San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Delays, plea deals dilute justice
“There was something wrong in her voice ... you could tell she wasn’t happy.”
— Veronica Torres, mother of Karla Ornelas
food restaurant when she met Ulises Rodriguez. He worked in the kitchen.
Ornelas’ mother, Veronica Torres, who texted and talked with her daughter every day, had concerns about this new relationship from the start.
“There was something wrong in her voice,” Torres recalled. “I asked, ‘Are you OK?’ She always said yes. But you could tell she wasn’t happy.”
The first record of violence is from Sept. 6, 2017. On that day, Rodriguez hit Ornelas, then 22, and another female and yanked Ornelas’ hair, according to court records. He was arrested on two counts of misdemeanor family violence.
Rodriguez, also 22, already had a criminal record: He’d been convicted of one minor drug offense and was on deferred adjudication, a form of probation, for a second. He was released on $3,500 bail. In court on Nov. 20, 2017, Assistant District Attorney Samuel Lyles asked then-Judge Eugenia “Genie” Wright to dismiss the family violence charges because of “missing witnesses.” Prosecutors said they could not get ahold of Ornelas. Wright tossed the case.
Lyles did not respond to a request for comment.
Wright said she didn’t remember the case but that she usually followed prosecutors’ recommendations.
“If the state doesn’t want to prosecute, what are you going to do? Make them prosecute?” she asked. “I would generally ask them, ‘Why are you dismissing this case?’ It was very common that the victim had a change of heart or the prosecutors couldn’t find the victim.”
Nearly five months later, on the evening of April 9, 2018, Rodriguez erupted again.
Earlier that day, he had taken Ornelas’ car to have it fixed, she later told police. He was supposed to pick her up from work, but he called to tell her she was on her own.
Ornelas got a ride home and put her son, then around 1 year old, in the bathtub. Rodriguez arrived, drunk, and the pair began to argue, according to police and court records.
He grabbed Ornelas’ phone and flung it into the bathtub. Then he seized Ornelas by the throat and choked her so hard she couldn’t scream, according to a police report. She tried to pry his fingers loose. Finally, he let go. He threw her in the bathtub, grabbed the boy and walked out of the room.
Ornelas’ sister-in-law called 911. With the baby wailing in the background, she reported that Rodriguez “has been physical before,” according to the dispatcher’s notes. A responding officer noted marks on Ornelas’ neck.
Rodriguez was arrested on a felony charge of assault family violence strangulation.
Research shows that abusers who attempt to strangle their partners are much more likely to kill them in a subsequent assault. A 2008 study in the Journal of Emergency Medicine found that the odds a woman will be killed by an intimate partner increase sevenfold after a strangulation.
In response, the Texas Legislature
in 2009 made family violence strangulation a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison for a first offense and up to 20 for subsequent offenses.
Rodriguez was now considered high-risk, and a judge could impose tight conditions on his release.
It didn’t happen. Then-Magistrate
Lori Crockett set bail at $15,000 and didn’t prohibit Rodriguez from contacting Ornelas while he awaited trial.
Nor did Crockett require Rodriguez to wear a GPS ankle monitor, another standard tool to restrict dangerous defendants.
Crockett did not respond to a request for comment.
Prosecutors could have filed a motion asking the magistrate to tighten Rodriguez’s bail conditions. They didn’t. Christian Henricksen, chief of litigation at the DA’s office, said the case file does not indicate why.
According to her mother, Ornelas now was determined to leave Rodriguez. She met her mother and aunt in Fort Stockton, roughly midway between San Antonio and El Paso. When her daughter got out of her car, Torres saw bruises on her face.
Ornelas’ resolve soon faded. She returned to San Antonio and paid a bondsman $1,500 to bail Rodriguez out of jail on the choking charge.
Had there been one in San Antonio, a high-risk team of police, prosecutors and domestic violence specialists could have targeted the case for special attention. Its members could have reached out to Ornelas to impress on her the danger she was in. They could have connected her with legal help, housing assistance and other services. They could have helped her devise a personal safety plan.
But unlike other major urban counties in Texas, Bexar County didn’t have a high-risk team at the time. One finally was established last year.
After his release from jail, Ornelas reconciled with Rodriguez. When the couple visited El Paso for two days, Torres saw him boss her daughter around.
“You could see she was afraid of him,” Torres said.
In private, she begged Ornelas to leave him, to start over. She offered to pay for the move and her daughter’s living expenses.
It made no difference.
NO WAY OUT
I n early September 2018, Ornelas phoned her mother to tell her she was finished with Rodriguez. He had stolen her car and sold it. She told her co-workers at Wing Daddy’s Sauce House on
“No one can do the job they want handling 1,000 cases a year.”
Jackson Keller Road the same thing: It was over.
Around 9:45 p.m. on Sept. 5 of that year, the pair got into an argument at Rodriguez’s family’s home on the West Side. Rodriguez’s stepfather told the couple they had to stop arguing or leave the house. They left and began walking down the street.
Around 9:55 p.m., a witness called 911 and reported that Rodriguez had his hands wrapped around Ornelas’ throat.
“Help!” Ornelas screamed, according to the dispatcher’s notes. “Help!”
Rodriguez’s stepfather and stepbrother headed down the street and saw Rodriguez walking toward them.
“Where’s the girl?” the stepfather asked.
“She took off that way,” Rodriguez responded, throwing his hands in the air and cursing.
The stepfather found Ornelas lying on the ground. Rodriguez had stabbed her nine times — eight times in the neck and once in the shoulder, according to medical records. There was blood everywhere, but she was conscious and talking.
