Shiner is a place you can raise your cattle and chickens under the hot Texas sun, cool off with a bottle from the Lone Star State's oldest independent brewery, then go to bed knowing all your neighbors and believing that you'll be safe.
But a few days ago, one of its trademark ranches turned into a crime scene.
That's when a father spotted a man sexually assaulting his 5-year-old daughter, then beat the alleged abuser to death.
In a community that prides itself as being peaceful, a place where things like this just don't happen, there is a sweeping consensus that justice was served.
"Any father would have done that," Michael James Veit, whose son graduated with the father from Shiner High School in 2007 and who now lives across the road from the ranch where the killing took place, said Thursday. "Everybody is saying the father is justified."
Father kills man abusing daughter
According to the Lavaca County Sheriff's Office, the 23-year-old father and his family were enjoying a barbecue last Saturday at their ranch on Shiner's outskirts where they keep horses and chickens.
His young daughter had gone off toward the barn, to feed the chickens, the child's grandfather -- who isn't being named, to protect the identity of his granddaughter -- told CNN affiliates KSAT and KPRC.
Then her father heard screaming and ran.
He found a 47-year-old man in the act of sexually abusing his daughter, according to Sheriff Mica Harmon.
The father stopped the alleged abuser, then pounded him repeatedly in the head.
"I jumped the fence and saw the man on the ground," the grandfather said of what he first saw. "At that point, I didn't know if he was dead or not."
