A Houston father of five is dead after he went looking for his son’s stolen truck, and his family is not just grieving. They are asking a harder question. Why was the man charged with killing him free to be on the street at all? Louis Erebia, 56, was shot and killed Saturday afternoon, and court records show the suspect had already broken the rules of his probation months before pulling the trigger, according to investigators.
That gap between what the system knew and what it did is the part of this story that has the family demanding answers.
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How a Stolen Truck Turned Into a Killing
The chain of events did not start at the intersection where Erebia died. The Harris County Sheriff’s Office says it began about 15 miles away on Tidwell Road in east Harris County, where Erebia’s son reported being carjacked at gunpoint. That call set everything in motion. When his son told him what happened, Erebia did not wait around for it to resolve itself.
Investigators say Erebia used GPS to track the stolen truck himself. He went after it. The pursuit ended in a crash, and that is where Erebia was shot and killed. The fatal shooting happened at Airline and the North Loop, a long way from where the carjacking was first reported.
London Hogan, Sr., 37, is now charged with murder in Erebia’s death. He is also charged with shooting Erebia’s passenger, who is still in the hospital, and with the carjacking of Erebia’s son. Through his court-appointed attorney, Hogan said he did not steal the truck.
The Detail That Has the Family Furious
Here is the part that matters to the people who loved Erebia. Hogan was not supposed to be a free man in any practical sense by the time this happened. Court records show he was sentenced to five years of probation in March 2024 after pleading guilty to choking his girlfriend. That sentence let him stay out of prison as long as he followed the conditions attached to it.
He did not follow them. In January 2025, records show Hogan was arrested in Louisiana on drug possession charges and accused of planning to smuggle the drugs into a correctional facility. That is a probation violation on its face. A violation like that can send a person back to serve the original sentence. It did not happen that way.
Instead of revoking his probation, Harris County Judge Te’iva Bell of the 339th District Court sentenced him to 30 days in jail. Six months after that decision, Hogan was charged with murder. The family sees a straight line from one to the other, and it is hard to blame them for connecting those dots.
A Family of First Responders Watching the System Fail
At an emotional news conference, relatives stood holding photos of Erebia and talked about the kind of man he was. His sister-in-law, Amber Burrough, said Erebia meant everything to the people around him and that some loved ones were too heartbroken to even attend. She pointed straight at Hogan’s record and said this never should have happened. The family identifies as a family of first responders, people who expected the law to work for them and feel it failed instead.
Victim advocate April Aguirre framed Erebia’s decision to chase the truck as the act of a man who refused to take the loss sitting down. When his son called, he moved. That instinct, the urge to protect your own and recover what was stolen, is something a lot of people understand. It is also exactly why the stakes here run so deep. A father acted to help his son, and he did not come home.
What This Case Exposes About Accountability
This is where the story turns from one terrible afternoon into something bigger. The frustration here is not aimed at car culture or at a father trying to recover his kid’s truck. It is aimed squarely at a system that had a documented chance to act and chose a 30-day jail term over revoking probation for a violent offender who had already violated. Judges in Texas are barred by the Code of Judicial Conduct from commenting on pending cases, so the bench is silent while the family is left to ask why.
Judge Bell denied bond for Hogan at a hearing Monday morning, which keeps him locked up now. That does nothing to answer the family’s central complaint. The decision they are angry about was made long before Saturday, when a man with a violent guilty plea and a fresh out-of-state arrest was given a short stay in jail and then sent back out. Erebia’s relatives say they do not want the law to fail again. The question they are forcing into the open is who, exactly, is supposed to make sure it does not.
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Images Via: The Harris County Sheriff’s Office