assistance Fund says the county sees more than 40,000 law-enforcement calls related to domestic violence each year, along with more than 70,000 hotline calls, and shelters still turn away thousands because there is not enough bed space.
That scale is why this case reaches far beyond one home on Texarkana Street. The Harris County Sheriff’s Office says its Domestic Violence Bureau is handling between 4,000 and 5,000 active cases at any given time, while the county has reported 29 family violence victims so far this year. For relatives, neighbors and school staff in east Harris County, the warning signs can come long before police do: repeated arguments, fear in the home and children forced to shelter from violence they cannot stop. The Houston Area Women’s Center and county domestic violence services remain critical places to turn before another call to 911 ends in murder.
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