Deadly weekend in city
Woman going through trash among 5 slain; mayor calls for vigilance
Stacey Berghoff had a knack for giving trash — anything from junked chairs to tossed rugs — new life.
Roommate Randy Husmann called Berghoff a bona fide “dumpster diver.” Rummaging through trash, though, was what ignited the deadly clash Saturday in northwest Houston that left her dead and a motorist on the run.
“Why someone would confront her for taking stuff out of the trash, I have no idea,” said Husmann, whose daughter was Berghoff ’s best friend.
The pre-dawn shooting was among the year’s 44 deaths — at least five of which occurred over the weekend — that Mayor Sylvester Turner highlighted Monday at a news conference, condemning the violence and calling on residents to report information to police if they have it. Police said the number of murders is a 32 percent increase from the same period in 2020.
The mayor pointed to the COVID-19 pandemic contributing to stress in the community, but he said it does not excuse the heightened violence.
“It is a crime problem that we must all work together to confront, and that is what I’m asking all of us to do,” Turner said. “This is an all-hands-on-deck situa
tion. It’s not just up to HPD. It is all of our responsibility to get on top of the crime situation that is going on in our city.”
Turner directed $4.1 million in overtime payments last October to put more cops on the street, and the police department in December sent 20 more detectives to the homicide division. The mayor said police would have an increased presence in the city’s hot spots for violence next weekend.
Turner asked crime witnesses to speak up and encouraged neighborhood groups and apartment managers to revisit their safety guidelines.
Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said he was hopeful those efforts will help clear cases and curb violence. He has instructed the police department to start cracking down again on lowerlevel offenses, which officers had pulled back on amid overcrowding at the Harris County Jail.
“When we lose a Houstonian, it’s an affront to all Houstonians. It doesn’t matter where you live,” Acevedo said. “Word to the wise, in terms of everybody that has been running around … I’m happy to report the jail is open, it’s back to business, and we’re starting to make arrests for lower-level offenses.”
As officials gathered at City Hall, the dumped desk and coffee table that likely caught Berghoff ’s eye over the weekend remained along the 8600 block of Rayson Road, waiting for a city junk waste collection truck.
Investigators said Berghoff, 35, and a friend, Kristi Marrone, were going through a trash pile around 4:45 a.m. when a man in a silver Ford F-150 pickup truck confronted
the two in the road. Police said the encounter began in an argument over the women’s parked car in the road.
“This crazy guy in a silver pickup just started driving really fast up and down the street,” Marrone recalled Monday.
Marrone said the man was driving erratically and nearly hit them and their parked car. An argument escalated to violence and Marrone said the man punched Berghoff in the face. After the struggle, Marrone said Berghoff told her that she had stabbed the
man in self defense at least once during the fight. He also had threatened to shoot her, she said.
The two returned to the car and left the street. The man, however, followed them to the nearby 8500 block of Rannie Road, where he opened fire on Berghoff ’s vehicle. She was struck once and killed. She died at the scene.
“He was looking for trouble from the start,” Marrone said, adding that a bullet pierced her own jacket, but left her uninjured.
Husmann, 62, said he began to
worry when Berghoff failed to come home that morning and her phone went unanswered.
He acknowledged Berghoff’s lengthy criminal record but said none of that mattered. She had been his caretaker throughout the pandemic.
“She was helping me,” Husmann said, noting that had she been there he would not be smoking the cigarette in his hand. “She didn’t deserve this and I hope like hell they get the guy who did it.”
Police attributed the shooting to road rage, one of the worrisome
pandemic trends that Acevedo warned of in December.
Police cataloged more than 400 murders last year even as the pandemic kept many residents at home. The killings placed the year’s murder rate — calculated by the number of known murders per 100,000 people — as one of the worst in three decades.
Aggravated assaults were behind a violent crime uptick in Houston during the pandemic months, records show.