Former Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner was sworn in as a U.S. representative in January and died Wednesday in Washington. He is 70 years old and attended President Trump’s speech on Capitol Hill on Tuesday night.
His press secretary Gregory Carter said Mr Turner was taken to the hospital after his speech and returned home and died. He said the reason has not been determined.
Mr. Turner, a Democrat, is a veteran of Texas politics. From 1989 to 2016, when he became Mayor of Houston, he served in the state legislature. He served for two terms before leaving his term in January 2024.
A few months later, he participated in a special election to fill the seat in Congress representing the death of Sheila Jackson Lee in July. He then quit the primary, in favor of Ms. Lee’s daughter, Erica Lee Carter. Ms. Carter won the match and recognized Mr. Turner in the regular election in November.
He was sworn in on January 3.
Mr. Turner was born on September 27, 1954 in Houston. His father was a painter and his mother was a housekeeper in a hotel.
He graduated from high school, graduated from his high school, then received a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Houston in 1977 and a law degree from Harvard in 1980.
He returned to Houston as a trial lawyer, first a full-fledged company and then his own company Barnes & Turner, which focused on commercial law and personal injury litigation.
His marriage to Cheryl Turner ended in a divorce. Survivors include their daughter Ashley Turner-Captain.
As a liberal Democrat with the increasingly conservative Texas legislature in the 1990s and 2000s, Mr. Turner is known for his fiery partisan speeches. But he also has the ability to work in the aisle to improve his concerns, such as for low-income health care in Houston.
He ran for Houston Mayor in 1991 and 2003, neither of which was successful. His losses in 1991 were close, and he blamed the results on what he called defamatory news reports, linking him to insurance scams.
In 1996, he successfully sued reporters and TV stations who played the report. But the state Supreme Court overturned the jury prize, saying Mr Turner failed to prove it was malicious.
He ran for mayor again in 2015, and this time he won, partly due to President Barack Obama’s approval.
As mayor, he continued his efforts to expand health care opportunities in Houston and received praise for clearing the city’s budget. However, he was criticized for his decision in 2017 to not order the general evacuation of Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 storm that killed about 60 people.
Mr Turner worked in Congress for two months and didn’t have much time to establish a record of existence or legislation. The first bill he proposed last month was to provide on-the-job cybersecurity training in the federal office.
Before the president’s speech, Mr Turner spoke to reporters at night with his guests, and Houston mother Angela Hernandez relied on Medicaid to care for her children, who had special needs. “I gave the current government a message from ITU tonight: ‘Don’t get mad with Medicaid.'” he wrote on his Instagram account: “
