Candlelight vigil honors deputy remembered as a trailblazer
Charged with capital murder, suspected killer denied bond
Long before Sandeep Dhaliwal joined the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, he was always looking for two things in Houston: respect and acceptance.
That’s how his friend since childhood, B.J. Josan, described him during an emotional tribute to the deputy who was killed Friday in a traffic-stop shooting near Cypress.
Josan spoke to hundreds of people who gathered Monday for a candlelight vigil to remember the first Sikh deputy in Texas.
“He finally felt accepted and respected,” Josan said of Dhaliwal’s time with the sheriff’s office.
Lawmakers, local officials and family friends spoke of his “eternal optimism” and devotion to a life of service on a windy evening.
Dhaliwal became the county’s first Sikh deputy in 2008 under then-Sheriff Adrian Garcia, who spoke of the deputy as a “brother and a son.”
“This has got to be one of the most difficult moments in my life,” said Garcia, who directly addressed Dhaliwal’s family members at the event.
Dhaliwal’s death sent shock waves throughout the community. The Houston man charged in his death was in court earlier Monday.
Shoulders slightly hunched as he silently shuffled into court in orange jail scrubs, Robert Solis, charged with capital murder, faced Judge Chris Morton. Solis
heard stern words about his possible fate before he was sent back to jail with no bond.
“It is a likely outcome that death will be the sentence here,” Morton told the accused killer, pointing to the severity of the potential punishment as a reason to keep the 47year-old behind bars.
Solis was already on the run with an active parole warrant when Dhaliwal pulled him over for a traffic violation mid-day Friday in the Cypress area. As Dhaliwal — a “trailblazer” in the sheriff’s office — walked back to his patrol car, Solis allegedly ran up and shot him from behind.
Afterward, authorities arrested Solis as he walked out of a Marble Slab Creamery.
“He is a danger to our society,” prosecutor Katie Warren told the court Monday. “He showed signs of trying to flee.”
Before Friday’s arrest, Solis already had a history of violence, including a string of past convictions Warren outlined in court when asking the judge to continue holding him without bond. Solis was convicted of two felonies in 2002 after records show a jury found him guilty of shooting a man and then barricading himself in his home with his 4-year-old son, intending to use the boy “as a shield.”
He was sentenced to 20 years in prison for those crimes and was released on parole in 2014. Three years later, authorities put out a warrant for violating parole and illegally possessing a weapon.
That warrant — which could have sent him back to prison — was still active Friday, when Dhaliwal pulled him over just before 1 p.m. on Willancy Court. When the 10year veteran walked over to the silver Nissan Altima, he and Solis appeared to have a normal conversation, according to deputies who reviewed dashcam footage.
Sitting behind the wheel, Solis turned to the woman next to him in the front seat and said he had “tickets.” As the traffic stop unfolded, she eventually asked Dhaliwal for permission to leave the scene, and a male friend picked her up a little before the shooting started.
After the two drove off, Dhaliwal was walking back to the patrol car to run Solis’ driver’s license when Solis stepped out of his vehicle with a gun and ran toward the deputy, prosecutors said. After the shooting, he allegedly got back in the car and drove away.
When authorities arrived, they found Dhaliwal lying in the street where he’d been shot. The wounded lawman was flown to a hospital, while deputies at the scene worked to find his shooter.
Using dashcam and bodycam footage, Warren told the court, deputies put together a description of the suspected shooter and his vehicle, including the license plate number. They found the car, empty, in a nearby Kroger parking lot and set up a perimeter — then arrested Solis as he left the ice cream store.
He wouldn’t give deputies his name and refused to cooperate, Warren said. While authorities were arresting him, the woman he’d been with in the car showed up at the scene, along with the man who picked her up.
They both told investigators that Solis had called them separately and confessed to the shooting, then asked them to pick him up.
“They, of course, didn’t,” Warren said.
Investigating deputies also found security images that appeared to show Solis pulling something from his pants and tossing it in a dumpster. When authorities checked the dumpster, they found a .45-caliber gun — the same caliber allegedly used in the deputy’s slaying.
Prosecutors said Monday that they haven’t yet determined whether to seek the death penalty in the case, but Allan Isbell, the defense lawyer appointed to represent Solis, acknowledged after court that it would not be an unusual move in a case involving the slaying of a lawman.
“A capital murder case of course is either life without parole or the death penalty,” he added. “Unless they decide not to seek the death penalty, he’s not entitled to a bond.”
His client was “subdued,” he said, adding that they’d spoken for only a few minutes and he didn’t know whether the man felt any remorse.
As she left the courtroom Monday morning, Warren sought to refocus the conversation on the slain deputy instead of on his alleged killer.
“Right now, this community is in mourning,” she said. “Right now is not the time to talk about the defendant but rather right now is the time to talk about Deputy Dhaliwal and the amazing legacy that he left for this community. That’s all I have to say.”
Monday night’s vigil was held in Dhaliwal’s district at Deputy Darren Goforth Park in northeast Harris County. The Goforth park site was fitting because Dhaliwal was instrumental in getting the park named for his close friend who was killed in 2015.
Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez shared stories from residents in Dhaliwal’s district. In one anecdote, he said the deputy noticed a woman struggling with a broken garage door. Dhaliwal, he said, offered to watch her house closely so she could go to work.
“He was a community-oriented officer who led from the heart,” he said. “He was an ambassador for Sikhism and law enforcement.”
The Sikh community was out in force at the event. Bobby Singh, a Houston businessman and southwest regional director of the Sikh American Legal Defense Fund, said Dhaliwal paved the way so that his community did “not have to pick faith over service.”
“Trailblazer” was a word often associated with Dhaliwal at the vigil.
One Sikh man, Rajbir Sra, who said he was a family friend, said Dhaliwal made the community proud when he joined law enforcement.
“We’re very commonly mistaken for Muslims, and after 9/11 it got pretty tough ... but he joined law enforcement and he was just proving it to everybody that ‘I’m one of you,’ ” Sra said.
U.S. Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, and several county commissioners also spoke at the vigil. Dhaliwal’s family members became emotional as leaders described him as an “American hero.”