The Border Fence, Brownsville 
The Battle for the Border
Illegal immigration is exploding in Maverick County, which will soon become the busiest crossing point from Mexico into the U.S. Ranches are being overrun by drug smugglers, houses robbed, cattle stolen. Men have been shot and killed.
(Page 3 of 4)
Willingham steered the Expedition toward them, his headlights at last skimming across the seven Mexicans who had been caught and who were kneeling in the dark beside a pecan tree. The men wore baseball caps and serapes, their skin darkened by years in the sun. They were from Tampico, they said, and were headed to Plano, where they worked as landscapers. Despite their capture, they were in surprisingly high spirits, passing sticks of gum out to one another and talking animatedly, as though they had been through this charade before. All that Willingham and the other Border Patrol agents could do after processing them was take them to the international bridge and watch them walk back to Piedras Negras, where they would probably only spend the night. "Regresamos mañana," the Mexicans said, laughing. We'll be back tomorrow.
Will Honeycutt seemed, at first, like the sort of man Dob Cunningham could trust. A former police officer from the Hill Country town of Bandera, Honeycutt was square-shouldered and seemingly surefooted, a sturdy redhead who had cowboyed on ranches during his youth. Dob had rented out the spare house on his ranch to local lawmen before, and when the DEA in Eagle Pass asked if Honeycutt, the agency's new hire, could live there, he readily agreed. Around Dob, Honeycutt was unusually reserved, as if he feared the rancher's judgments. Still, Dob trusted that the DEA had hired a proven officer, and he was impressed with Honeycutt's conscientiousness, noting that he often left the ranch at dawn and put in fifteen-hour workdays. At 39, Honeycutt was neat and respectful and good with his hands, once fashioning flowers out of copper for Dob's wife, Kay. "It gets lonely out here, and we didn't mind having the company," said Kay. "We accepted him on good faith." But Honeycutt, whose stint in Bandera had largely consisted of handing out speeding tickets, was in over his head. DEA task forces are supposed to be staffed by an elite group of state and local police officers, experienced lawmen who are deputized as DEA agents to help rural areas fight the drug trade. Honeycutt had no training in drug interdiction, however, and seems to have won a place in the task force's ranks solely because he owned a valuable police dog. He worked hard, but to no avail; his supervisor once reprimanded him for wasting time tracking the flights of a local pilot who turned out to be smuggling not dope but roosters. His investigations were hampered by the fact that he couldn't speak even rudimentary Spanish, as Dob realized when Honeycutt once caught an illegal and asked the rancher to translate. "Will wanted me to ask him, 'Who helped you cross the river?' So I did," Dob recalled. "When the man explained that he had crossed 'solito,' or 'alone,' Will got excited and said, 'Solito! That's the name of the smuggler!'"
To Dob, Honeycutt seemed oddly inexperienced and more easily rattled than other lawmen he had known. When an illegal immigrant stole a water jug from his house, Honeycutt installed a trip wire around his yard and "screamers," or motion-sensitive alarms, to keep people at bay. The screamers, which deer and javelina often tripped at night, blared until their batteries ran dead, and Honeycutt would rise at odd hours to investigate. His behavior became increasingly erratic; he hung a deer skull and a cross by his door, Dob remembered, "a voodoo kind of thing to spook Mexicans away." On morning ranch checks, Dob began spotting Honeycutt's footprints by the river and realized that his tenant had been prowling around the ranch at night. When the rancher grilled him about it, Honeycutt shrugged it off, saying he had been rock hunting—an explanation that, to Dob, "didn't ring right." Dob later found a bullet hole in the barn, and when he sharply questioned Honeycutt again, the agent became flustered: He had shot a feral hog that had attacked his German shepherd, he stammered, and the bullet must have ricocheted into the barn. "I told Kay he had a screw loose and that we should kick him out, but Kay has a big heart," said Dob. "She felt sorry for him, and so he stayed."
Honeycutt often boasted to other lawmen, exaggerating his role in DEA drug busts and claiming that Mexicans he had caught, who were in awe of his abilities, had nicknamed him the Red Scorpion. "He had a hero complex," remembered Texas Ranger Brooks Long, who later investigated him. "He wanted to impress people, especially Dob. He was getting frustrated because he'd made numerous claims about interdicting big drug loads, but he didn't actually know what to do." Dob was dismayed to see that his tenant was settling into the spare house on the ranch, sprucing it up and having his wife, Cindy, move there from Bandera. "I'd always been under the impression he wasn't going to be out there long," Dob said. "The place needed a lot of repairs and was strictly a bachelor type of thing." Still, he didn't insist that Honeycutt move. Dob rarely saw him and perceived Honeycutt as an annoyance, not a threat. "If he hadn't been with the DEA, I would have studied him more," said Dob. "I was duped. Before a new Border Patrol agent can go out on his own, he's schooled, he's trained, he has weekly appraisals. Honeycutt had none of that. They gave him a gun and a badge and said go get it."
