A Legacy of Evil
Once San Diego was home to Texas’ most ruthless dynasty. Now, in the town of the Parrs corrupted, a savage gang rape has resurrected the old ghosts of lawlessness, fear, and betrayal.
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For San Diego, it was a new beginning, though the new world was not so different from the old one. Hispanics controlled their destiny, but it was rarely a destiny of openness and reform—the lessons of the Parrs had been learned too well. The town remained one of the poorest in Texas, so controlling the vote (and in turn the jobs) remained the consuming passion as power passed from the Carrillos to the Urestis to the Garcias. Meanwhile a new evil has been introduced into the garden. Because of its location on one of the least-populated roads from the border, San Diego was fast becoming a center for drug smuggling. An unusually large heroin problem developed, and townspeople joke that anyone with a flashy new car must be selling dope. Still, after a century, the Anglo had been driven out and with him the days when little boys were told not to bring taquitos to school or were rapped on the knuckles for speaking Spanish in class. At last San Diego could have the world it wanted, a world of its own making, in its own image—that so-often-dreamed-of paradise in the desert. The shame of San Diegoans felt at their decades of submission would be forgotten. A curtain was drawn against the outside world; few were tempted to look beyond it, and even fewer asked to be let inside.
News of the gang rape did not appear in local newspapers, although almost everyone in town knew what had happened by late Sunday. Many people assumed it was a neighborhood thing—not a good neighborhood at that—something best left alone. That this would not blow over was apparent by Monday morning, when San Diegoans awoke to find that someone had painted “Cut the balls off the rapist” on the town-square gazebo. When the Corpus Christi Caller Times broke the story on March 31, TV news trucks with satellite dishes began patrolling the streets. The cameras whirred, and the news that a nineteen-year-old mother of two had been raped by upward of twenty neighbors at an illegal cockfight in San Diego, Texas went out not just all over the country but all over the world.
Arrests came slowly. Few of the men who had been at the cockfight would even admit to being there, much less offer themselves up as witnesses to or participants in a gang rape. Eventually ten men, mostly in their twenties, and one juvenile were arrested: Ruben Vela, Roel Torres, Jose Carlos “Payo” Briones, and the fourteen-year-old boy were charged with sexual assault. Alex Bear, Corando Perez, Orlando Garza, Felipe Chew, and Roberto Garcia were charged with sexual assault and aggravated kidnapping. Roberto Perez faced a charge with sexual assault and aggravated kidnapping. Roberto Perez faced a charge of sexual assault and two charges of aggravated kidnapping. Isidro Soliz, whom law-enforcement officials say drove the car in which Linda Gaitan was taken to the cockfight, was charged with kidnapping. All but two were swiftly released on bond.
As news accounts of the crime increased in number and intensity, hate mail poured into San Diego, like the letter addressed to “Whomever might possibly care in the Police Department of San Diego, Texas.” A group of Banditos threatened to come to town and eliminate the rapists forever. While there were San Diegoans, mostly women, who were outraged by the crime, many followed their first instinct, which was to protect the town by downplaying the episode. There were people who asserted that this gang rape wasn’t as brutal as the 1983 gang rape of a woman in New Bedford, Massachusetts (it was more so), and they complained that rapes occur in Corpus Christi and Houston on wealthy American college campuses without receiving this much media coverage. Alfredo Cardenas, the editor and publisher of the weekly Duval County Picture, editorialized that regional and national news media “have raped this town in a fashion not too unsimilar to the gang rape itself.” The publicity had struck a nerve. People in San Diego did not want to endure the scrutiny and disapproval of outsiders again, specifically Anglos. They didn’t want to hear their assessments of illegal cockfights; they didn’t want to hear their analyses of the Mexican character. Most of all, they didn’t want another stain on the reputation of San Diego and Duval County.
In reality, the attack and the subsequent pressure from the outside world threatened to tear the heart out of the town. “We hurt for the girl,” people told me, “but we hurt for the families of the boys too.” The survival of every small town is predicated on accommodation, and certainly few want to be confronted with the sins of their husbands, sons, or brothers; it is a sad truth that rapes can and do happen everywhere, although this case is extreme. Still, if the crime was not unique to San Diego, the town’s response was firmly rooted in its very particular history. Pressed to turn on their own, townspeople recalled the agonies of the Parr days and found themselves paralyzed. The people would not speak out against one another, and in refusing to choose sides, they chose one: Linda Gaitan had no family in Sand Diego, her husband had some but little compared with the defendants. In a slow, insidious shift, the couple became outsiders in the place they had called home.
