Augustine name resonates but for wrong reasons

By Brian Eckhouse

Monday, July 28, 2008 | 2 a.m.

There was a time in Dallas Augustine’s life when she showed little interest in her mother’s doings. That was clear about a decade ago, when she left home to attend San Diego State University, even as her mother, Kathy Augustine, was a state senator serving the community northeast of the Stratosphere.

Daughter and mother didn’t get along.

“Just two strong personalities clashing,” Dallas Augustine would say later. Mom was a “very controlling woman ... who wanted things done her way.”

The daughter lived outside Nevada for about 10 years. As Kathy Augustine moved up the state’s political ranks, from assemblywoman to state senator to state controller with her eyes on the state treasurer’s office, Dallas Augustine grew up as a teenager, left home for college and then moved around in Southern California and Arizona. She never got her college degree, working instead in various retail jobs, including at grocery stores in Orange County and at a Lowe’s home improvement store in Phoenix.

At some point Dallas Augustine and her mother started to talk again. There was a sense of reconciliation. But still, they remained in different states.

She didn’t move back, for instance, when her mother was impeached and convicted in late 2004 for using her controller’s office for political purposes. Kathy Augustine was censured by the Nevada Senate, where she had served, but wasn’t removed from office.

Two summers ago at her home in Reno, Kathy Augustine was poisoned with succinylcholine, a paralyzing drug whose effects a Reno anesthesiologist described to jurors as “sheer terror, worse than any Stephen King novel.” Augustine’s husband, Chaz Higgs, was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison with the possibility of parole.

And that’s when Dallas Augustine returned to the family home in Las Vegas.

And moved into her mother’s master bedroom.

And, now, has turned the dining room into a campaign office.

Dallas Augustine is running for the assembly seat held by her mother in 1993 and 1994. It is a strange full circle — a winding, contorted one at that — for the 28-year-old.

She remembers being a youngster, walking house to house with her political mom and hanging campaign material on doorknobs. But it was a mechanical exercise for the young girl, tagging along with Mom. As she grew older, she was never able to articulate her mother’s political values. She didn’t much care.

She remembers one law her mother pushed: fining Nevada newcomers who don’t get Nevada license plates within 30 days of moving here.

But Dallas Augustine doesn’t remember much else. Politics wasn’t discussed often at dinner.

Now, she says, she gets it. She gets what her mom was doing.

“I picked up things I didn’t understand then,” she says, “but I do now.”

And she’s becoming a politician.

Touring her neighborhood in a shimmering black 2008 Lincoln Navigator (“Mom took care of me,” she says), Augustine talks about blight, about gangs, about crime, about tagging and stores closing early, or not opening at all, and about children not focused on school because they’re afraid to walk there.

It’s the environment of her own neighborhood, she says, that is informing her politics.

Helping to restore this community, what many consider Old Vegas, to its vintage self is a top priority for Augustine.

But all the best campaigning in the world might not get her elected. She lives in an overwhelmingly Democratic district, and is running against an incumbent no less, James Ohrenschall.

Recognition of the Augustine name may not prove that helpful, says conservative blogger Chuck Muth, a former executive director of the state Republican Party.

“It’s been so long since Kathy represented that district ... that (Dallas) would have to reintroduce her mother to the district,” Muth says. “People probably know the name Kathy Augustine, but as the woman who was murdered by her husband.”

Dallas Augustine struggles with her mother’s death. She vents her anger by working out and by training in martial arts. Her punches, slashes and kicks are precise and purposed.

There’s little left at home to remind the daughter of her mother’s life. Many of the furnishings and decor items, including a furniture set and the bed Kathy Augustine was poisoned in, were sold at an estate sale.

In the living room, there’s a picture of Kathy Augustine wearing a T-shirt with her own name on it.

There’s little else in the home that harks back to her.

Dallas Augustine may be back home, but she’s moving forward on her own.

“One of our tag lines is, ‘Dallas Augustine, a new legacy,’ ” the candidate says.