ANDREW WOLF: A CHAMPION FOR NAVARRO COUNTY CHILDREN

By Emilie Parten, The Reporter on the Rove

Navarro County First Assistant District Attorney Andrew Wolf has dedicated his life to returning voices to children who have suffered at the hands of their abusers, giving the young victims a safe and cathartic chance to speak out against their attackers, empowering them to heal and protecting them from retaliation while fighting to ensure their monsters-in-human-form don’t have access to them ever again.

The son of a military man, he spent much of his life traveling from one Air Force base to another with his family settling in Texas in the mid 1980’s. Wolf met his wife, Niki, in October of 2007 during a Karate camp in Double Lake National Park in Coldspring, Texas. He described their first meeting, remembering every detail from how her hair was styled to the outfit she was wearing, mentioning that she was taking swigs of Dayquil because she wasn’t feeling well. He smiled the entire time he spoke, describing his now wife as “amazing” and “perfect.” They were married in April of 2010 and welcomed a son in 2011.

As an undergraduate, he changed his major three different times before he took a semester off. During the semester off, he took a CPR class and ended up sharing the class with Jay Abrams, who now works at the Attorney General’s Office in Austin but was, once upon a time, an Assistant District Attorney for Travis County.

Wolf saw that Abrams was distracted during one particular class and asked if everything was all right. Abrams told him that he was in the midst of a child abuse case and was unsure of how things would happen the next day. When Wolf expressed interest in the case, Abrams invited him to the courthouse to watch.

Wolf ended up watching the entire trial. He remembered sitting there thinking “I can do that job. I would enjoy that job,” finding his true calling and answering it, he went back to school knowing beyond a doubt that he wanted to be a prosecutor. He changed his major one final time to Criminal Justice.

Wolf graduated from Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State at San Marcos) where he obtained his degree in Criminal Justice focusing on Law Enforcement and minoring in Business Administration. He chose to study Criminal Justice as a means to better understand how law enforcement officers are trained and what processes and procedures they use, which better helps him as a prosecutor to present cases.

He began law school in 2001, attending the University of Houston Law Center. In 2002, during the summer after his first year in law school, he interned in the Child Abuse Division in Harris County, which aided him in creating a niche for himself as the go to prosecutor for child related cases.

He was hired as a Navarro County Assistant District Attorney by the late Lowell Thompson in July of 2011. “I started on a Monday, picked my first jury on a Tuesday and had my first guilty by Friday,” Wolf joked.

He discussed at length how taxing the job could be, how devastating it was to lose a case you thought was a sure thing and how incredibly rewarding it was to get the conviction and know that a victim was getting justice.

Wolf marveled at how incredibly brave and strong the children who come forward to not only report a wrongdoing against them, but to face the culprit which takes an indescribable amount of courage.

Wolf received the best piece of advice in 2002 when a mentor told him to find levity in the job because if you take it as seriously as others think you should, you will not last long.

Now, 23 years later, Wolf has found that advice to be the absolute truth. He takes a yearly vacation to Disney World to recharge and get away from the more difficult aspects of his job.

Prosecuting criminals who target children is not the only way that Wolf aids the community. He is also a Sensei, teaching free Karate classes in Fairfield and Teague through Wolf Pack Karate. More information on that is available on their Facebook page.

Andrew Wolf has spent years fighting for the children who have been taken advantage of, giving them a powerful voice, and sending a message to all who have caused a child harm.

You do not want to be the one sitting in the defendant’s chair against ADA Wolf.

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