Today, Explained - Introducing Chicano Squad

Episode Date: February 1, 2021

After the 1977 murder of a young Latino man, the Houston Police Department created a team of five young Latino officers to solve homicides in their community. True crime meets forgotten history in the Vox Media Podcast Network’s Chicano Squad. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Ferrum. In 2020, the killing of George Floyd sort of mainstreamed conversations about police reform in the United States. They were happening in homes, in friend groups, in text chains, in churches, on TV. But it's worth remembering that these conversations have been happening for a long time.

And there's a new podcast from the Vox Media Podcast Network that serves as a reminder. It's called Chicano Squad. It's a true crime story blended with a bit of forgotten history from the late 70s. A young man dies in police custody. There are protests and demands for racial justice. And the Houston Police Department responds by creating a team of Latino officers to solve homicides in the city's Latino community. They call them the Chicano Squad.

On the show today, we're bringing you the first episode, but if you want to hear the whole thing, you're going to have to subscribe wherever you listen. Here's the host of Chicano Squad. On the show today, we're bringing you the first episode, but if you want to hear the whole thing, you're going to have to subscribe wherever you listen. Here's the host of Chicano Squad, Cristela Alonso. It was a spring afternoon in Houston in 1978. The date was May 7th. It was a Sunday after Cinco de Mayo. Thousands of people gathered at a sprawling green space north of downtown called Moody Park to celebrate the Mexican holiday. Now as a Tejana, that's a Mexican-American Texan, I can't help but think of my own typical Sundays with my family, filled with pan dulce and barbacoa runs, so we could celebrate the weekend with the Mexican staples.

In 1978, the neighborhood near Moody Park was largely Latino, mostly of Mexican descent, still is today, and so Cinco de Mayo was a holiday to celebrate exuberantly. I don't consider it a holiday myself, but the U.S. sure seems to think it is. That day, live Tejano bands played, and the park's 35 acres were full of family picnics. But as festive as the event was, a certain charge, an ominous energy, lurked beneath the surface. In 1978, there was another very all-American aspect to the scene in Moody Park.

Carlos Calvillo, a local activist, remembers. That particular one was very different because for about a year, the community had been really upset and just angry at the Houston Police Department for what they perceived that had happened to Joe Campos Torres. Exactly one year earlier, on Cinco de Mayo in 1977, a young Latino veteran named Jose Campos Torres

had died while in custody of the Houston Police Department. And anger over the case had not subsided, only grown. It was a year full of marches, protests outside City Hall, and increasingly heated exchanges between HPD and the community. We were demanding two things. Justice for Jose Campos Torres and jail the murdering cops for life. Those were our simple demands. This is Travis Morales. Travis is an activist

who grew up in Houston and was at Moody Park that day. Some people told us before Moody Park that if the cops got off, that there was going to be a riot. Quite frankly, I didn't believe it at the time. And the cops did get off. Just five weeks before that sunny Cinco de Mayo in Moody Park, a decision came down in Jose Campos Torres' case. The cops got a slap on the wrist. For a community that had been waiting, they felt justice had not been served. Despite the underlying tension, the park had remained peaceful,

jovial, festive throughout the day. That changed at about 7.30 that night. A small fight over a girl broke out between two intoxicated men. Park police officers tried to stop the fight, and suddenly it was like someone had thrown a lit match on gas. Adrian Garcia was a teenager attending the celebration that day. As those officers in the park used force to try and break up the fight, the crowd reacted. That's when the rocks and the bottles started to fly. Then that's when you got into a true riot mode. Oh, my God! into a true riot mode.

Two reporters from Channel 2, Jack Cato and Phil Archer, were taking pictures of the burning car when they were attacked. Black jackets and shields were handed out and the officers formed a line to move to the scene. These chaotic clips, taken by a news crew at ABC 13

on the ground that night in Moody Park, sound like they could have been ripped from any of the protests that have erupted across America today. Some motorists found themselves greeted with drawn pistols. Martinez and I had that experience ourselves. Police officer was just run down. Police right now are calling for an ambulance as this officer lies seriously wounded here in the street. The death of Jose Campos Torres at the hands of the Houston Police Department would be the spark that set off a powder keg that had been brewing between Houston's Mexican-American community and its police department for a long time. It would push the city of Houston to the brink, and it would destroy the last shred of trust the Houston Latino

community had in the police department meant to protect them. From Frequency Machine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Chicano Squad, a piece of history I can almost guarantee you've never heard before. I'm Cristela Alonso. I'm a comedian, actress, and activist. And I'm also a first-generation Mexican-American born and raised in Texas. As a Latina, I have broken the glass ceiling and made TV film history twice. History is important to me, especially telling stories about my Latino community. Even stories that are difficult. This year, protests led by the Black Lives Matter movement revealed to much of this country something they never knew about.

