Regina Ann Santos-Aviles served as regional district director for U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales. She died Sept. 14 after setting herself on fire.
Regina Santos-Aviles LinkedIn
Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Republican from San Antonio, is running for a fourth term representing Texas’ 23d Congressional District. Revelations that he had an affair with a female staffer who later killed herself have unsettled his re-election campaign.
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Adrian Aviles, shown in a Zoom interview with the San Antonio Express-News, calls Rep. Tony Gonzales “a predator.” The congressman had an affair with Aviles’ wife, Regina Ann Santos-Aviles, who later committed suicide.
Screen Grab/San Antonio Express-News
The Uvalde home where Regina Ann Santos-Aviles, 35, set herself on fire on Sept. 13, 2025. She died the next day at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.
STAFF/Nancy M. Preyor-Johnson
In the spring of 2024, U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales was in the midst of a bruising primary campaign, fighting to hang onto his congressional seat. But politics was not on his mind when he began trading text messages with a staff member at 12:15 a.m. on May 9.
“Send me a sexy pic,” he texted Regina Ann Santos-Aviles, then director of his regional district office in Uvalde, according to messages obtained by the San Antonio Express-News.
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Santos-Aviles replied that she’d had a rough week and “you don’t really want a hot picture of me.”
“Yes I do,” Gonzales texted, adding, “Hurry.”
READ MORE: Husband of Tony Gonzales aide breaks silence about affair
“No, I just don’t like taking pictures of myself,” Santos-Aviles responded a few minutes later.
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Gonzales persisted: “I’m just such a visual person.”
The congressman went on to ask Santos-Aviles about her favorite sexual positions and to fantasize about having sex with her. Twice, she told Gonzales he was going “too far.” But at his urging, the two made plans to meet up two days later, when he would be campaigning in the Uvalde area.
“Will be lots of fun,” Gonzales texted, adding that they should rendezvous at the agreed-on place “at check-in time.”
The third-term Republican congressman, a married father of six, pursued a romantic relationship with Santos-Aviles despite U.S. House ethics rules that bar lawmakers from engaging in sexual liaisons with staff members, the message chain shows. Santos-Aviles, 35, killed herself in September by setting herself on fire. She was married and the mother of an 8-year-old boy.
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Adrian Aviles, her widower, provided the May 2024 texts to the Express-News, which authenticated them.
READ MORE: Gonzales affair with staffer sparked House ethics probe
A separate set of texts from a different source show that on two occasions that same month, Gonzales and Santos-Aviles arranged to spend time together in a vacation cabin in the Hill Country owned by the family of a Gonzales staff member. The cabin is in Concan, a resort town along the Frio River 25 miles northeast of Uvalde.
Gonzales did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
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News reports on the affair between Gonzales and Santos-Aviles have roiled this year’s Republican primary in Texas’ 23rd Congressional District. Gonzales, 45, faces, among other challengers, Brandon Herrera, a firearms manufacturer and YouTube personality who nearly unseated him in 2024.
In response to the furor, Gonzales has accused Aviles of trying to “blackmail” him. Aviles’ lawyer, Robert “Bobby” Barrera of San Antonio, acknowledges that he tried for months without success to negotiate a confidential settlement with the congressman over the affair and Santos-Aviles’ death.
TIMELINE: What we know about Tony Gonzales’ affair with Regina Ann Santos-Aviles
The Express-News was the first news organization to uncover documentary evidence of a relationship. The newspaper on Feb. 16 published an image of a text in which Santos-Aviles told a colleague she’d had an “affair with our boss.” The message was from April 2025.
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The string of newly obtained texts from 2024 were extracted from Santos-Aviles’ smartphone by a digital forensics firm.
Barrera said he paid Exhibit A Computer Forensics to retrieve the data in anticipation of using it in civil litigation against Gonzales. The San Antonio-based company employs advanced software to capture the contents of electronic communications, along with phone numbers and timestamps. Its clients include law firms and law enforcement agencies.
Aviles shared with the Express-News 34 texts sent between 12:15 a.m. and 1:09 a.m. Central Standard Time on May 9, 2024. He said he had withheld other texts because they were even more graphic and he did not want his son to see them.
Barrera described the unreleased texts “as sexually grotesque.”
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‘This is going too far’
The message chain made available by Aviles begins with Gonzales asking Santos-Aviles for “a sexy pic.”
Seven seconds later, he sends a message in which the text field is empty — an indication the transmission was a photo or video.
Santos-Aviles replies at 12:19 a.m.: “I swear my life has been a Telenovela for the past seven days. You don’t really want a hot picture of me”
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Gonzales says he does. After a break, the exchange resumes. At 12:48, Gonzales texts: “Favorite position”
“Yours first?” Santos-Aviles replies.
“on top pinning your legs,” Gonzales writes.
“This is going too far boss,” she replies.
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Gonzales persists, asking: “What do you like”
He follows up with a description of a sex act.
“never,” she responds.
“This is too far Tony,” she texts a minute later.
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‘A cute place’
About 13 minutes later, the conversation shifts from sexual banter to arranging a private meeting.
“Do you want to spend Saturday together,” Gonzales asks at 1:07 a.m.