Paramedics transported her to University Hospital, where she later was pronounced dead.
Rodriguez fled to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, but was arrested a week later.
In 2019, he pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. He’ll be eligible for parole in 15 years.
On her cellphone, Torres keeps a video of her grandson playing with Ornelas’ big, sweet dog, Marly. Ornelas can be heard admonishing the boy to be gentle.
It’s the only surviving trace of Karla’s voice.
A SYSTEM OVERWHELMED
Ornelas’ case was handled by a justice system that conspicuously lags those in Texas’ other urban centers in holding domestic abusers accountable.
From 2011 through 2020, just 21 percent of misdemeanor family violence cases filed by prosecutors in Bexar County ended in a conviction, according to an ExpressNews analysis of statewide court data. About 60 percent of the cases were dismissed.
For felony domestic violence cases, the dismissal rate was 32 percent and the conviction rate 35 percent.
In both categories, those were the lowest conviction rates and the highest dismissal rates among the state’s five most populous counties.
The 10-year period spanned all or part of the terms of three Bexar County district attorneys: Susan Reed, Nico LaHood and the incumbent, Joe D. Gonzales.
LaHood did not respond to a request to be interviewed.
Reed, DA from 1999 to 2015, was the first woman to hold the office in Bexar County.
In an interview, she said she made domestic violence a high priority, hired dozens of victim advocates and lobbied for creation of the Bexar County Family Justice Center, a one-stop resource where abuse victims can get legal help, counseling and other services.
Reed said that if the evidence was strong, her office pursued domestic violence cases even when victims were uncooperative. She said she was disappointed and puzzled by the county’s low conviction rate for domestic violence cases, its high dismissal rate and the recent surge in fatalities.
“We have been talking about domestic violence for decades. It was a focus when I was running for DA in 1998,” said Reed, now a senior district court judge. “There have been press releases. There have been campaigns. This is not something new.
“When you look at the total amount of money that we have spent trying to address this issue, through housing, through support services, I just don’t understand it.”
Gonzales, who was sworn in as DA in January 2019, offered a different take. He said the office has been hobbled by a heavy caseload and a “historical lack of resources” for prosecuting family violence and sexual assault.
He said he inherited a backlog of 3,300 felony domestic violence cases. They had been filed by police agencies and were awaiting review by prosecutors to determine whether there was sufficient evition.
dence to seek indictments. Some of the cases were nearly 20 years old.
Prosecutors put in about 1,500 “voluntary overtime hours” in 2019 to attack the backlog, records state. It had been reduced to 25 felony cases by April of this year, according to the district attorney’s office.
But felonies make up just 15 percent of the domestic violence caseload. The rest are misdemeanor assaults, and the backlog there was even worse — and has proved much harder to reduce.
In 2015, prosecutors reviewed 3,800 misdemeanor family violence cases filed by police officers. By 2020, the number had grown to 6,700. And that doesn’t count the thousands of pending cases in which charges already had been filed.
Until last year, four junior prosecutors and two judges, sitting in domestic violence specialty courts, shouldered that entire workload. The idea was that judges steeped in the complex dynamics of domestic abuse would bring a heightened focus to the problem.
But a mismatch between resources and caseload doomed the effort. Prosecutors had time to prepare only a fraction of cases for trial. Delays multiplied. Eventually, victims lost heart and stopped cooperating with prosecutors.
Defense attorneys exploited the situation. Knowing that prosecutors were desperate to clear cases, they negotiated reduced charges, dismissals or deferred adjudica
Bryan Lee Hoover is serving a 12-year sentence for burning Christianson, his then-girlfried.
“Until there is some mechanism to better address the volume issue, that will be a continuing problem,” said Henricksen, the DA’s chief of litigation. “No one can do the job they want handling 1,000 cases a year.”
Prodded by Gonzales, court officials in 2020 began to assign misdemeanor family violence cases more widely, to ease the burden on the two specialty courts. Now, 13 judges share the workload.
So far, however, the effect has been negligible.
Bexar County uses standards established by the National Center for State Courts to measure the court system’s efficiency. Those standards say that 98 percent of domestic violence cases should be resolved within six months of filing — through a trial, a dismissal or a negotiated plea.
In the first three months of 2021, only 31 percent of cases in County Court 7, one of the two misdemeanor domestic violence courts, had been resolved within that time period. In the other, County Court 13, only 27 percent had hit the mark.
For county courts overall, 60 percent of misdemeanor cases were resolved within six months.
Gonzales has sought millions of dollars from Bexar County Commissioners Court to alleviate delays in domestic violence prosecutions. In the misdemeanor courts, he’s hired two more domestic violence prosecutors and two victim advocates.
Those versed in the system say such steps are long overdue. By the time many victims hear from the DA’s office, they’ve lost interest or given up on prosecution. They’ve moved. They’ve changed their phone numbers. They’ve reconciled with their abusers.
“They took too long to talk to the victims,” said former Judge Eugenia “Genie” Wright, reflecting on her experience handling thousands of family violence cases. She oversaw County Court 7 from 2010 to 2018.
“I spoke to the district attorney at the time in El Paso, and the moment a complaint came in, they got in touch with the victim. They stayed with them from day one,” Wright recalled. “But in Bexar County, there was very little money put into following up with victims. Many times, prosecutors wouldn’t reach out to victims until trial.
“I don’t understand why everyone is acting like the situation today is a big surprise. These were