A problem that has existed for decades. I have to admit, I've seen some people within my own Latino community react as if these protests are not about them, or rather, us. So, it's time to go back. La ciudad es comunidad. We'll be a rising tide when we unify. Our story begins exactly one year before the Moody Park Riot would shake Houston. It was early on the morning of May 8, 1977, when one of J.C. Freeman's pontoon tour boats was navigating through the already steamy, slow-moving water of Houston's Buffalo Bayou. Okay, you have to know, Houston's bayous are its lifeline.

Between the concrete, the skyscrapers, the medical centers, the shopping malls, the posh neighborhoods, and the barrios. The bayous go on for 2,500 miles. They weave underneath tangled highway interchanges and sky-tickling overpasses, past skyscrapers, right through the heart of downtown and into Galveston Bay. Over the years, many of these waterways had become badly polluted. It wasn't uncommon for Houstonians to dump broken appliances and other garbage into them. I'm not kidding. We even heard a story about how they used to hold a race in Buffalo Bayou every year called the Reeking Regatta. How about that for a picture?

And by the late 70s, parts of them were thick with brown, foul-smelling water. Plenty of people loved to make fun of the bayous, but for J.C. Freeman, it was all love. The heron birds and the special seabirds. And you know, porpoise came up to Memorial Park. That's how clean it used to be, and everybody used to go skinny dipping in the bayou. Come on now. J.C. had spent years building up a successful tour boat company that ferried families and students through the peaceful bayou that splices through the heart of Houston. But on this particular morning, May 8, 1977,

Freeman was about to become a part of history. Overnight, he kept his boat safe by paying some of the guys who slept on a landing on the bayou to watch over his fleet. Two days earlier, when he'd arrived at the landing in the morning, some of the guys told him they heard something suspicious overnight. They were crashed out, and they heard something going on on the other side of the bay bayou and you could hear the echo underneath the Fannin Street Bridge. The men said they'd heard a commotion on the other side of the bayou. And they kind of saw these cops over there take their handcuffs off the guy and threw him in the bayou. The men described what they thought was a man falling with an unforgettable splash

into the murky water of Buffalo Bayou. The story sounded crazy. Then, on that balmy May morning, he looked up and saw one of his boat operators speeding back towards the landing with a look of panic. He had seen a body floating in the water. And he picked me up and we went down there. The men pulled the body onto the deck of the pontoon boat.

It was obvious that the man's body had been in the water for a few days. It was disfigured and the body was degrading very quickly. J.C. Freeman began trying to figure out who the man was. All these years later, his memory is hazy, but he recalls finding dog tags. He called the police to report the body and read the name to the dispatcher, Jose Torres. I said, hey, do you have a line on this person? What the dispatcher said next stopped him in his tracks. And they said, yeah, he's in police custody right now. I said, no, he's not.

He's down here on the bio. We just fished him out of the bio. Something had obviously happened between the time Jose had been in police custody and the time his body was fished from the water. Something that would change life dramatically for the city of Houston for years to come. Jose Campos Torres's family had started to get nervous. His sister Janie was only 10 at the time, but still remembers it all clear as day. I know it was Cinco de Mayo. He was out that day, went to a neighborhood cantina a couple of blocks away from the house.

Now, everyone knew that Jose Campos Torres liked to visit the neighborhood bars, the cantinas. He was especially fond of one in the heart of Houston's East End neighborhood called Club 21, where he often fought with the bartender and anyone else who wanted to argue. But everyone also knew that no matter what, he always showed up to work. At the time, he lived with his grandmother. The day after Cinco de Mayo, she grew worried when she realized he hadn't come home, and even more worried when she heard from a co-worker that Jose hadn't been at work.

