I was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. After graduating from Jefferson High School in 1988, several of my friends and I decided to serve our country by joining the military. Although most of my friends joined either the Army or the Navy, I joined the United States Air Force. After being honorably discharged from the Air Force, I enrolled at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) from where I received a bachelor’s degree in accounting. Although my ultimate goal was to become a business attorney, I wanted real world business experience before attending law school.

So, after graduating from UTEP and becoming a Texas certified public accountant, I gained valuable business experience while working as an auditor for two national public accounting firms, as a business analyst for a publicly traded company, and as a chief financial officer for a local service company. After working in the accounting and finance field for over five years, my wife Patricia and I left El Paso and moved to Ithaca, New York where I attended one of the nation’s top law schools, Cornell Law School.