How did so many MPD folks miss a man dying in a van?
It was bad enough that robbers shot Pablo Castor three times while he was enjoying a beer and listening to music with his friends — Florensio Perez and Bardomiano Perez Hernandez — in a van in a Binghamton apartment parking lot last Dec.18.
It was worse that one of his friends, Hernandez, was killed.
But what intensified the pain and awfulness was how Castor learned about his friend’s death.
He didn’t learn it from the Memphis Police Department. Nor did he learn about it from an obituary while recuperating from his wounds.
Castor learned Hernandez was dead from the odor of Hernandez’s own rotting corpse; which he discovered in the back of the van when he went to pick it up at the police storage lot Feb. 5.
A body that police overlooked because apparently, even with 19 officers involved in the case, somebody didn’t think to search the entire van.
How in the world did they manage to miss a whole person?
For their part, both Memphis Police Director Michael Rallings and Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland have called the incident unacceptable.
As MPD continues to investigate, a review by The Commercial Appeal has uncovered some clues.
Of the officers involved in the probe, all except four have been investigated by internal affairs for violations of police practices and procedures, such as wrecking police vehicles and not turning on body cameras.
One officer, Thomas Ray, was fired from the MPD in 2013 after pleading guilty to reckless driving and other charges in connection with wrecking a police ATV in Fayette County, but was rehired in 2017.
As it turns out, Ray was placed on long-term absence a month after the Dec. 18 shooting.
Last year Essica Cage, vice president of the Memphis Police Association, blamed the incident on crime scene investigators being overworked. With the city ranked the third most dangerous in the nation for violent crime, that’s probably an issue.
Problem is, this isn’t the first time this has happened.
In 2007, 32-year-old Curtis Carmicle’s bullet-ridden body was found in the trunk of a 1993 Chevrolet Corsica that had been stored at the impound lot. His family found it after they were called to pick it up, and after they had filed a missing person’s report on him.
Besides, it’s hard to believe with that case touching that many officers, the question of whether the entire van had been searched didn’t arise — especially since Castor said he told an investigator at the hospital that three people were in the van during the shooting.
Such a search might not have necessarily revealed Hernandez’s presence, but money or other items that might have offered more clues about the shooting.
Also, while the police did arrest the two suspected robbers, maybe if more were immersed in Latino culture — 2 percent of MPD sworn officers are Latino compared to 6 percent of Memphis’ population — they might have been more inclined to thoroughly inspect the van.
For example, Latino construction workers like Castor, Perez, and Hernandez often travel to work sites in vans.
That means some may ride in the back.
All Castor, Perez and Hernandez wanted was some relaxation during a time when Latinos and other immigrants don’t get many moments to relax.
Those moments have been stolen by President Trump, who demonizes them regularly and whips up animosity toward them, and by criminals who believe they can rob and steal from them because they won’t report them to the police because of deportation fears.
Then, as these three men were relaxing, they not only were victimized by robbers who saw them as a mark, but by sloppy police work that led to their friend’s body being left to rot in a van for two months.
So, Rallings and Strickland are right. It’s unacceptable. And it should never happen again. To anyone.