“Yeah we can find us a cute place tomorrow,” Santos-Aviles replies.
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“Will be lots of fun,” Gonzales texts. “I say let’s meet there at check in time”
Aviles and Barrera declined to say whether they had provided or planned to provide the messages to Hererra’s campaign or the Office of Congressional Conduct, which enforces congressional ethics rules and which began investigating the affair several months ago.
Aviles asserted that he was not releasing the messages as part of a legal strategy. He said he was acting in response to Gonzales’ accusation of blackmail, which he said he interpreted as suggesting that he had fabricated evidence of an affair.
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“I’m releasing them now because I don’t want to be called a liar and don’t want her to be called a liar,” Aviles said. “I also want to show proof to everybody the type of person that he is. He’s a predator. He took advantage of a very vulnerable woman.”
Hill Country cabin
The texts about the vacation cabin in Concan were provided by a former staffer whose family owns the rental property. They indicate that Santos-Aviles arranged for Gonzales to have access to the cabin on May 11, 2024, and again on May 20. Text messages and social media posts place Gonzales in Concan on both dates. At the time, he and Herrera were hustling for votes in a close primary runoff campaign.
The former staffer said Gonzales and Santos-Aviles spent several hours together in the cabin on both dates.
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He shared a May 7 text from Santos-Aviles in which she asked: “Hey … can you send me photos of the places in Concan for the boss? He wants to see them.”
On the afternoon of May 11, Gonzales sent the staffer a text thanking him for the use of the cabin. “Appreciate today, I’m back on the road,” he wrote. “Cleaned up, minus a dirty towel. Everything turned off.”
Other texts from Santos-Aviles to the former staffer show her arranging for Gonzales to use the cabin on May 20, 2024, after a fundraiser.
That evening, the staffer texted Gonzales asking, “Do you need anything over there at the cabin?”
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Gonzales replied, “I’m all set. Just wanted to get some rest before getting on the road.”
He eked out a victory over Herrera in that year’s May 28 runoff, winning by 324 votes out of nearly 30,000 cast.
‘Black-sheeped’
Santos-Aviles, a Uvalde native, did not have a college degree, her husband said. She got her start as finance manager for the Uvalde County Fairplex and later served as executive director of the Uvalde County Chamber of Commerce before joining Gonzales’ staff in 2021.
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Aviles said he discovered the affair on the evening of May 31, 2024, when he returned home from a jiu-jitsu class to find his wife texting with Gonzales. When he confronted her, he said she replied: “You’re not going to like what you see.”
Two days later, he used his wife’s phone to send a group text to Gonzales and seven members of his district staff. He identified himself as “Reginas (sic) soon to be ex husband” and said he had learned from texts and pictures on her phone “that she’s been having an affair on me with your boss Tony Gonzales for some time now.”
Aviles and the former Gonzales staffer said Santos-Aviles was treated differently from that point on. She no longer was invited to accompany Gonzales to meetings in the district, and appointments she had arranged for him were canceled, they said. Aviles said the congressman and his staff “black-sheeped” her to try to make her quit.
Santos-Aviles and her husband separated. Aviles and the former staffer recalled that she grew despondent. In August 2025, Uvalde police went to her house on a welfare check after Aviles reported that she appeared suicidal, records show. The responding officer wrote in an incident report that he found no indication she intended to harm herself.
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On the evening of Sept. 13, first responders rushed to Santos-Aviles’ home after receiving a call about “an individual who was on fire.” She had “doused herself in gasoline” and set herself aflame, according to a fire department report. She was taken to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where she died the next day.
The Bexar County Medical Examiner ruled the death a suicide by self-immolation. Police said they found no evidence of foul play.
Ethics inquiry
Barrera said he believes her husband’s discovery of the affair, combined with what he described as workplace ostracism, “put into place a series of events” that led to Santos-Aviles’ emotional decline and suicide.
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Barrera said Aviles retained him to explore potential claims under the 1995 Congressional Accountability Act, which brought Congress under the same anti-discrimination and workplace safety laws that apply to other government agencies and private employers. The act allows congressional staffers to pursue claims against House members and senators for harassment, retaliation and other violations of employment law.
Even though Santos-Aviles did not file a complaint against Gonzales before her death, Barrera said Aviles could bring a workplace harassment or wrongful death claim against the congressman as his late wife’s “legal representative.” A 2018 update makes members of Congress personally liable for violations of the accountability act.
Media reports about the affair caused Gonzales to come under scrutiny by a congressional ethics watchdog last fall, the Express-News reported last week.
As part of its inquiry, the Office of Congressional Conduct (OCC) sent Aviles a letter in November requesting text messages, emails and other communications related to the relationship. The letter cited a statutory deadline of 45 days. Barrera said he did not submit any materials before the deadline.
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Depending on what the staff inquiry finds, the agency could refer the matter to the House Ethics Committee, which can recommend disciplinary action against a member by the full House. It is unclear whether the OCC has concluded its investigation. House rules prohibit the agency from making a referral within the 60 days preceding an election, but it could do so immediately after the March 3 GOP primary.
Staff Writer Bayliss Wagner contributed to this report.