Letter From Houston
Girl, Interrupted
Almost two years after brutally stabbing a teenage gangbanger, Ashley Benton is determined to reclaim her life. But her problems are not over yet.
Nick says: Unbelievable! The same types of things happen everyday in this country, and the killer gets charged as an adult and spends most if not the rest of their lives in prison. Only difference? It’s a female who was the killer. That is just wrong. (March 2nd, 2009 at 1:31am)
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Ashley said she went to the park that June afternoon knowing there was going to be a confrontation between Crazy Crew and MS-13. (Apparently, MS-13 was angry because a Crazy Crew boy had been harassing a young cousin of an MS-13 member.) MS-13, an international gang also known as Mara Salvatrucha, is made up of mostly young males of Central American descent and is notorious for its vicious killings; in 2005, after the local faction was suspected of committing several murders, the Houston Police Department formed a squad designed solely to put its members behind bars. One of the gang’s stars, despite his young age, was Gabriel Granillo. “You didn’t mess with him,” one older MS-13 member told me. “If some putos threw down at him [flashed their gang sign], he went after all of them. That homey had no fear.”
Ashley told me she’d had no intention of fighting, but once the conflict began, she was so frightened she grabbed her knife from her backpack. Suddenly, she said, Granillo arrived, swinging an aluminum softball bat. “He shouted at me, ‘F— you, bitch. I’m going to f— you up.’ He swung at me twice with the bat, my head and then at my chest, and I got out of the way both times. And after the second time he swung at me, I just stuck out my knife and stepped forward. I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was aiming. My eyes were shut when I did it.”
Ashley paused and looked at me. “Then everything just went silent, like a scene in a movie, and when I opened my eyes, there was blood on my hands, and he was falling . . .” She dissolved into tears, unable to finish her sentence.
When the trial began, assistant DA Mia Magness did her best to persuade the jury that Ashley was not an innocent bystander. She had a parade of MS-13 members who were at the fight testify that they saw Ashley attack Granillo as he was running away. Magness also played Ashley’s taped confession to the police, in which she said more than once that she stabbed Granillo after he had turned to leave.
But Ashley’s attorneys roundly ridiculed the testimony of the MS-13 members as nothing more than lies. (Schaffer got one of them to concede that he actually did not see Granillo running away from Ashley.) They also noted that a confused and frightened Ashley told detectives conflicting stories during her taped confession, which was conducted without a lawyer or even her mother present. Yes, she did say that Granillo was running away from her, but at another point in the confession, she said that Granillo was facing her when she stabbed him. Surely, the lawyers said, the latter version was correct. If Granillo had been leaving, then there was no way she could have stabbed him directly in the heart. And who really believed that an MS-13 gangbanger would back away from a girl?
Then, Ashley, looking very much like a proper high school student, in a black pantsuit and a green silk blouse, took the stand and recounted much of the story she had told me. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” she said quietly. Rolling her eyes, Magness asked, “So you just landed a lucky shot?” “I wouldn’t call it a lucky shot,” Ashley replied, her voice trembling. The diminutive Magness, whom defense attorney Wice once called “a pit bull in stilettos,” glared at Ashley and snapped, “You hit him right in the heart and buried the knife to the hilt, didn’t you?”
After two days of deliberations, the jurors said they couldn’t reach a verdict. About half of them believed Ashley’s story; the other half were convinced that she knew exactly what she was getting into when she showed up at a gang fight with a knife. The judge called a mistrial, and for the next six months, Magness and the defense attorneys argued about a plea agreement.
Finally, this past December, Ashley pleaded guilty to aggravated assault, receiving five years of deferred adjudication probation (meaning that if she completes her sentence with no violations, the charge will be dismissed). She was also ordered to obtain a high school diploma or a GED certificate and perform three hundred hours of community service.
When we meet in DeToto’s office two months after her plea agreement, Ashley tells me, “I’ve been given a second chance to make something out of my life.” Now eighteen, she does indeed seem determined to start over. She has moved back in with her grandparents and faithfully attends their church. She is working off her community service at a nearby animal shelter, cleaning out cages, and she is not only studying for the GED but also taking a couple of English courses at a community college. She says she never goes back to her old neighborhood and refuses to talk to any of her friends from Crazy Crew. “I don’t even like watching violent movies,” she says. “I promise you, I had trouble watching the guys doing all that fake fighting in Grease.”
But her problems are hardly over. Shortly after she was arrested, police picked up reports that MS-13 leaders had sent out word to the gang that they wanted Ashley dead. When I interviewed one MS-13 member in the wake of the fight, he unabashedly told me, “We’re going to find that f—ing bitch and dump her body where no one will find it. Nobody does something like that to us and gets away with it.” During Ashley’s trial, the police were so concerned that MS-13 hit men would come after her that a squadron of pistol-wielding officers surrounded the courtroom. All would-be spectators at the trial were “wanded” with handheld metal detectors and their bags searched for weapons. Ashley herself entered the courthouse through a special parking garage and used a private elevator to get to the courtroom. Wherever she went during the trial, she was accompanied by at least two bailiffs.
Now she is completely alone. “I don’t go to the mall, I don’t go to movie theaters, I don’t go to parties, I don’t go on dates, and I don’t drive around,” she says. “When I’m not at my community service or at school or at church, I stay home.” Just to be on the safe side, she and her grandparents have moved into a new house with a good alarm system in another neighborhood. “But I still can’t sleep at night. I hear a car drive by the house or I hear a door slam and I think, ‘This is it. They’ve finally found me.’”
When her probation is over, Ashley says she plans to move to a state far from Texas, where she hopes to get married and have a family “and try to forget about everything that happened.” She is silent for a few seconds and shakes her head. “But I know that isn’t going to be possible. I still have these flashbacks where I see the blood on my hands. I see him falling . . .” Once again, she gets choked up and cannot finish her sentence.
She stands up and heads toward the lobby, where her grandmother is waiting. They walk to their car, and Ashley slumps down in the passenger seat, her head barely above the dashboard. “I can’t take the chance that someone might see me,” she says. “I just can’t take that chance.”
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