Before the New Braunfels Police Department removed Tyler D. Palacios from its ranks, a federal judge had already refused to end most of the civil-rights claims pending against him and two other officers at the courthouse door. Chief Osbaldo Flores indefinitely suspended Palacios from employment effective April 14, 2026, a civil-service action that ended his NBPD employment. The firing grew out of a separate internal investigation involving a New Braunfels resident and events primarily occurring between November 2023 and April 2024. The lawsuit and disciplinary case involve different people, and different encounters, but they now place the same former officer at the center of two substantial public records about police authority and personal judgment.

Federal Judge Keeps Most Claims Against Officers Alive

As The Hawk’s Eye first reported⁠, Robert Nagel sued Palacios, Officer Beverly Fraga, Sgt. Clint Penniman and the City of New Braunfels over a March 2023 traffic stop on Interstate 35. Nagel alleges Palacios prolonged the stop after a license-plate database problem, refused to let him retrieve paperwork and arrested him without probable cause after he invoked his right to remain silent. According to the complaint, Palacios told Nagel while handcuffing him, “You shouldn’t have started with that ‘I want to remain silent’ shit.” Nagel spent approximately 12 hours in jail on allegations involving a fictitious vehicle registration and unlawfully carrying a firearm, but prosecutors filed non-prosecution affidavits nearly two years later.

On December 17, 2025, Senior U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra granted part of the defendants’ joint motion to dismiss but refused to dismiss the remainder. Ezra dismissed Nagel’s municipal-liability claim against the City without prejudice because the complaint did not allege enough similar incidents to show an official policy or widespread custom. He nevertheless found that Nagel had plausibly alleged an unlawful search and arrest without probable cause and declined to give Palacios, Fraga and Penniman qualified immunity at the pleading stage. That ruling was not a finding that Nagel’s accusations are true, because courts generally accept well-pleaded allegations as true when deciding this kind of early dismissal request. Ezra expressly noted that discovery or later proceedings could still show the officers are entitled to immunity, but the allegations against them were sufficient to keep the case alive.

A Separate Complaint Reaches Internal Affairs

While the federal dismissal request was awaiting a ruling, NBPD had already opened an unrelated investigation into Palacios. On October 17, 2025, the New Braunfels resident and her husband went to the police department over a separate matter, and the resident told a supervisor about an officer she knew as “Ty.” She alleged that the officer sent repeated unwanted sexual messages, called frequently, used traffic stops to contact her and once came to her home in uniform and attempted to initiate sexual activity. She said she had delayed reporting the conduct because she feared retaliation, and she provided printed message excerpts and a phone that linked the “Ty NBPD Officer” contact to Palacios.

Investigators reviewed traffic-stop video, phone records, text screenshots, vehicle-location data, department email records and several recorded interviews. Palacios was questioned multiple times, with his attorney participating in later interviews, and was repeatedly given opportunities to address inconsistencies or supply records supporting his account. The final result did not validate every accusation the resident made, but it documented enough undisputed conduct for Police Chief Osbaldo Flores to conclude that Palacios could no longer remain employed.

The Camera Went Dark, but the Contact Continued

The main recorded encounter occurred on November 12, 2023, when Palacios stopped the residents vehicle and ultimately issued a warning. Video showed the two discussing a federal criminal matter involving the resident, and it also captured her offering Palacios a German beer stein more than once. Palacios declined the offer during the recorded encounter, then turned off his in-car and body-worn recording systems after completing the warning and approached the residents vehicle again. Vehicle data showed his patrol unit remained at the stop for approximately 13 additional minutes after the recording ended. Palacios said the continued contact was a private conversation unrelated to enforcement, but he also acknowledged that he switched off the camera because he did not want their sexual communications surfacing unexpectedly on department video.

In one internal-affairs interview, Palacios said he knew he should not have been having sexual conversations with the resident and did not want anyone else to learn about them “in an impromptu way.” He maintained that the two had been exchanging flirtatious and sexual messages before the traffic stop and described their interaction as consensual. The resident disputed that history and said the November stop was the first time she remembered meeting him, although the video shows Palacios addressing her by name and both referring to some prior contact. Investigators ultimately did not sustain a body-camera violation because they considered the wording of the policy ambiguous once the enforcement portion of the stop had ended.

Phone Records Complicate the Earlier-Relationship Account

Palacios said he initially met the resident while searching for a wanted person, placed her in the back of his patrol vehicle, drove her to point out a possible location and exchanged personal phone numbers. He admitted that he did not notify dispatch or activate a recording during that transport, but investigators could not independently confirm that the trip occurred. Carrier records supplied by the resident showed no calls or texts between their numbers from mid-August through November 13, 2023, despite Palacios’s belief that they had been communicating for months before the stop. The first documented text from Palacios appeared two days after the stop, and the first documented call came four days afterward and lasted seven minutes. Palacios could not produce his old messages, and possible communications through Wi-Fi-based messaging or social media prevented investigators from treating the carrier records as conclusive proof that no earlier contact occurred.

