Crime spree suspect caught
‘A lot of … residents will be sleeping much better tonight,’ sheriff says
It was the call they’d been waiting for.
Harris County Deputy Jorge Reyes and his partner had been up all night, patrolling Cypress, eyes peeled for a parolee suspected in a violent spree that included the July killings of two people at local mattress stores and a woman found dead at her home.
The suspect — who’d allegedly cut off his ankle monitor before unleashing a nine-day reign of terror — had eluded capture for almost two weeks, sowing seeds of fear throughout the northern part of the county.
But just after 6 a.m., the lawmen got the tip they needed. There was a suspicious man in a gray Nissan Sentra in the neighborhood. And he fit the description.
It took a half-hour to find him and 14 minutes to chase him down, but by 7 a.m., deputies had him in custody.
Now, authorities say Jose Gilberto Rodriguez is expected to face three capital murder charges after a much-anticipated arrest that brought relief to residents of Greater Houston.
“A lot of Harris County residents will be sleeping much better tonight,” said a relieved Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez,
less than 24 hours after he and Houston’s police chief held a joint news conference to plead for the public’s help in locating Rodriguez.
In addition to the three killings, Rodriguez, 46, a convicted sex offender, is suspected in a home invasion involving an elderly couple and the shooting of a MetroLift bus driver. Authorities said the victims were innocent people who happened to cross the suspect’s path.
The violent spree focused new attention on the problem of parole violators, sparking promises of change from Police Chief Art Acevedo, who vowed to create the state’s “biggest” task force to go after them.
“We are going to be flies on stink to parolees,” Acevedo said late Tuesday. “They’re not going to like us.”
In addition to creating a “model” task force of local agencies focused on the county’s 18,000 parolees, Acevedo called for tougher laws, such as subjecting those on parole to random searches.
String of crimes
The manhunt began around July 5, when Rodriguez clipped off his ankle monitor and slipped away, authorities say. They gave the following account:
Four days later, investigators say, he broke into an elderly couple’s home in the 12000 block of Foxburo. There, he allegedly held an 87-year-old homeowner at gunpoint, tying him up and crushing a pillow over his face during a robbery.
The man’s 86-year-old wife was in the shower at the time and survived unharmed.
It’s not clear what the suspect did or where he went in the days that followed.
But on Friday, police found the first body.
It was that of 62-year-old Pamela Johnson, a Kroger grocery chain employee who’d been shot to death in her Cypress home before her car was stolen.
A day later, the manager of a Mattress Firm on FM 1960 in the Willowbrook area found 28-year-old employee Allie Barrow shot in the head in the store’s back office.
Hours later, a witness spotted a man ditching Johnson’s missing car at Willowbrook Mall.
Early Monday, the violent streak continued with the shooting of a 22-year-old MetroLift bus driver. He was transported to the hospital and listed in critical condition.
The last of the fatal shootings came later that day, when police found the body of 57-year-old Edward Magaña inside a Mattress One on the North Freeway.
By that point, police were on high alert. They thought they knew who their killer was — and that he might be looking to kill again.
“There’s no doubt in our mind that he intended to find his next victim,” Gonzalez said.
Long criminal record
The suspect’s violent past dates to at least 1989, when, records show, he was sent to prison for attempted sex assault, burglary and auto theft convictions.
That September, he broke into a young woman’s home and stole her car. He pulled down the teen’s pants and underwear and tried to rape her in an act that court records describe as “more than mere preparation that tended to but failed to effect the commission of the offense intended.”
He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and while behind bars also was sentenced to six years in prison for a theft charge he picked up in Montgomery County the year before.
All four of the felony sentences ran concurrently, but two years later he caught another charge while in prison in Anderson County.
This time, he was sentenced to 10 more years after a conviction for one count of possession of a deadly weapon inside a penitentiary, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jeremy Desel.
With the stacked sentences, he wasn’t let out on parole until September 2017.
It wasn’t the parole board’s decision to release him, Desel stressed. Given the amount of time he’d served, the law required his release.
‘Ideal tenant’
At one point he lived in the Dallas area after prison, though records show he later returned to Houston and moved into a Fifth Ward halfway house. He was deemed a high-risk sex offender, though the home’s owner, Theresa Williams, described him as nice and hardworking — an “ideal” tenant who paid on time and mowed the grass.
He was holding down a job at a nearby Tyson’s factory and was scheduled to be under parole supervision until 2023.
Williams said she last saw him sometime last week, when he left the house, ostensibly headed out to do laundry.
“Don’t worry, Mama T,” Williams recalled him saying. “I’m never gonna leave you.”
When police started questioning Rodriguez on Tuesday morning, the man they found was not nice or interested in helping out.
He was stoic, investigators said. He didn’t admit to his alleged crimes or express remorse.
But, authorities said, they felt confident they had enough to tie him to all three slayings — though they declined to offer specifics.
Police recovered a pistol during the arrest, but it won’t be clear until tests come back whether it’s the murder weapon.
By late Tuesday, he’d been formally charged with one count of capital murder, and police said two more counts are expected. He’s being held without bail in the Harris County Jail.
For Reyes — one of the two deputies who arrested Rodriguez — that ending seemed almost predestined.
“When I left the house before my shift, I told my wife, ‘I’m gonna catch him,’ ” the four-year veteran of the sheriff ’s office recalled at Tuesday’s news conference.
“And I did.”