A man has been arrested after allegedly shooting his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend outside a home on San Antonio's South Side, striking the 43-year-old victim in the elbow before pedaling away on a bicycle. Ray Wechsler Jr. is now charged in connection with the Oct. 11 shooting on Gladstone Street, according to an arrest-warrant account of the confrontation.
According to that arrest-warrant account, reported by KENS 5, Wechsler went to the home to speak with his ex-girlfriend. The woman's new boyfriend told Wechsler to leave, the warrant states, and investigators learned that the victim had also told Wechsler on Oct. 4 to stop coming to his home and to move on with his life.
Police say Wechsler responded by pulling out a gun and firing a shot that missed the victim, who ran away. Wechsler then got on his bicycle and fired another shot, which struck the victim in the elbow, per police. The victim survived and later identified Wechsler as the shooter, according to the arrest warrant.
What Officers Found That Sunday Morning
The shooting unfolded around 9:30 a.m. that Sunday, when officers responded to the 100 block of Gladstone Street and found a man with a gunshot wound, according to KSAT. Police said at the time that an altercation had broken out outside the home before gunfire erupted. The victim was taken to a hospital, though his condition was not known in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the outlet reported.
A preliminary police report in the hours after the shooting said the gunman had fled on a bicycle and had not yet been located, the station's report noted. Wechsler was charged in connection with the shooting at the Gladstone Street home.
A Pattern Reflected in Local Data
Cases like this one fit into a broader pattern tracked by local advocates. The San Antonio Police Department receives more than 40,000 family-violence-related calls on average each year, according to data from CCDV. The organization also reports that more than one in three women and roughly one in three men nationally say they have experienced intimate-partner violence in their lifetime.
CCDV's data further shows that in 2018, Bexar County's rate of women murdered by intimate-partner violence stood at 2.8 per 100,000 female population, higher than the statewide Texas rate of 1.6 per 100,000 female population that same year. The organization notes that the broader rate of domestic- and family-violence-related murders climbed gradually through 2018 before declining in 2019.
Readers looking to track the status of Wechsler's case can consult the Bexar County Central Magistrate Search, which allows the public to look up people arrested for offenses of Class B or higher and processed through the county's Central Magistrate Office.
