A Father Tracked His Son’s Stolen Truck by GPS. The Man Who Allegedly Killed Him Should Have Been in Prison.

On the afternoon of Saturday, June 6, 2026, a teenager was pumping gas into his family’s blue Chevrolet Silverado at a north Houston station when a man approached, asked questions about the truck, pulled a gun, and drove off in it. The boy called his father. Louis Erebia, 56 — a husband of 22 years, a father of five, a grandfather of three, and a North Shore Little League coach — opened a GPS app, watched the stolen truck moving across the map in real time, and went after it with a family friend.

They caught up to the Silverado near Airline Drive and the North Loop. The vehicles collided, disabling the truck. Two suspects bailed out and ran toward a Chevron station. As Erebia chased them, according to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, the man allegedly produced a firearm and opened fire — striking Erebia and the friend. Family members say Erebia died shielding the others from the gunfire. He was pronounced dead at a hospital. The friend survived.

The man charged with his murder is London Hogan Sr., 37. He has a Harris County rap sheet stretching back roughly two decades. He was on five-year felony probation for choking a household member — and he had already violated that probation with an out-of-state felony arrest. The system did not send him to prison. It gave him 30 days in jail and let him go. Hogan is presumed innocent of the new charges, which remain allegations. What is not in dispute is that he was free to be at that gas station at all.

• ~20 years — the span of London Hogan Sr.'s prior Harris County record — burglary, drug possession, felon in possession of a weapon, unauthorized use of a vehicle, and a 2023 assault by impeding breath · Source: ABC13 Houston, FOX 26 Houston
• 30 days — the jail time Hogan served for violating his 5-year felony probation with a January 2025 out-of-state drug-smuggling arrest — instead of revocation · Source: ABC13 Houston
• 3 charges — murder, aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon, and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon now filed against Hogan, 37, in the death of Louis Erebia, 56 · Source: KPRC 2, Harris County Sheriff's Office

The Harris County Sheriff’s Office says the chain of events began around 2 p.m. on June 6 in the 11800 block of Tidwell Road in north Houston. A young man — Erebia’s son — was fueling the family’s blue Chevrolet Silverado when a stranger walked up, asked questions about the truck, then drew a handgun and stole it at gunpoint. It was a textbook carjacking, captured in part on a nearby Metro bus surveillance camera; a stray round even struck a transit employee’s vehicle, though she was unhurt.

Erebia did what a generation of car owners now does instinctively: he pulled up a GPS app showing the truck’s real-time location and followed the moving dot. With a family friend, he tracked the Silverado roughly across town to the area of Airline Drive and Interstate 610. What began as a recovery ended in a collision — the pursuit vehicle and the stolen truck crashed, disabling the Silverado near the North Loop. Two people, a man and a woman, ran from the wreck toward a Chevron station. Erebia gave chase.

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During the foot pursuit, according to the sheriff’s office, the male suspect turned and fired. “The male suspect had produced a firearm, discharging the firearm, and the victims sustained a gunshot wound,” Detective Sergio Torres told reporters. Both Erebia and his friend were hit. Erebia was rushed to a hospital, where he died of his injuries. The friend — a younger man — was struck in the lower back, hospitalized, and is expected to survive. Family members and witnesses say Erebia put himself between the gunfire and the others, dying, as relatives told local stations, as a “human shield.”

This was not a stranger’s tragedy to the people of north Houston. Erebia had spent years on the diamonds of North Shore Little League — coaching children, dragging fields, helping families — and serving at his church. His family described a man who, in their words, “died doing exactly what he did every day of his life: protecting others.” The arithmetic of his death is brutally simple: a stolen truck, a tracking app, and a man with a gun who, by the record, should not have been on the street.

“Louis died doing exactly what he did every day of his life — protecting others.”

Amber Burrough, Erebia family member · paraphrased from public statement

London Hogan Sr., 37, is not a first-time offender. Court records reviewed by ABC13 and FOX 26 describe a Harris County criminal history “dating back decades”: a 2009 burglary; drug-possession cases in 2015, 2016, and 2024; a 2020 charge of being a felon in possession of a weapon; a 2020 charge of unauthorized use of a vehicle; and, on November 12, 2023, an assault on a family or household member by impeding breath or circulation — the felony Texas calls strangulation. That last case is the one that mattered most.

On March 27, 2024, Hogan was placed on five years of felony deferred-adjudication probation for the strangulation charge — a status that, in Texas, keeps a defendant out of prison and off a conviction record so long as he complies with the terms. He did not comply. In January 2025 he was arrested in Louisiana on drug-possession charges and accused of planning to smuggle the drugs into a correctional facility — a textbook probation violation that, on its face, exposed him to the full prison term he had been spared.

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Here is where the justice system made its choice. Faced with a documented probation violation — an out-of-state felony arrest by a man already on probation for choking a partner — the court did not revoke Hogan’s probation and send him to prison. Instead, according to ABC13, Harris County District Judge Te’iva Bell (D)of the 339th District Court sentenced him to 30 days in jail and returned him to probation. Thirty days. Then he was free again — free for the seventeen months that led to a gas station on Tidwell Road.

Erebia’s family has not been quiet about the math. “This should have never happened,” his sister-in-law Amber Burrough told ABC13. “Let’s be clear. Look at the man’s rap sheet.” Victim advocates and relatives called the killing a “cataclysmic failure” of the system — a repeat violent offender with a roughly twenty-year record, a recent multi-state felony violation, and a live probation case, left on the street to allegedly carjack a teenager and kill the boy’s father. The charges against Hogan are allegations and he is presumed innocent. The decision to keep him free is a matter of record.

“This should have never happened. Let’s be clear. Look at the man’s rap sheet.”

Amber Burrough, Louis Erebia's sister-in-law · to ABC13 Houston

Erebia’s death sits inside a recurring American story: a citizen, failed by a slow or unwilling court system, takes recovery into his own hands — and pays for it. The GPS pin and the AirTag have turned theft victims into trackers, and the results are increasingly fatal. In San Antonio in March 2026, a man tracked his stolen truck by Apple AirTag, confronted the alleged thief, and shot him dead. Different city, different outcome, same root: when people no longer trust the system to recover their property or hold offenders, they go themselves.

Law enforcement’s advice in every one of these cases is the same — call police, do not pursue. It is sound advice. But it lands hollow with families who watched the same system give a strangulation defendant 30 days for a felony probation violation. The deterrent that was supposed to keep London Hogan Sr. off the street failed long before Louis Erebia ever opened a tracking app. The vigilante risk and the soft-sentence problem are two halves of the same broken trust.

Five children lost a father. Three grandchildren lost a grandfather. A Little League lost its coach, and a wife of 22 years lost her husband. The cost of a justice system’s leniency is rarely abstract; here it has names and ages. Deferred adjudication and short jail stints for repeat offenders are sold as “second chances.” The hard editorial point is that a second chance handed to a man who has already cycled through burglary, drugs, illegal weapons, vehicle theft, and the strangulation of a partner is not mercy — it is a wager placed with someone else’s life.

London Hogan Sr. is entitled to the presumption of innocence on the new charges, and a jury will weigh them. But the decision that put him back on the street — 30 days for a felony probation violation instead of the prison term the violation invited — was made in a courtroom, on the record, by officials Houston voters elected. When the next family asks why a known repeat offender was free, the answer should not have to be read off a rap sheet at a funeral.

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Last updated June 9, 2026