As she prepared to vacate the post she has held 16 years, Bexar County District Attorney Susan Reed stared out of a window in her downtown office.

“Life has no certainties,” she said, her gaze back on a reporter when asked about prior portrayals that she was unbeatable in elections, a winning streak that ended with her November loss to incoming DA Nico LaHood.

What’s certain, in her mind, is that during her run as the county’s longest-serving district attorney, she was tough on crime, modernized the office, increased cooperation with federal counterparts, helped with the legal framework to build important county venues and was notably involved in civic activities like Fiesta.

She sent killers, rapists and other violent offenders to prison or the death chamber, targeted gang members with injunctions, imposed mandatory blood draws on drunken-driving suspects who refused breath tests and went after scammers who targeted the elderly.

Among her feats were creating the Family Justice Center — a one-stop shop for victims of domestic violence — taking down longtime Sheriff Ralph Lopez during a corruption investigation and rooting out graft at City Hall and a local college district.

“I’ve done a lot of things on the criminal side, and I think I’ve been a champion within our justice system with relation to victims’ rights,” Reed said. “On the civil side, I represented the county civilly, and so we built the AT&T Center and the Tobin Center (for Performing Arts). I spearheaded a lot of the legal work in relation to all of that, in creating the public-private partnerships that are presently being utilized.”

It’s a legacy that made the Republican one of San Antonio’s most notable women, and one of the more difficult politicians to beat.

She also weathered challenges that included the death of her parents and her husband, a moped crash that nearly took her life, a stolen airplane ticket voucher scandal that rocked the courthouse and criticism in controversial cases, including her steadfast refusal to appoint a special prosecutor to review claims that an innocent man was wrongly put to death.

Reed also has been accused of favoritism in prosecutions, an issue that has dogged her for years, and which local politicos viewed as her Achilles heel.

While defending her record, she has angered bankers, made other politicians fear her, got crossways with a county auditor and the defense bar and turned the spotlight on Child Protective Services for failing victims of child abuse.

Her law-and-order persona earned her labels from area publications, including “The Toughest Woman in San Antonio” and “The Most Feared Woman in Town.”

“She’s somebody who gave her life seeking justice to those who were victimized by crime and she was very tough at doing it,” said lawyer Scott Simpson, who worked in the DA’s office 15 years, 11 of them under Reed.

“As district attorney, you always try to emphasize that you’re tough on crime, but there’s much more to that,” said Michael Bernard, who was Reed’s second-in-command until he left in 2005 to become city attorney. “The hard part of that is doing justice that doesn’t always take the hard line. She did that as well. She was very practical. If a case deserved leniency, she’d recommend leniency, or if it deserved dismissal, she’d recommend that, too.”

No-nonsense reputation

Reed, 64, grew up in Alamo Heights and attended the University of Texas, where she majored in economics and then went to law school, finishing in two years instead of the usual three.

She graduated in 1974 and married classmate Robert Reed. Susan Reed was an assistant Bexar district attorney from 1974 until early 1982. She then went into private practice for four years, and in 1987, became the first woman elected to a criminal district court judgeship. She held the post for 12 years.

“In a trial, as a judge, she was fair to both sides,” defense lawyer Alan Brown said. “Most judges ruled for the state. She didn’t do that. She was good for the defense in terms of her rulings, even if they were unpopular.”

She became the first woman elected as district attorney in 1998, bringing a reputation of no nonsense to the job.

More than simply tough, Reed pushed the envelope with creative cases that bewildered some lawyers but resonated favorably with the public.

They included public nuisance laws to go after gang members with injunctions that barred them from even assembling in designated exclusion zones.

One often-cited case involved an abusive husband who shot his wife and a police officer. Reed had the shooter’s mother indicted on a manslaughter charge because Reed believed the woman set the killings in motion when, ignoring her son’s violent streak, she called him at work to say that his wife was trying to leave him. The mother pleaded guilty, and lawyers remember other women agreeing with Reed’s actions.

In another case, Reed prosecuted San Antonio con man Brad Farley, who bilked $9 million from several elderly investors by using their certificates of deposit as collateral to take out loans without their knowledge, and defaulting. Reed used the state’s forfeiture law to seize the $9 million from six banks. The banks protested Reed’s actions, arguing the investors should take the loss instead.

“A lot of retired people got their money back because Susan Reed had the audacity and the courage and the nerve to protect the individual,” victim Joyce Hendrix of Round Rock said at the time.

Changing the office

Reed listed a number of accomplishments during her term, including creating a unit to help prosecute crimes against the elderly, and a white-collar unit that took many cases federal authorities wouldn’t because their attention focused on counter-terrorism in the wake of 9/11.