As word got out that he was missing, Jose's family gathered at his grandmother's house, a few blocks from Club 21. So my aunts and my dad and everybody was looking for him, calling around, trying to find out where he could be at or who was he last with. The Torres family was well known in the Houston vecindario, the neighborhood they called home. Okay, a quick sidebar here. In the series, you might hear some people use the word barrios. For me, barrios has a negative connotation, similar to the word ghetto. So I prefer to call them simply vecindarios. In the Torres home, there were three boys and three girls. Jose was the oldest. All the kids were born and raised in Houston. There were also aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and babies. The Torres family was large.

For a kid like Janie, waiting for news about her favorite brother was agonizing. We knew that he wasn't in hospital. We knew that he wasn't in jail. One day passed, and then when Friday passed, Friday, payday, didn't show up. Jose missing payday was a big deal. Jose's mother grew quiet. Now as a mother herself, Janie understands her mother's quiet all too well. Now today, I kind of see that my mom was more quiet.

I saw her more, of course, down, course down you know things like that that's probably you know a mother's instinct you know feeling when your child's no longer with you you know and she just had no confirmation yet, but it's like every mother knows their kid. Torres's sister hugged me and was crying, saying, nobody has told Jose's story the way that you told it. She says, he's either a superhero or he's a villain, but you made him real. That's Dwight Watson, an associate professor of history at Texas State University in San Marcos. Dwight researched the Houston Police Department, including the Jose Campos Torres case, for his book called Race in the Houston Police Department.

A change did come, and he's gone through every moment of the night Jose Campos Torres went missing. As we've mentioned, Jose was a veteran. And as Dwight told us, Jose had returned from the Army with more than just a rucksack. He was part of an elite mountain unit, according to the record. In the Vietnam War, it brought home veterans. It brought home people who were damaged by the war. One person was like that was Jose Campos Torres. Jose came home with a serious drinking problem.

He became a professional drinker, and he drank from sunup to sundown. When he was sober, Jose was serious and disciplined, a man with plans. But he had been struggling for eight months, unable to find a job and solid footing back home in Houston. Finally, in April of 1977, things began to look up. Jose got a job making $2.75 an hour as a glass contractor. It was a relief, and the jingle in his pocket wasn't bad either. And on Cinco de Mayo, Jose took some of that jingle out to celebrate, like so many others in Houston. Jose's favorite place to blow off steam was Club 21. It was a bar on the bottom of a two-story white brick building on Canal Street, a hole-in-the-wall kind of place

where the beer was cheap. He and the bar owner had a contentious relationship. And on that night, he and the bartender got into a fight. It was a hell of a fight because they called the police. The bartender had had enough of Jose, who was at the end of a 12-hour drinking bender. He had asked him to leave, but Jose refused. So the bartender called HPD. And the police knew Jose, they said, that they had had a run-in with him before. Jose's previous drunken fights had landed him in handcuffs and behind bars in the Harris County Jail a time or two before. So when the policemen showed up to pull him out of the bar, he didn't go quietly. He was beyond belligerent. He was screaming and cussing, and there was a lot of cussing back and forth at him by part of the officers.

Jose yelled at the officers, calling them pigs. The officers decided, as one of them would later tell a source, to teach Torres a lesson. They took Jose to a quiet spot they called The Hole. There were a few places like it around town, secluded spots where uniformed officers might park their cars, crank up the A.C., and catch a snooze on a hot summer day. But this particular spot they headed for that night was a parking lot in the shadows of downtown buildings along Buffalo Bayou, far from Jose's East End home in Club 21. So they got out, beat the hell out of him. Okay, trigger warning.

I have to let you know, this next part, it's emotional. Forty years later, and it still feels raw. Maybe it's because we're still hearing stories like this today. But it's important to tell. So this is what happened. They beat Jose with their batons and their bare hands. Once they finished, they loaded him, bruised and broken, back into the squad car and drove him to the jail.

But when he arrived at the jail looking like he did, the admitting officer wouldn't take him. Houston had had a series of events where prisoners in the jail had either died or been seriously hurt. And so the jail would no longer take a prisoner that had visible scars or marks or looked like he was in need of medical attention. So they had already kind of beat the hell out of Torres, and the jailer said, no, we're not going to take him. The officers were told to take him instead to a hospital, but they didn't.