For Honeycutt, his failure as a DEA agent took its toll, as did his mounting frustration with the flow of drugs and illegal immigrants he seemed powerless to control. Perhaps in an effort to redeem himself, to finally prove himself the hero, he began tracking illegals at night and trying to intercept drug loads on his own. The strain he was under clearly showed; several times he unnecessarily pulled his gun during traffic stops and ordered passengers to lie facedown on the ground. Still, warning signs went unheeded. Honeycutt allegedly boasted to U.S. Customs agent Mike Schuster that he had once forced a group of illegal immigrants he had rounded up to take their shoes off and walk until their "feet were messed up." He also allegedly said that he had made two men strip naked and swim back to Mexico on a particularly cold night and that he had once sicced his dog on two illegals, firing his gun when one hid in a tree. Schuster assumed Honeycutt was exaggerating and failed to report him. But Honeycutt's hostility toward illegal immigrants—who continued, despite his determined efforts, to elude him—was growing more menacing. To the astonishment of Border Patrol agent James Prejean, Honeycutt once quipped, "The only Spanish I speak is 'Habla Glock?'"
Honeycutt was carrying his Glock pistol on the night of January 25, 1999, when he set off into the brush. He had completed his shift but was still wearing his uniform and was carrying a machete for cutting through the underbrush. Dusk was settling over a clear, cold horizon. Honeycutt descended the rocky hill from his house to the nearby water pump, where he bent down to replace the batteries in his screamers. Spread out before him were fresh tracks: a solid, unmistakable trail of footprints that led past the toolshed, then tacked northeast through the ranch. Honeycutt turned his flashlight on and began walking. The footprints appeared to lead toward the irrigation canal, a little more than a mile away, and he headed in that direction, finally breaking into a hard run. As he neared the canal, he slowed, hearing voices speaking in Spanish. He ducked down, creeping through the brush until he at last saw a group of roughly twenty illegals, about eighty feet ahead of him, along the banks of the canal. Then, with his flashlight in one hand, he stepped forward.
"Stop, police!" Honeycutt yelled. The group scattered, with people scrambling into the brush. "Stop, police!" he yelled with more urgency, as they began to vanish in the darkness. Honeycutt drew his gun and—whether out of panic, fear, or his accumulated rage—he fired eight shots into the brush. From the opposite side of the canal there was a scream of pain and then, "¡Me dieron!" They got me.
Abecnego Monje Ortiz felt a hard blow to his right shoulder, a fiercely hot, vibrating pain that radiated out through his limbs and left him gasping for breath, its force buckling his legs beneath him. He fell to the ground, then tried to right himself so he could run but found that his legs had gone limp. Lying there, he could hear his fellow travelers running furiously through the brush, moving farther and farther away from him. Then all fell silent. "Cacho!" Abecnego whispered, calling his friend's name, but no one answered. Blood seeped from his shoulder and began soaking through his jacket, wetting the ground beneath him. He was alone and unable to move. Abecnego stared up at the dark, moonless sky and prayed that God would let him live.Abecnego had left the tiny village of Montecillos, in the southwestern state of Michoacán, ten days earlier against his mother's wishes. He was eighteen, a slight, shy teenager who had decided to follow his two older brothers to the States, where they already worked in restaurants. The town of Montecillos had no plumbing or paved roads and was populated largely by subsistence farmers who had suffered under a long drought. The Monjes tried to draw corn from the parched soil, but they, like most families there, relied on money sent home by fathers, husbands, and brothers working up north. Abecnego's father, who had baked and sold bread in town, had died the previous year in a car accident, leaving the family in dire straits, and Abecnego felt it was his duty to help support his mother, Dolores, as well as his four sisters and younger brother. Going north was also a rite of passage. The bravest and most ambitious men left Montecillos behind each year, Abecnego had noted, while the town's remaining boys, women, and elderly waited for their return. Though his mother pleaded with him not to go, saying he was too young, Abecnego and his friend Cacho set out for Texas.
My Library