Her white-collar unit brought bribery charges against board members of the Alamo Community College District and two former city councilmen accused of milking bribes from contractors seeking government business.

She also prosecuted much of the adult family of Jovonie Ochoa, who became Texas’ poster boy for child abuse. The 4-year-old was declared dead shortly after his frail body arrived at a hospital on Christmas Day in 2003. He was found to have been beaten, bound with duct tape and starved to death.

The case drew a call for reform of CPS from Reed and others over allegations that Ochoa could have been saved had his case not fallen through the cracks.

“People have asked me, 'What is your biggest case?’” Reed said. “I have always felt that delineating something like that kind of hurts victims across the board, because to everybody who comes down here, their case is the biggest case.”

The Bexar DA’s office is one of the busiest in the state, handling some 60,000 cases a year. Reed oversaw a staff of nearly 400, with 170 of them lawyers.

“It’s like herding a bunch of cats — 170 lawyers,” Reed said, laughing. “You want something to keep you up at night? They’re all doing things in your name. And then what they do is run up here once it backfires, and they say, 'Let me tell you what’s happening. How do we fix this?’”

Community leader

“She managed the DA’s office as well as anyone can,” said state District Judge Raymond Angelini, who retired this month after 20 years on the bench. “It’s impossible to deal with everything perfectly, but I assure you she and her office won most of their cases.”

Others said she was pragmatic but strict and could be angered if prosecutors made what she believed to be the wrong call without consulting her first. And some said she had a businesslike approach that made her seem aloof.

Ex-prosecutor Simpson, who served under Reed and her predecessor, said Reed was “not pleasant to deal with. She didn’t really have conversations with you. She would call you in and tell you what she wanted to tell you and then you were dismissed.”

Reed endured personal tribulation. A year after becoming DA, Reed lost her father. Six months later, her mother died. She also survived her own close call in a moped accident while vacationing in Hawaii in 2002, and in 2003, her husband of 29 years died of a heart attack.

“It was very difficult, and it’s compounded by doing it in the public eye,” Reed said. “All of that happened in a not-so-long period of time, but the outpouring of the community was huge for me and meant a lot.”

She sometimes immersed herself in her work or civic engagements to help cope. Reed took some time off to grieve her husband’s death with their son, Travis, but attended a Rey Feo fundraiser that Robert, a former Fiesta Commission president, had intended to support.

Reed also was active in the Fiesta Commission. She served on the executive committee and was senior vice president and on two Rey Feo courts.

Her civic role and job representing the county on civil matters are other aspects that earned her the admiration of some, like County Judge Nelson Wolff, who lauded Reed for helping develop and build the AT&T and Tobin centers and other important county projects.

“I will remember her more for just her job as criminal district attorney,” Wolff said. “She made an impact beyond the office she held. She will have a good legacy dealing with the civic community.”

Missteps cost her

But it was her position within the criminal justice system that sometimes made Reed a target for criticism. Lawyers, both Democrat and Republican, said she had a pattern of missteps that nearly cost her the election in 2010 and helped LaHood, on his second attempt, defeat her in November.

They cite several publicized examples, including:

Her refusal to appoint a special prosecutor to review claims that Ruben Cantu was wrongly executed in 1993 after an eyewitness reportedly recanted. The decision raised eyebrows because Reed, as a judge, had denied one of Cantu’s appeals and set his execution date. A 19-month investigation by her office found Cantu was not wrongly sent to the death chamber.

The revelation that Reed was one of several officials who bought Southwest Airlines ticket vouchers stolen by a court bailiff’s wife and sold at the courthouse. Reed’s driver at the time bought several, including some for Reed and others, but he was later acquitted in a federal trial.

Allegations that she showed favoritism in alleged drunken-driving incidents involving of the son of state Rep. Carlos Uresti and a matter in which a friend of Reed’s son called her in 2008 after the friend was found to have a gun at the airport. Reed made a call to the magistrate's office, resulting in a reduced bond for the man and his quick release from jail.

Reed blames her election loss on the nearly $2 million war chest of LaHood, saying it helped him distort her record in areas such as child-abuse prosecutions.

“When you have massive amounts of money … it just clouds everything and there’s no way to deal with it,” Reed said.

But Reed said she would not change anything she did during as DA. She leaves office on Wednesday.

As for her future, she has been rumored to seek an appointment to a vacant seat at the 4th Court of Appeals, but she would not say if another judgeship or higher office is in her cards.

“You know, who knows?” she said. “I’m not focused on anything other than taking care of myself and de-stressing and doing some things that I want to do now that I have time to commit to. I love photography and I’ll do that. I love cooking and I’ll do that. I’m just going to take care of me for a while. I think I’ve given enough, don’t you?”

gcontreras@express-news.net