Cinco de Mayo harks back to police brutality case in 1977
Cinco de Mayo is a day of celebration in the United States, but in Houston, the date has bittersweet connotations. That’s because it also marks one of the most shameful acts of police brutality in the city’s history, prompting a riot and the emergence of a civil rights movement to bring equality to the criminal justice system.
It’s known by historians as the Joe Campos Torres case — the brutal, racially charged beating and slaying of a Vietnam veteran committed by what was dubbed by the media as a “gang” of six Houston Police Department officers.
On Saturday, many Houstonians will celebrate MexicanAmerican and Hispanic culture with parties and special events, while others will commemorate the other side of Houston’s Cinco de Mayo with the annual Joe Campos Torres Solidarity Walk for Past and Future Generations. It is scheduled to take place Saturday, beginning at 10 a.m. at the intersection of 4800 Canal Street and 100 Burr Street, and will follow the trail of events associated with the Campos Torres case.
The Cinco de Mayo observances are rooted in the improbable defeat by the Mexican Army of occupying French forces at the battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, but in the U.S., it has become a wider celebration of Hispanic culture.
But in Houston, it was Cinco de Mayo in 1977 when a case of extreme police brutality gave the festivities a dark pedigree.
Shortly before midnight, HPD officer M. G. Oropeza was dispatched to check on a disturbance at a cantina located in the heavily Hispanic East End
neighborhood. After arriving, he called for a backup unit.
Just after 11:35 p.m., as recounted by Mitchel P. Roth and Tom Kennedy in their book “Houston Blue: The Story of the Houston Police Department,” and other publications, Oropeza walked into the bar with officers Stephen Orlando and Charles Elliot to subdue and arrest a 23-year-old man who the manager said was inebriated and quarreling with two other customers.
The man, a Vietnam veteran named Joe Campos Torres, was handcuffed and taken into a patrol car. By then, three police vehicles and six policemen were at the scene. One of the officers said the young Hispanic man had put up a fight while being taken into custody.
That was enough for them to turn on Torres and begin a frenzy of brutal attacks. They had to “quiet” the guy, officer Joseph Janish said in subsequent criminal investigations.
The six officers drove their cars in caravan to take Torres to “The Hole,” a hidden spot below street level at the south bank of Buffalo Bayou, near the courthouse complex. Five of the policemen took turns beating Torres, who was still handcuffed and unable to protect himself.
He was then taken to the city jail, but he was so severely injured that the sergeant on duty ordered the officers to take him to the emergency room at Ben Taub Hospital. He refused to book Torres into the jail until he received medical treatment.
That was too much trouble for the gang; too much time to be wasted at the hospital for this Hispanic guy. They instead went back to “The Hole” for the ultimate act of brutality. Officer Terry Denson came up with the idea: “Let’s see if the wetback can swim,” he said.
One of them removed the handcuffs. And those who chronicled the attack said the executioner was Denson, who thrust Torres into Buffalo Bayou, where he drowned.
“When you have law enforcement officers acting like that and calling somebody a wetback just because they don’t like him, it becomes a very racially hostile situation,” said Lupe Salinas, who at the time was a Harris County assistant district attorney and attended the trial against the officers as an observer in Huntsville.
The additional devastation for “that family is that it was on Mother’s Day when they found Torres’ body floating in the bayou,” said Salinas, who later became an assistant U.S. attorney in the civil rights division of the Southern District of Texas and is now a law professor at Texas Southern University. Protest raged around the city. HPD fired all but one of the officers and immediately created its first internal affairs unit, an attempt to remedy its badly damaged image.
But it didn’t appease Hispanics and other minority communities, who were outraged not only by Torres’ death but other cases of brutality and corruption.
Tensions escalated after only two of the six officers, Denson and Orlando, were prosecuted but found guilty of only a misdemeanor — negligent homicide — and received lenient punishments of a year of probation and a $1 fine.
“Many of us protested and marched to push for the officers to be indicted and punished,” said Jonny Mata, a young Hispanic activist at the time, now with the Greater Houston Coalition for Justice. “Unfortunately, the trial didn’t produce a satisfactory result, and the policemen walked away from the court and just went on with their lives.”
Under pressure from the community, the Justice Department took three of the policemen to federal court on charges of violating Torres’ civil rights, for which they served nine months in prison.
A year after his death, at a park in the Northside neighborhood, a party to celebrate Cinco de Mayo quickly morphed into a bloody riot to commemorate Torres’ klling. It became what is known as the 1978 Moody Park Riot, where violence erupted as approximately 1,500 participants chanted “Justice for Joe Torres,” according to police reports at the time. One police officer was run over by a car, two journalists were stabbed, and real estate properties and cars were set on fire.
It was a critical moment in Houston’s history and a cause that motivated the Hispanic community to organize and fight for their civil rights, Mata recalled. One of the positive outcomes was that HPD established a Hispanic liaison so the community could bring their concerns. And historically, the Torres case was the first time in Houston that police officers involved in a brutality case were taken to trial.
Margaret Campos Torres, Joe’s mother, is still grieving his death 41 years later, said Richard Molina, one of her grandchildren and Joe’s nephew.
“My grandmother hasn’t been able to talk that much about Joe in many years. It overwhelmed the family, and she just wanted my uncle’s soul to rest,” Molina said. He was born a few years after his uncle died and is now an activist for criminal justice and one of the organizers of the solidarity walk.
The walk is “important because it recognizes the pain and grief that family members of those killed by police experience,” said Mario Salinas, a Hispanic activist in Houston and one of the coordinators of the walk. “It’s often overlooked, even though it is a pain that has been experienced for as long as law enforcement has been focusing on certain communities.”
TSU law professor Lupe Salinas said the problem of police brutality is still frequent in Texas and the nation.
“My observation is that police brutality is still too much an issue in the American society today,” Salinas said. “We need chiefs of police departments, district attorneys and other public officials that will not tolerate lawless police officers.”