Video of Rep. Sylvia Garcia breaking down at committee hearing goes viral

Sylvia Garcia has been in the public eye for decades, but rarely has the first-term congresswoman from Houston displayed the kind of raw emotion that viewers around the country observed when a video of her testimony at a committee hearing went viral.

Garcia, a Democrat who previously served as a state senator, Harris County commissioner, municipal court chief judge and Houston city controller, had to briefly stop speaking Tuesday while talking about the case of David Ritcheson, a Houstonian who committed suicide at age 18 in 2007. A year earlier, Ritcheson, who was Hispanic, was assaulted, tortured and sodomized by white supremacists who taunted him with racial slurs.

In an interview, Garcia said she grew emotional at the hearing because "it's appalling to think about what this young man went through, beaten to a pulp just for being a Mexican-American Latino, and here we are 12 years later still dealing with the same issues of hate, which is growing in the country. This is unacceptable. We should be getting better at this, not worse."