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.
Indolence clings to San Diego like sheets to the skin in summer. It is a place rich only in time: the oil boom that fleetingly livened the South Texas towns of Freer to the west and Alice to the east bypassed San Diego. The compliant coastal plain gives over to the wild and inhospitable brush country here, land that submits to nothing but the inexorable pressure of the sky. “There is not a thing to do in this lonely land but drink and fornicate,” a turn-of-the-century traveler wrote, and to speed across Duval County today is to believe little has changed since then.
San Diego, the county seat, puts up a good front. It is, like most small towns, neither interested in nor of interest to the person just passing through. The Lopez convenience store and El Mercado supermarket indicate how little this insular and isolated place has in common with the small towns that line the interstate highways to the north, towns that are little more than far-flung suburbs with their own 7-Elevens, multi-cinemas, and strip shopping centers. English is spoken only intermittently in San Diego. In its heart, it is a Mexican town begrudgingly located in Texas.
In San Diego, Americans are people who live elsewhere; Anglos are people who bring or cause bad news. Faith soothes, fate rules: The Catholic church on the town square brims with people on Sunday mornings; on a weekday a young boy, pumped by a friend on the handlebars of his bike, crosses himself as he speeds past. A white horse, loose from the field, poses no inconvenience as it prances down a main street; instead cars fall into line behind in an impromptu parade. Cocks and dogs have the run of their blocks, where ancient adobe houses graciously permit frame bungalows and trailers on adjoining lots. The few spacious Spanish colonial mansions, their windows covered with extravagant grillwork, overlook the shacks of Naked City—a poor neighborhood so named because the babies run around without clothes. Reconciled to close quarters, San Diegoans present sunny faces to one another. There is always time for coffee at the Dairy Queen and Jerry’s Diner; one of the worst snubs imaginable is to refuse to say “hi” to someone. In this town of five thousand, everyone belongs.
Only after spending a longer time in a town might one question this congeniality, see it as a courageous attempt at wishful thinking. For San Diego is a kingdom of cursed. People here are epicures of talk, but the stories they embroider and embellish have the haunting beauty of a mournful corrido. When San Diegoans talk of their families, they talk of loss: the mother who went mad, the brother who stole the inheritance, the son killed in an automobile accident on Christmas Eve. Resigned to the price of passion, townspeople are all too familiar with tragic results of beer-joint fights and late-night lovers’ quarrels.
But the curse of San Diego is found not in the cruel mixture of poverty and passion but in its own hunger for accommodation. A student of history knows the secrets the insiders do not give up willingly—that this is a place where terrible things have happened, a place where justice has been as fleeting and capricious as the dust devils that swirl up and disappear along the back roads out of town. One of the oldest towns in Texas, San Diego is a place shaped by violence, oppression, and domination: first, as Anglo and Hispanic settlers battled bitterly for control of the land—“My grandfather killed her father,” a resident told me, her way of introducing a character into her family narrative—and later, as the people of San Diego fell under the spell of Archer Parr and his son George. The two men helped the Mexicans take over this parched Eden only to take their freedom in return; styling themselves as patrones, the Parrs used the threat of violence to maintain control for more than sixty years. To survive, the people of San Diego learned to submit—or to be cast out into a world they did not want, that did not want them.
Eventually the Parr empire collapsed, but the people of San Diego clung together even more fiercely in the aftermath. Marked by history, they had only one place to feel at home. They would acquiesce to their own: When toughs took over the club at the town’s only hotel, the respectable customers simply moved on. It did not matter so much that the hotel soon closed as a result—no one cared about visitors anyway. It did not matter that city-hall windows in San Diego had to be boarded up and white-washed because, one woman explained, “we have a man who doesn’t like glass.” In San Diego it is better to sit in the dark than to punish the man with the rock in his hand. Never did it occur to the people here that they had exchanged one form of tyranny for another.
It is occasionally noted that no highways lead north from San Diego, a detail that seems to reveal indisputably the town’s southward orientation. In fact, a few local roads do lead north out of town. One in particular, on the far west side, is a winding, desolate stretch that eventually turns to caliche before veering east to intersect State Highway 281. The mesquite and prickly pear form a curtain along the roadside; it is barely possible, beyond a rise a few miles outside of town, to make out a small colonia of shacks and treeless lots off the main road to the left. On one plot, incongruously prosperous, sits a neat white wide-bodied trailer with a raked caliche drive. A series of metal-roofed sheds is visible out back; the yard is enclosed by a wire fence supported by thick posts.
