Arrest leads to tragedy in Rio Grande Valley
Texas Rangers found evidence of brutal treatment as unauthorized worker shocked with stun gun, punched, knelt on; he died weeks later
OEDINBURG, Texas fficer Coltynn Williams was the first person at the Hidalgo County Jail to actually see Jorge Gonzalez Zuniga.
When he clocked in for his graveyard shift on Easter Sunday, Gonzalez was still in the drunk tank, 20 hours after his arrest.
Gonzalez, an unauthorized farmworker from Mexico, had been arrested at a party the day before for public intoxication and violating the curfew imposed across parts of the Rio Grande Valley to help control the widening coronavirus pandemic. Now, he lay motionless on the detox cell’s concrete floor, his bagged lunch untouched.
Williams asked him if he felt OK.
“My neck hurts,” he replied.
When he was unable to hold his head up for a mug shot, Williams sent him to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed a crushed vertebra and a body temperature of 82.4 degrees. He spent the next several weeks on a ventilator and died on July 15.
In their report on the investigation, a partial copy of which was obtained by the New York Times, the Texas Rangers found evidence of brutal treatment during Gonzalez’s arrest, during which witnesses said he was shocked with a stun gun, tripped, punched and knelt on before being pushed chest-first into a patrol car.
On Aug. 20, the Hidalgo County District Attorney’s Office sought manslaughter charges against the three deputies who conducted the arrest, but the grand jury came back with a decision on the same day: no charges.
The case has sent shock waves through the Rio Grande Valley, a place that has dealt with corruption and brutality in law enforcement in the past, but where protests of the kind that rattled the country after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis are rare.
More than 142,000 unauthorized immigrants live in the valley, many of whom fear detection and deportation much more than mistreatment by police, especially those who came from countries where government power is routinely wielded with violence.
People outside the valley are largely unaware of what life is like for those who live in the shadows along the border, said Katia Gonzalez, who is Jorge Gonzalez’s sister.
“My brother had to die for people down here to know,” she said.
Katia Gonzalez said that Jorge Gonzalez, 23, had cried when he watched a video of Floyd’s death. What happened to Floyd had happened to him, he told her in May, a little more than a month before he died. A week later, Black Lives Matters protesters marched in downtown McAllen, a rare display of solidarity in support of the small Black population in the Rio Grande Valley.
In 2008, when Jorge Gonzalez was 11 years old, he and his sister, then 9, fled the corruption and gang violence in their hometown in Tamaulipas, Mexico. They joined their father, already living north of the border, and soon after, their mother reunited with the family in Texas.
After graduating from a local high school, Gonzalez harvested cabbage and watermelons from the rich soil to support his wife and 1-year-old son, Jason.
In March, as the coronavirus pandemic spread in South Texas, authorities feared that the traditional family gatherings that are a feature of spring and summer in the valley would help fuel the outbreak and overwhelm hospitals. Sheriff J.E. Guerra made it clear that his deputies would be out to enforce a countywide curfew over the Easter weekend.
“The objective of this order is for people to stay away from each other,” he said. “So I know that it’s very difficult, especially in our culture, because during the most holiest of all holidays, families all want to be together.”
On Saturday, April 11, Gonzalez, dressed in a pink shirt and camouflage pants, went with his wife to a friend’s cookout at the Delta Lake RV Park, 3 miles from the high school that he had graduated from. The couple needed a night out. They were tired of isolating at home because of the pandemic.
Gonzalez drank a dozen beers, he later told an investigator, then passed out on the ground. His wife found a spot in one of the trailer homes to sleep. Other cookouts continued into the night.
Lucio Duque, the park’s landlord, said he got a call from a neighbor shortly before 2 a.m., saying some of the tenants were fighting. So he walked the short distance to the mobile homes and confronted partygoers.
Three Hidalgo County sheriff ’s officers — Sgt. Julio Treviño and two deputies, Steven Farias and Jorge Cabrera — arrived after the neighbor called 911.
The deputies found Gonzalez and nudged him awake, according to the Texas Rangers’ report. At first, they ordered Gonzalez to go sleep inside a trailer, but Treviño decided to arrest him after Duque said he did not live on the property.
Gonzalez later told his sister that he had been scared, so he ran — perhaps, she said, because he knew that the sheriff ’s office cooperated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The deputies tackled him. Duque said in an interview that Gonzalez, who was 6-foot-3 and 235 pounds, had run but did not fight back as the officers cuffed him.
“He just didn’t want to be arrested,” he said. Jesus Reyes, a tenant, said he saw “one deputy pick up Jorge’s hands from the back, another tripped him and the third looked like he punched or pulled Jorge’s head.”
Reyes said Gonzalez fell to the ground headfirst and appeared to be unconscious after that, but then Reyes heard the sound of a Taser and heard Gonzalez shriek.
At that point, another witness told the Texas Rangers, the deputies walked a handcuffed and shackled Gonzalez to the patrol cars, but when they reached the cars, Gonzalez fell to the ground again. Then the witness saw a deputy kneel on Gonzalez’s back, and a second deputy kneel on his neck.
In a dashcam video from inside a patrol car, according to the investigator, Cabrera could be seen pulling Gonzalez chest-first onto the back seat, he said. Gonzalez kept saying that the deputies had “paralyzed” him. “I’m not breathing,” he said, using words similar to those Floyd had used during his arrest. “Pick me up.”
“My nephew was a fun, outgoing person, and they took his life away,” said Danielle Gonzalez, Jorge Gonzalez’s aunt. “All we want are answers.”