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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When she struggles to understand the budget consciousness that he counselors at the crisis center are trying to instill in her, she is desperately afraid they will abandon her. She would like to buy a hand wringer so she can wash clothes at home because she is afraid to go to a public laundry. She is, actually, afraid to go outside at all. The only time she ventures out is once a day, when she lets her children play in a plastic pool right beside the front door to the apartment. Most days she minds the children and waits for Frankie to come home from his donated job at a department store so she can eat and sometimes go to the counseling crisis center. Sometimes she blacks out while she is talking to Frankie: The gang rape comes into her mind, her mouth tightens, and she seems to leave the room. Then she gets a headache on the side where she was thrown against the car; her relief comes from prescription medications. San Diego is a place she tries to obliterate from her memory. “I don’t want to go back there,” she insists, an urgent hatred wrapping itself around the syllables.
Frankie cannot conjure up such anger. He, after all, has been banished from home. His family has been in San Diego for generations, and a brief job in Irving served only to convince him that San Diego was the place for him. Being from San Diego, he can accommodate his own homesickness and his nager at what happened to his wife; he is pulled back by a powerful psychic tide—for a few days each month, for Memorial Day, for Father’s Day, to have the baby baptized. His mother misses him, and he misses his friends, who thought of him as “kooky—a sweet guy.”
In San Diego he belonged. In Corpus Christi he is just another Mexican, an anonymous stockboy made all the more anonymous because his coworkers do not know why he is there. He is having trouble with his job, partly because his skills are in construction work and partly because he is terrified every time he sees someone from San Diego come into the store. When he does see someone he knows (Orlando Garza’s brother was a recent shopper), Frankie runs to another part of the store, which gets him in trouble with his boss, who doesn’t understand his behavior. Once, when some of his coworkers learned he was from San Diego, one of the men teased him about being one of the rapists. Frankie grabbed hold of his tie and warned him not to make that joke again. On his way to work Frankie sometimes winds up at a stop sign across from Roel Torres, who lives in Corpus Christi. He pictures Torres assaulting his wife and fights the urge to ram the car of the he once considered a friend.
Frankie plots vengeance as quickly as he dismisses the notion—he knows all too well the odds are stacked against him. But he wants the accused to know he has their number. “They’re not bad guys—they’re assholes,” he tells me, using pachuco logic; to give his former friends credit for the evil they are accused of is to elevate them to a powerfulness they do not deserve. Besides, Frankie has other worries—he wants to keep his marriage together, he wants very badly for the outside world to believe his wife was really raped. Being from San Diego, he assumes that the larger world shares the doubts of people in town.
Around five on a sunny evening, I ask Linda and Frankie to dinner. Given her pick of restaurants, Linda opts for Chuck E. Cheese because the kids like it. Although she hasn’t eaten all day, she spends thirty minutes letting her children play on the mechanized toys—she smiles when Frank Junior grins in a car that shudders down an imaginary highway, and she giggles and pats his belly when he leans out of a rocket that twists four feet off the ground. Threading her way through the crowd, a baby on her hip and Frankie Junior toddling beside her, she could be any mother out with her family on a Friday night.
After dinner we decide to go to the beach. We settle on some concrete bleachers north of the Holiday Inn and watch the color drain out of the sky. There are people on the sidewalk, kids on skateboards, two bearded, heavyset men lolling against a Cadillac parked behind us. Frankie drinks a beer, studies the water, and then squints down the sidewalk. Suddenly he freezes. “That’s Roy,” he says slowly under his breath. A young man in aviator glasses is walking towards us; he has the long-legged gait I recognize from television clips. It is Roel Torres, one of the men accused of raping Linda. Linda turns and looks at Frankie hard, an unmistakable challenge in her eyes. I ask them if they would like to get back into my car. Frankie says there is no time. “Act like you don’t see him,” he hisses. “But he’ll recognize Frank Junior,” Linda whispers, frantic. Linda clutches Sara close while Frank Junior waddles gaily across the concrete steps. Torres ambles forward until he is directly behind us. Then, slowly, he makes an arc, sauntering back toward his blue truck. I suggest to Frankie that we leave, and he agrees, reminding us that Torres was once in a knife fight with a kid at school.
On the way back home, the Gaitan are silent. Finally, Frankie curses and sighs from the back seat. “Seeing one of those guys can ruin your damn day,” he says. “Your whole damn day.”
