DALLAS — Shortly after he tried to reassure this city at a news conference that he did not put himself at risk of Ebola by coming into contact with the quarantined family of the nation’s first Ebola victim last week, Judge Clay Jenkins had a smaller audience to convince.
His neighbors. And his wife.
Hours after driving the quarantined family from their potentially contaminated apartment to their new temporary home on Oct. 3, Mr. Jenkins, 50, pulled up about 10 p.m. to the house in the upscale Highland Park area where he lives with his wife and 8-year-old daughter. His wife greeted him at the door of the vehicle. She learned that he had escorted the family by watching it live on television. Soon his neighbors across the street came by to express their own concerns.
“Everything is a learning curve,” said Mr. Jenkins, the county’s chief executive and its director of homeland security and emergency management. “Marriage is a learning curve. I learned quite a bit when I got home that night. My wife is at the door of that S.U.V. like J. J. Watt” — defensive end for the Houston Texans football team — “and she is explaining to me that this is a marriage and we communicate with each other.”
That night, Mr. Jenkins, a trial lawyer, appeared to have swayed the jury, since those close to him — including some of his neighbors, his wife and his 82-year-old mother — have become supportive of his contact with the quarantined family. Calming Dallas has proved more difficult.
No local, state or federal official involved in the Ebola emergency in Dallas has put himself farther on the front lines and done more to humanize and personalize the government response than Mr. Jenkins. Such a hands-on approach raised his political profile as he runs for re-election in November and helped counter the widespread misinformation about how Ebola spreads. But his involvement has earned him both praise and criticism as fear of the disease continues to fester.
Mr. Jenkins, soft-spoken to the point of a whisper-drawl, a religious man who often speaks of his faith and regularly attends Highland Park United Methodist Church, makes for a quiet but commanding presence at the Emergency Operations Center, the hub of the Ebola response, on the third floor of the Dallas County Records Building downtown.
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“The goal that I’m tasked with is containing the Ebola virus and stopping it here, and we’re going to do that no matter what it takes,” Mr. Jenkins said. “But we can choose to do that by creating a police state and taking steps that are scary to people, or we can choose to see people as our fellow human beings and treat them with compassion and respect. We chose the latter course.”
But as the concerns of his wife and neighbors illustrated, Mr. Jenkins’s handling of the response has at times heightened rather than alleviated fears. On Thursday, the day after Mr. Jenkins and a Baptist pastor went to see the fiancée of Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to receive an Ebola diagnosis in the United States, to deliver the news that Mr. Duncan had died, nearly 100 children were absent from Armstrong Elementary School, where Mr. Jenkins’s daughter is in the third grade. The typical number absent is about 12. Mr. Jenkins’s wife, who volunteers at Armstrong at lunchtime, was initially told by some at the school that she should not serve food to the children.
Officials with the Highland Park Independent School District, which includes Armstrong, sent an email to parents and employees assuring them there was no cause for concern. In an unusual move, two officials — Dr. David L. Lakey, the Texas health commissioner, and Dr. Inger Damon, who is managing the Ebola response for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — issued letters stating that Mr. Jenkins’s interaction with the family had put neither himself nor others at risk, letters that were made public in part to calm Armstrong parents.
“Ebola is only spread by direct contact with an individual who is symptomatic,” Dr. Lakey’s letter read. “To date, the family members have shown no symptoms of Ebola. For this reason, Judge Jenkins was not at risk and posed no risk to others through his interaction with the family.”
Even before this incident, Mr. Jenkins’s flair for the dramatic and his on-the-front-lines management style, which he calls being “a servant leader,” had drawn widespread attention and controversy both locally and far beyond.
Amid the recent surge in unaccompanied minors from Central America, Mr. Jenkins announced a plan for Dallas County to house 2,000 of the children. Thousands of emails and phone calls in support and opposition flooded county offices. The plan, unveiled at the Texas Democratic Party convention, led Mr. Jenkins to take part in a meeting with President Obama when he visited Dallas. When word spread that one of the neighborhoods was reluctant to host the children, Mr. Jenkins knocked on the doors of residents to tell them about the plan and ease their concerns. He received threats after the housing announcement, and as a result he asked that the names of his wife and child not be published.
Dallas Officials on Duncan’s Apartment
Health officials in Texas say relatives of a Liberian man, Thomas Duncan, who developed symptoms of Ebola while visiting Dallas are quarantined in their home.
Video by Reuters on Publish Date October 2, 2014. Photo by Larry W. Smith/European Pressphoto Agency.In 2012, as Dallas dealt with a deadly outbreak of West Nile virus, Mr. Jenkins rode in the trucks that were spraying chemicals and was such a hands-on presence that he was accidentally doused with them.
“I just look at this as a job,” he said. “My mother and father didn’t get the opportunity to go to college. But they worked hard every day of their lives. And this is my job, and I’m working hard at my job.”
His personal involvement in the Ebola response, though in line with his style, has surprised even those close to him.
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Mr. Jenkins drove Mr. Duncan’s fiancée, Louise Troh, and three others from their contaminated apartment to their new temporary home in a county-owned Ford Explorer. He did so without protective gear, wearing, as he pointed out to reporters, the same dress shirt to a news conference that he wore in the vehicle. He went inside their old apartment twice before it was cleaned and has seen Ms. Troh and those quarantined with her — her 13-year-old son, Mr. Duncan’s nephew and another young man — about five times since Mr. Duncan was found to have Ebola on Sept. 30. Each time Mr. Jenkins has not worn protective clothing.
“He’s really a very caring person, and what he’s doing with the Ebola situation shows how caring he is,” said Nelson W. Wolff, 73, a Democrat and a former mayor of San Antonio who has been the county judge in Bexar County since 2001. “He’s stepping up and going beyond what a normal person would do, which is terrific.”
Mr. Jenkins, who became county judge in January 2011, is a Democrat in a county that is, along with Bexar County, one of the few Democratic strongholds in a state dominated by Republicans. Many of his Republican critics have largely kept silent in public, wary of appearing to attack Mr. Jenkins while the situation is still unfolding. But privately they call him a fool, showboat or opportunist who has used the Ebola emergency to further his political career. The conservative website Breitbart.com ran a story with this headline: “Naïve Liberal Texas Judge Enters Ebola Apartment Without Protection.”
“While I applaud his personal involvement, I am a bit perplexed as to why any elected official would go into the Ebola patient’s home with no protective gear,” said Toby Marie Walker, president of the Waco Tea Party. “I understand that he may have wanted to show he wasn’t afraid of catching Ebola. However, that is not what many people I know thought. Instead of alleviating public fears, he stoked the fires of panic and distrust.”
Mr. Jenkins denies that he has been politically focused during his handling of the response, and said he understood why people would be concerned about the risk of exposure. But there was zero risk, he added.
“There’s not any time for politics when it comes to public safety,” Mr. Jenkins said. “Right now, the science is very unclear to people, and I’ve made a lot of people who have always supported me extremely upset in doing this, but I can’t control when things like this happen. We have a job to do here in Dallas County.”