So they decide during the drive that they're not going to do that. The officers headed back to the hole. They even called buddies to come. They get on the radio and say, meet us at the spot. They got somebody who needs to teach a lesson. And so with batons and flashlights, and they basically beat the hell out of Torres. One of the officers walked Jose Campos Torres to the edge of the lot where, depending on who you believe, he was either pushed, fell, or jumped 20 feet down into the dark, polluted water of Buffalo Bayou.

Sandcuffs were off at that time, but he was already still drunk. And sometime between the buff whooping and letting him go, Torres drowned. Jose died in the murky water of Buffalo Bayou. Houston would never be the same. More after the break. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames.

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with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. In the days after Jose Campos Torres was beaten by Houston police officers and left to drown in the bayou, no one who was there that night said a word. The police department's code of silence had descended over the entire incident.

It's an unspoken understanding that when shit hits the fan, police protect each other. After Jose's body was discovered two days later, police crawled the banks of the bayou, ostensibly searching for evidence. The situation was clearly suspicious. Jose had last been in police custody, and now his mangled body was floating in Buffalo Bayou. But none of that came out, at least initially. I remember seeing this tiny little article. Again, that's community activist Travis Morales. Maybe a two-inch article about an unidentified body

of a Latino man had been found in Buffalo Bayou. An unidentified Latino man. Despite these suspicious circumstances, a homicide detective concluded that it appeared there was no foul play involved, and the body was left unidentified. Now, I'm sure this is not going to come as a surprise to a lot of people, especially Latinos, but long before the death of Jose Campos Torres, it wasn't uncommon for the Latino community to have contentious encounters with HPD. Even as a child, Janie Torres recognized that the Latino neighborhoods were not always served and protected by the cops.

So we always knew somebody getting beat up by the police. You know, we saw it as life. Not realizing until way later, you know, that it was wrong. We always heard of so-and-so's brother got beat up real bad. And so, yeah, it was scary. Houston police were known for their excessive use of force, but especially in neighborhoods of color. Growing up in our house, we didn't see cops as being our heroes or anything. You know, we actually feared them. You know, to be honest, we feared them. Travis Morales.

In the 60s and 70s, HPD was known as just, look, they were known as murdering, brutalizing thugs. I mean, black people, Latino people did not want to get stopped when they were driving. Travis grew up in Houston and was a self-proclaimed nerd who always had a slide rule in his pocket. At age 17, he enrolled at Rice University in Houston and started school in the fall of 1969. I mean, I was stopped and harassed. I mean, for instance, there's an incorporated city called Bel Air within Houston. It's over on the west side. I would not, as a teenager, I would not drive through Bel Air because the police

had such a horrible reputation of stopping people and planting drugs and brutalizing them. People would be scared to death. I myself have to tell you, I'm a Texan, and I know exactly the kind of discrimination and fear that we're talking about right now. I've lived it. But I think in order to understand why Jose Torres was discovered floating in Buffalo Bayou, we need to go back in time and get into a little bit of Houston's history. Houston is as old as the state of Texas itself. In 1836, when Texas won its independence from Mexico, the Allen brothers paid $1.41 an acre for nearly 7,000 acres of land along Buffalo Bayou.

There were about 12 people living in Houston at the time, but it turned out to be a pretty good investment because in 1901, oil was discovered nearby. That's right, black gold. And that put Houston in a pretty sweet position as the center of oil development. As gusher after gusher flowed and wells went up everywhere, oil workers, both black and white, flooded to the city to take advantage of the jobs. For decades, Houston was a biracial city, home to black and white citizens. Then, in 1942, with World War II raging and absorbing thousands of workers into its war industry, farm labor ran short. So the U.S. instituted the Bracero program. Bracero means laborer in Spanish. It permitted

Mexicans to enter the country and work as laborers on farms. It's often overlooked that many Mexicans came to the U.S. to help during World War II. In return, they were offered decent wages and living conditions. A new wave, thousands of Mexican workers poured into the U.S. At almost the same time, a new landmark 1965 immigration law lifted previous quotas, quotas that severely limited immigration to the U.S. by anyone who wasn't Northern European and white. Oh, look at that. White people had it easier back then. And with the door now opened, the demographics of Houston began to shift dramatically. It was, however, still against the law to be an undocumented immigrant in the U.S., even if it was legal to hire one.

