AUSTIN, Tex. — Steve Mostyn, a Texas trial lawyer and one of the nation’s leading Democratic donors, who spent a fortune in a long effort to turn his reliably red home state blue, died on Wednesday at his home in Houston. He was 46.
The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences ruled the death a suicide resulting from a gunshot wound to the head. His wife and fellow lawyer, Amber Mostyn, said his death had come after a “sudden onset and battle with a mental health issue.”
The death jolted Texas politicians in both parties and left Democrats grieving the loss of a friend and wealthy patron who had been at the center of the party’s struggle to wrest power from Republicans. Texas Democrats have not won a statewide political office since 1994.
“Texas has lost one of its giants for justice and one of its most important voices for those without the ability or means to fight for themselves,” said Wendy Davis, a former Democratic state senator who ran for governor there in 2014, losing to Greg Abbott, a Republican and the current governor.
The Mostyns and their law firm’s political action committee donated nearly $10 million to state races during the 2014 election cycle but they were also major players at the national level. They gave nearly $3.5 million to candidates for federal office in the 2016 election, making them the 64th-largest donors in the country, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
“There is no Democratic donor that has come close to the amount that the Mostyns have given over the past decade to political candidates,” Mr. McDonald said.
The Mostyn Map
John Steven Mostyn was born in Perth, Australia, on March 25, 1971, the son of George and Glenda Jean Mostyn. His father was in the oil industry and his mother was an educator. At some point they moved to Whitehouse, a small East Texas town near Tyler, where Mr. Mostyn graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1994 and the South Texas College of Law in 1996.
He founded Mostyn Law in Houston, and built a reputation as one of the state’s power lawyers by building a fortune through homeowner suits against insurance companies after hurricanes and other storms.
Since inaugural publication we have rectified Mr. Mostyn’s chart to 03 Taurus, that in the Hyperion Symbols gets the image of “Man in search of the fabled Golconda” located in Hyderbad India. We feel that this is appropriate for him because it shows his pursuit of higher goals and the dichotomy within him of living up to them. Alas most of the videos on Golconda are in Hindi. Here is one.
It is not the fort itself that makes the area so famous, but the reason it was built: diamond mining. Long before there was the South African mines, there was Golconda. A The diamonds Golconda (Hyderabad) and then cut, polished, evaluated and sold making Golconda a premier diamond trading center in the world until the end of the 19th century. Many famous diamonds came out of Golconda including the Sancy and the Koh-i-noor.
With only one conjunction, Mr. Mostyn is a Splash Temperament Type, that also fits in with his humanistic bias. His chart also has three out of the total five possible oppositions that could occur and so the one conjunction Uranus in the Seventh and Jupiter in the Eighth takes on a heavy bias, showing his industrious desire to capitalize on natural destruction (Neptune rules waters, monsoons, hurricanes and earthquakes). This pair amazingly does not have an opposition also giving it great focus.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, Mitch, 16; and a daughter, Ava, 10.
