Good Guy with a Gun #270: Houston, TX

Superman wears his underwear on the outside; David Garza just skipped the costume and kept the outcome. | Original incident: July 28, 2024

Jul 28, 2026

These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is significantly updated from the calendar version.

“I looked out the window and I saw a man beating up a woman on the ground ... trying to take her clothes off,” David Garza said.

He didn’t stop to get dressed. He grabbed his pistol and ran outside — in nothing but his boxers — to find out what was happening.

Two sides of David Garza: Underwear-clad hero on the left, middle-school modesty on the right.

“I ran outside, asked what’s going on. The girl screamed, ‘I’m 15, help me!’ I pointed the gun at him and told him to get off her,” Garza said. The man had her by the hair. “He took his hands off right away. He went chasing after her, I went chasing after him and she got away.”

The man got away — investigators said he’d boarded another bus nearby — and they reported that he was last seen in a black hoodie with a white Reebok logo, blue jeans, and white tennis shoes.

Garza admitted that the incident rattled him. “I was scared, too, I’m not gonna lie,” he said. And why not? He was a middle-school teacher, not a cop. “But she needed help more than I was afraid, so I had to do it.” Good man.

A neighbor watching from her window felt the same way about how close it came: “At first, I was scared, I thought she was going to get raped. I think if he didn’t come out, she would have gotten raped.”

The girl and the would-be rapist had ridden the same METRO bus that night and gotten off together at the same stop near Garza’s apartment complex on Houston’s east side, just before midnight on a Saturday; the man had followed her the rest of the way. Per HCSO, he’d threatened to “fatally injure the complainant if they refused to engage in sexual activity.” Pretty clinical language for such a violent threat.

Andy Kahan, a victim advocate for Crime Stoppers, thanked Garza publicly: “I take my hat off to you — you did the right thing.” Then, turning to the man still loose: “If he’s willing to do this, it makes me wonder — is this your first time? We need to get you off the streets.”

Garza brushed off the hero treatment — he said it wasn’t the first time he’d chased off a man trying to hurt a child, and that he’d do it again. “I think it’s something anyone else would have done — come help a child,” he said.

Crime Stoppers put up a $5,000 reward. Whether it paid off is where the record turns messy: Crime Stoppers told KHOU a suspect was in custody. Two days later, HCSO told a different outlet no arrest had been made at all. Nobody’s been named either way since. I don’t know which agency has it right — but Garza didn’t need either one to figure out his job: a Good Guy with a Gun, standing there in his boxers, protecting a girl from rape without even firing a shot.