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A San Antonio police officer is hospitalized after a pickup truck hit him as he worked an accident scene on Interstate 410 on the northwest side of the city. Police reports show Officer Jonathan Esquivel was placing traffic cones to protect an officer working the accident scene when he was hit Sunday night.

According to the reports, the driver of the truck had taken his eyes off the rode briefly and hit the 28-year-old officer when he swerved to avoid hitting the stopped vehicles.

Bexar County sheriff’s deputies joined federal agents in a roundup of more than 200 high-powered guns, including AR-15s, AK-47s and a sniper rifle. The weapons were seized by agents from Homeland Security and the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives after straw purchasers living in San Antonio bought the weapons and delivered them to gun runners for a Mexican cartel.

Twenty-two people were arrested and pleaded guilty in federal court this week to firearms charges. The suspects were as young as 20 years old, and agents said many of them were women who had been recruited to go into gun stores and buy the weapons.

Exercise Bold Alligator 2012 has allowed sailors aboard the USS San Antonio an opportunity to once again work with Marines and Marine Corps equipment, something the ship’s crew has not handled in more than three years.

“The last time we had Marines aboard was when we deployed Oct. 2008,” said Cmdr. Neil Koprowski, commanding officer of the USS San Antonio, “but since then we had very limited amounts of Marines.”

Convicted murderer Rodrigo Hernandez was headed to the Texas death chamber after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block his execution Thursday evening for the abduction, rape and strangulation of a 38-year-old woman in San Antonio 18 years ago.

The high court rejected a last-day appeal about two hours before Hernandez, 38, was set for lethal injection for the slaying of Susan Verstegen, an employee of snack maker Frito-Lay. She was attacked at a storage area behind a supermarket and her body was found dumped in a garbage barrel behind a San Antonio church.

The slaying of a mother whose body was found stuffed in a garbage can behind a San Antonio church in 1994 remained a mystery for nearly a decade, when a prisoner in Michigan had to provide a DNA sample to be eligible for parole on an assault conviction.

That prisoner, Rodrigo Hernandez, was slated to die by injection Thursday for the abduction, rape and strangulation of 38-year-old Susan Verstegen. The execution would be the first of the year in Texas, which puts more prisoners to death than any other state and which is scheduled to kill at least six more inmates in the next several weeks.