Here, late in the evening of March 26, an illegal cockfight scheduled as the night’s entertainment did not go as planned. The event wasn’t a typical South Texas cockfight. There were no families present, no soft-drink or taquito sellers. It was just a brush fight, arranged to test the roosters of one particular owner. The cockfight was really just an excuse for a bunch of guys from the tough side of town to get together and party. They certainly weren’t expert bird handlers—someone had to go back into town to find a person who knew how to put metal gaffs on the rooster’s legs.
Sometime around eleven o’clock, a maroon car pulled up with four men and a young woman inside. This is what happened next, according to law-enforcement officials, whose accounts are based on eyewitness statements. Three men got out and headed for the cockfight. The fourth, a thick, barrel-chested man with pale-brown eyes named Orlando Garza, stayed in the car with the woman. The two had known each other for some time, but tonight’s was not a friendly outing. In a statement the woman later filed with the sheriff, she said she had been abducted from the street near her home and driven to the cockfight after she had turned down an invitation for a ride. Now Garza made sexual advances; when the woman refused, they argued. Finally he began forcing her to have oral sex. In the meantime, another man had strolled back to the car. “Save some for me,” Corando Perez, a slight young man possessed of manic energy, told Garza and then, impatient, got into the car and started to have sex with the woman. Felipe Chew tried to get in on the act as well, but after the muscular Mexican national climbed into the car, the woman struggled and escaped. Garza caught her, however, threw her on the hood of a car, and began raping her again. Someone warned him not to tear her clothes—that would show they had used force.
Payo Briones, a lumbering man with a dazed look and a large growth on one side of his face, had drifted out of the cockfight and approached Garza while he was assaulting the woman. Briones had heard her crying—Garza told him to get away. Instead, Briones began playing with the woman’s breasts. Finally, because she was scratching him, Garza told Briones to hold her down. When Garza finished, Briones tried to take his turn but was impotent because he was drunk. A crowd that had formed began to laugh at Briones, especially when Garza “pushed me down between her legs like I was a dog,” as Briones later said in his statement. Other men moved in. Corando Perez pushed Briones aside and entered the woman again while Garza shoved his crotch at her face. When she could, the woman screamed for help and begged to be taken home, but no one was in a mood to listen.
Instead, the men formed a line as the cockfight ended. According to the woman’s statement and those of witnesses, Roel Torres, a long-haired man with a fierce overbite, mounted the woman, as did Ruben Vela, a twinkly-eyed 22-year-old with a halo of black curls and a pregnant wife at home. Alex Bear, a small man whose face is dotted with acne scars, raped her; so did Roberto Garcia, a young man with a haunted look, and Roberto Perez, Corando’s heavy-set older brother. One young man who had ridden to the cockfight on his bicycle took his turn, then bicycled back home. A few boys were dragged to the car and told, “This is what you can look forward to” —a nine-year-old was thrown on top of the woman. A fourteen-year-old took part, and then, while the men held her hands and feet, he placed his hands over the woman’s mouth to try to stop her from crying out. Eventually, unable to stand the woman’s screams, Briones tried to stop his friend: “I said leave her alone, because she was crying and yelling, but the guys got mad and almost got into a fight with me.” Finally after the woman fainted, Garza told Garcia to take her away. Briones gathered up her clothes and got in Garcia’s red Ford Galaxy with Roberto Perez, Garcia, Bear, and two small boys. But instead of taking her home, Perez, Garcia, and Bear dropped off Briones and the kids and took the woman to a shed on property owned by Garza’s brother, where they again took turns raping her. Afterward, Perez drove back into town, dropped off Garcia and Bear, and then proceeded to a third location, where he raped the woman again and warned her to keep quiet. Finally, according to the officials’ account of the rape, Perez dumped her near the railroad tracks around four in the morning. Then he drove the few blocks home to his place on Tovar Street, just a few short steps from the rickety King Street shack of the woman he had spent the night assaulting.
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