From November 2023, through April 2024, the records showed 17 calls from Palacios to the resident and two calls from the resident to Palacios. Printed screenshots also showed two-way text exchanges, even though the carrier statement did not capture the residents outgoing messages, a discrepancy investigators said could be explained by internet-based iPhone messaging. Some excerpts appeared to support Palacios’s claim that the resident participated in the flirtation, including exchanges about meeting somewhere private and whether her husband would be home. Other messages were graphic, and one from Palacios said that if he pulled her over again, she would have to “suck something to get out of a ticket.” When investigators showed Palacios the excerpts in February 2026, Palacios did not disown them and described the messages as the two of them “sexting back and forth.”

The Stein That Became Evidence

The beer stein moved the relationship from a disputed text history into conduct Palacios largely admitted. After declining the gift on video, he later contacted the resident, drove a marked patrol vehicle to her home, arrived in uniform and accepted the stein. Palacios said the resident invited him inside, that he remained in the kitchen and that they discussed when they might meet for sex. He further said the resident exposed her breasts and that he touched them for several seconds before taking the gift and returning to work. The resident denied that the described exposure and touching occurred and instead alleged that Palacios tried to push her toward another room, an accusation he emphatically denied.

Investigators could not determine the exact date of the home visit, and vehicle-location data did not resolve the dispute. One late-night vehicle ping placed Palacios near the residents neighborhood on a date when phone records showed calls between them, but both parties remembered the stein encounter taking place in daylight. Palacios initially tied the visit to a shift briefing, then learned that he had been assigned to a 9 p.m.-to-7 a.m. shift and suggested he may instead have been coming from a side job or covering another shift. Investigators wrote that he did not believe Palacios intentionally lied about his old work schedule, yet the changing timeline prevented the department from reconstructing the visit with certainty. 

Mutual Flirting or Unwanted Attention?

The resident told investigators that the sexual attention was unwanted, that she tried to deflect Palacios without angering him and that she feared his access to police power. Palacios said she never told him to stop, sometimes initiated communication and sent replies he understood as interest rather than rejection. Investigators found that the preserved excerpts did not expressly tell Palacios to stop and, in places, could reasonably be read as the resident encouraging further contact. 

An Earlier Email Trail—and a Missed Connection

The investigation also uncovered evidence that the resident tried to raise a concern with department supervisors in January 2024, long before the formal complaint. Her brief emails asked to discuss harassment by an unnamed NBPD officer but did not identify Palacios or describe the conduct. Then-Chief Keith Lane forwarded one message to the lieutenant overseeing Internal Affairs, who emailed the resident two weeks later asking to speak with her. The resident did not respond and told investigators she did not remember seeing the reply, acknowledging that it may have been lost among unwanted email. Two other supervisors either did not recall seeing her messages or did not answer, leaving an incomplete warning trail that never became a formal investigation at the time.

What the Department Did Not Sustain

The internal-affairs report did not substantiate many of the complaint’s most explosive claims. Department records showed only one documented Palacios traffic stop involving the resident, vehicle-location data could not prove that he repeatedly waited near her home and investigators lacked enough evidence to sustain alleged threats, forced contact or misuse of authority. The report also marked alleged violations based on criminal conduct, disrespect for rights, discourteous treatment and disobedience of law as not sustained. Even the camera-policy allegation was not sustained because of the policy’s ambiguity, despite Palacios admitting that he intentionally ended the recording before continuing the conversation. 

Criminal Questions Remained Unresolved

The Texas Rangers examined possible official oppression and misuse of official information, including whether Palacios obtained the residents number through police contact and whether the traffic-stop-themed sexual message crossed a criminal line. The report says Comal County prosecutors initially indicated that they would not pursue misuse of official information but verbally discussed pursuing official oppression over the message tying a sexual act to avoiding a future ticket. By the time the administrative report and final discipline were issued, however, NBPD wrote that it was unknown whether prosecutors would pursue a charge. 

A Termination Built on Palacios’s Own Admissions

The decisive evidence came from Palacios himself. He acknowledged the sexual messages, the uniformed gift pickup, the physical contact he described as consensual, his knowledge of the residents federal matter and his attempt to pursue a relationship anyway. At one point, Palacios told the investigator, “Did I violate policy? Yeah, I did,” adding that there was “no doubt about that,” although he insisted he had acted without malice and committed no crime. Flores sustained violations involving poor judgment, accepting a gift connected to official duties, maintaining a prohibited personal relationship, conduct prejudicial to good order, failure to follow department rules and acts the chief said showed a lack of good moral character. The chief gave Palacios notice on April 9, held a pre-disciplinary hearing the next day and issued the indefinite suspension four days later, writing that the conduct brought discredit to both NBPD and law enforcement generally.

Two Cases That Must Not Be Blurred—but Cannot Be Ignored

Nagel’s lawsuit asks whether Palacios and two other officers crossed a constitutional line during an arrest, while the disciplinary case asked whether Palacios crossed departmental and ethical lines in his dealings with a resident. The federal court has not found Palacios liable, and the internal investigation did not prove all of the residents allegations or establish that he committed a crime. 

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