Linda pulls her daughter close and winces from the pain that has returned to one side of her head. “Your whole damn day,” she repeats under her breath, softly, slowly, as if a day could ever be anything but.
“The truth will come out at the trial,” I was told with great assurance by defense lawyers and other champions of the accused, a curious sentiment for a town that has always viewed the law with a jaundiced eye. Actually, a few weeks in San Diego will turn a nagging question into an anxious aria: one comes to wonder whether Linda Gaitan will receive justice in any form. As the summer wore on, townspeople wished the trial would be moved—almost impossible, unless the defense were to request a change of venue, and unlikely, since the odds for the defendants were so much better in Duval County. The assistant district attorney, Rodolfo Gutierrez, however, is confident that Gaitan will receive her due. It is possible that he will not be the prosecutor for all the rape and kidnapping cases; the Duval County DA lost to a man from Starr County in the last election, so come January Gutierrez will most likely be out of a job. Gaitan could face up to seventeen trials, though no one in San Diego believes such a thing will come to pass. There will be deals, there will be payoffs, knowledgeable cynics say with certainty. No one believes the fourteen-year-old will ever be prosecuted.
In late June pretrial hearings were held for the accused. By then the town had wearied of the gang rape. “San Diego is under pressure,” the DA’s investigator told me, and indeed it had been a difficult spring. Along with the drought, there had been a series of incomprehensible tragedies that sent the small town reeling. One man was charged with murdering his wife and son, the son of a leading citizen had committed suicide. That another round of publicity would begin on the gang rape made San Diegoans edgy; they wanted to forget while the outside world seemed to remember.
As the nine o’clock hearing approached, the men took their places at the courthouse. Garza, Torres, and Vela loitered on the west-side steps. Corando Perez occupied himself on an east-side landing, clicking his heels and snapping his chin when a woman passed who struck his fancy. It was possible to see in the courtroom seating arrangements portents of divisions to come: Briones sat alone, apart from his friends, worrying a weather-beaten hat between his splayed legs. Garcia sat far to the left, surrounded by family. Garza, Soliz, and Corando Perez sat in the back but at some distance from Torres and Vela, who are not burdened with kidnapping charges. They viewed the proceedings with moderate interest, scratching, stretching, yawning; they were like men slipping into old, familiar roles—defendants before a legal system that has let them off before.
Felipe Chew, who had never made bond and had remained in jail since the indictments, was called to the stand the next day for a bail-reduction hearing. It was brought out that he could be deported if released on bond; it was brought out that he had had a previous wife who had been a heroin addict. When asked whether he had used cocaine, Chew licked his lips, leaned to one side, and shrugged his shoulder. His lawyer advised him to take the Fifth. Leaving the courthouse to go back to jail, Chew shot the bird at a television cameraman.
There was, however, a glimmer that all might not go as predicted. Later in the summer, when the original trial date of July 11 was rescheduled for September 12, Orlando Garza’s probation was finally revoked, and he was thrown in jail. Perhaps the hostile glare of the outside world had finally forced San Diego to see its own in a new light.
The biggest house in San Diego sits on the road to Benavides, just a short distance from the spot where the town gives over to the brush country to the southwest. It is a two-story white-washed Spanish colonial; clearly at one time it was very grand. Bald palm trees lean in toward the house; a brick fence encloses a swimming pool. It was the home of George Parr, and it is for sale.
Parr’s widow, Eva, lives there now with her second husband. She had married Parr when he was in his fifties and she was fifteen, the courthouse janitor’s daughter. Eva remarried after Parr’s suicide but kept the house, though she and her new husband occupy the downstairs only. The upstairs bedroom where George and Eva slept looks almost as it did when he was alive. A portrait of the couple hangs over the bed. In another room, Parr’s hats remain preserved in a plastic hanging bag, a Christmas card from Price Daniel lies abandoned on the floor. Parr’s Chrysler, the bloodstains cleaned away, sits in the garage with hundreds of deer mounts, triumphs from his hunting trips. The house is dark, the drapes pulled against the summer sun. Eva does not want to sell the house, but she has to. It is the only way to pay off liens against the estate for back taxes.
The old bills have come due for San Diego too. The gang rape has forced the town to confront its corrupt past. It remains to be seen whether it will throw off its legacy of silence and lawlessness, or whether the town will submit to the curse once more, drawing the curtain ever tighter, sentencing itself to live in darkness.
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