The accused were finely woven into the fabric of the town; news accounts frequently noted that nine out of ten of the suspects were related through either blood or marriage. Their network tapped into the town’s power structure via Roberto Garcia, a member of one of the oldest and most prosperous families in San Diego. A young man who picked up the extra money by mowing the lawns of his parents’ friends, he was, in the words of many, “the shyest, sweetest boy you’d ever want to meet.” His mother, who worked at the First State Bank, was a deeply loved member of the community. Less well loved but far more critical to the survival of San Diegoans was Roberto’s uncle Frank, who was a county judge and the president of the school board and therefore controls virtually all of the jobs in town. The Garcia faction has even been embroiled in political scandals, proof that the old days are far from gone in San Diego.
Other defendants had close ties to local government and law enforcement. Felipe Chew played on the county volleyball team; quite a few of the accused had put up campaign signs for the sheriff before election day. Ruben Vela’s mother worked as secretary in the sheriff’s office. Over and over again townspeople insisted to visiting reporters that these were good boys from good families. “I don’t think these guys were bad guys,” police chief Oscar Hughes told the Houston Post. “I just don’t know what happened.”
In truth, San Diego had been turning a blind eye to these young men for years. The majority of these good boys from good families had had problems with the law. Men like Alex Bear and Ruben Vela had served probationary terms for petty theft. Payo Briones had been convicted for possession of heroin; Felipe Chew had been indicted for possession of cocaine. Department of Public Safety highway patrolmen had apprehended Chew after a motorcycle chase; later, when officers returned to the scene, they found a packet of the drug. Faced with a weak case, the DA’s office struck a deal: Chew’s charge was plea-bargained to possession of marijuana. Scheduled for deportation, Chew was out on bail at the time of his arrest for the rape of Linda Gaitan.
Other defendants had histories of violent crime. Roel Torres was placed on probation when, as a juvenile, he had cut a boy on his left arm and wrist with a knife at school. Roberto Perez, who dumped Linda Gaitan by the railroad tracks, had been indicted in 1980 on a charge of aggravated assault for shooting a man with a .22 rifle. Having pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of misdemeanor assault, he was sentenced to one year in jail and ordered to make restitution to his victim in the sum of $150. A motion to revoke his probation was entered in 1981 because he failed to fulfill those obligations; seven years had gone by without his arrest.
Orlando Garza, who seems to have provided the spark that ignited the incident, was well known to peace officers for his violent behavior. A deputy sheriff, responding to a call at Garza’s house, recalls that he arrived to find the man brandishing an ax. Garza’s criminal record begins with a 1983 theft indictment. He was sentenced to one year in jail, which was subsequently knocked down to one year’s probation and a fine of $400. Garza told the judge he could not afford to pay the damages; revocation was requested when it was discovered he had easily come up with a cash bond for a friend in San Antonio. The motion to revoke probation in 1984 included information that in November 1983 Garza had tried to run over a woman with a car. A warrant for Garza’s arrest was issued in July 1984. Revocation hearings continued to be scheduled for the next four years—the last motion to reschedule was pending at the time Garza was arrested for raping Gaitan. The town had taught the men that they would not be held accountable; there was no reason for them to fear harsh judgment for anything they did.
They were further protected by South Texas attitude toward sexual morality. Rape is a confusing crime in most places; in San Diego, where machismo still thrives, people are particularly ambivalent. This is the place where Pancho Villa bragged about his sexual conquests, where George Parr was justified in stopping his Chrysler to slap a young man he believed had made eyes at his wife. Beneath the surface runs the age-old assumption that men are weak-willed and women corrupt. The Casa Blanca Bar does not allow unescorted women—they cause trouble, I was told—yet a man is entitled to his infidelities as proof of his manhood. “Mexican men always have something on the side besides their family,” A woman from an old Hispanic family told me. “It’s almost a must around here.” Women may be idolized or scorned, but they are never equal. Those who stay in San Diego marry young, have children, and do as they’re told—those who do not, suffer the consequences. Only two rapes have been reported in San Diego in the last two years, which might indicate the crime’s rarity or, more likely, the rarity with which it is reported. Rape is viewed by man not as a crime of violence but as a crime of passion, something that has to do with sexual attraction. More than once I heard men comment with much puzzlement that the accused “had prettier wives.”
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