#BREAKING Texas death row prisoner Jorge Villanueva died this weekend after testing positive for covid, several sources confirm.

He had been on the row 25 years, was blind and had cancer. He was 66.

I first exchanged letters with Jorge back in 2017, when I started investigating rumors that I'd heard that the Texas prison system was not giving dentures to toothless prisoners -- he was one of them.

"Greetings! I am blind but my neighbor reads and writes letters for me," his letter said. "I am in need of dentures. They look at my teeth back in June and he said that I don’t qualify for dentures. I don’t know why not, I don’t have any teeth."

His letter was one of the first confirmations I had that this was really happening - that instead of giving people dentures, TDCJ was just serving pureed food. I investigated for another year, then wrote about it: https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Toothless-Texas-inmates-denied-dentures-in-state-13245169.php

Afterward, the prison system bought a 3D printer and (pre-covid) starting printing teeth for some of the guys.

Jorge was not one of them.

He did not get teeth. https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Texas-prisons-to-start-3D-printing-dentures-for-13454914.php

In fact, only rarely heard from him after that. He could only write me when he happened to be next to someone who would write for him.