When a crippling winter storm was bearing down on Texas last year, Connie Mae Richey’s family got a few extra oxygen tanks and stocked up on medicine just in case the lights went out. They had no reason to think the family matriarch was in mortal danger. Not in Texas of all places.

As temperatures began plunging, Gov. Greg Abbott assured anxious residents that the energy capital of the United States had “the ability to ensure that we do not run out of power.”

Not two days later millions were shivering at home in the dark after fuel shortages shuttered power plants and triggered outages all over the Lone Star State. Less than a week after that Connie Mae Richey was gone.

She didn’t die the way she had wished — at home surrounded by her family — but instead grimacing in pain at the hospital, mostly alone, after her urinary catheter froze inside a house where temperatures had fallen into the single digits.

The trauma of watching Richey wail day and night was bad enough for her family. Then came the news from Wall Street: the natural gas industry was reporting record profits for the week of the storm, thanks to prices that had gone up 10,000 percent. Anyone who could get natural gas to market made a killing.

“This week is like hitting the jackpot,” bragged natural gas company Comstock Resources, in a Feb. 17, 2021 earnings call. That was the same day paramedics were carting off Connie Mae; she died two days later.

How was this possible? A few big companies got even richer while hundreds died, many of them from hypothermia, in their own beds?

“We learned it was all over money,” said Frank Meza, Connie’s son-in-law. “And greed over life.”

Protecting the Greed tells in unflinching detall how tearing down energy regulations and ignoring years of warnings about the need to prepare the grid for winter sparked a humanitarian crisis and killed over 700 Texans, including Connie Mae Richey.