With so much uncertainty over their legal status, many Latinos in Houston feared the Houston Police Department, which had been founded in 1841, back when Houston was still a one-horse, one-steamboat kind of town. Again, Travis Morales. You know, Lead Belly wrote this song back in the 30s about, you know, if you ever go to Houston, you better not gamble, you better not fight, because it had a reputation of brutalizing police. The folk song, recorded in 1934, was when the blues musician Huddy Ledbetter, who went by Leadbelly, picked up while serving a murder sentence in the Imperial State Prison Farm in Sugar Land, outside of Houston. In it, he sings about the horrifying conditions inside the lockup, and as Travis Morales said, it also references the reputation of Houston's police force,

a force that was overwhelmingly white. In 1950, when there were around 500 officers in HPD, the department admitted its first Mexican-American into the academy. Eight years later, there were still only 15 Latino officers in HPD's ranks. Meanwhile, by 1960, Latinos made up 6% of the county's 1 million residents, and the Latino population doubled in the 1970s. The distance between HPD and the growing population of Latinos in Houston was only stretching further apart with every year, and the department would prove they were ineffective, or unwilling, to bridge the gap. We wanted an equal seat at the table, but for Latinos, that was complicated because,

and get this, it's a wild fact when you think about it, the government didn't consider us our own group. Yeah, until 1970, we were always just lumped in with white, but the census was about to change that. And I know the census can be seen as nerdy and wonky, but I like nerdy and wonky. And also, it's very important. I myself worked with organizations in both English and Spanish on the 2020 census to make sure people were counted. And in 1970, for the first time, the US Census Bureau asked participants

if their origin or descent was Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, other Spanish, or none of these. And that, quite literally, put us on the US map. Suddenly, Mexican-Americans, who had almost no political representation, had strength in these numbers. And with these numbers,

they started to unite and push for equality. The League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC as it's known, registered citizens to vote while the American GI Forum represented the rights of Hispanic veterans. A political party called La Raza Unida was also formed and ran Hispanic candidates for city council, county, and state office seats.

The Brown Berets marched and rallied for civil rights of all Latinos. Together, these groups combined under the umbrella of the Chicano movement. It's a social movement. It's an awakening. And it's not a bad word, it's a good word. That's Luis Cano. He taught sociology at the University of Houston

and is someone who has not only studied the movement, but was part of it. It embodied a philosophy and an attitude of Mexican-Americans becoming aware of our history, our heritage, and the racism that was buffeting us and had buffeted us and had denied us opportunities. And the Chicano movement was a spirit of protest that enabled Mexican-Americans spiritually to fight back against that injustice. This groundswell of young Latino people bucking against the racism that was so institutionalized in Houston began to gain increasing traction. The Houston Police Department was an obvious target. Following a string of short-lived and sometimes controversial police chiefs,

in 1976, the torch was passed to B.G. Pappy Bond. Portly and well-liked, Chief Bond was tasked with improving HPD's image with the community, raising morale, and cleaning up a department that was rapidly losing control over a growing city. Over his tenure, his weight would fluctuate with his moods. In the end, he was obese and pretty depressed. Pappy was presiding over the department on the night José Campos Torres was murdered. On the banks of the Bayou that day in May 1977, J.C. Freeman waited with the body of Jose Campos Torres for the police to arrive. The dispatcher had told him that Jose was in their custody, but someone had obviously missed

a beat in that story. When the officers arrived, they seemed nervous. Word had already started to spread up the chain that the body might belong to a man who had been arrested several nights earlier. And that meant someone would have to answer some questions. You know, that's right. The officers placed a call into Police Chief Pappy Bond to let him know. Pappy hit the ceiling. He had been tasked with turning the department's image around. This was the kind of thing that would do exactly the opposite.

He needed this incident to be kept quiet. But that wasn't going to happen. There, on the evening news, was J.C. Freeman, telling Houston viewers about how the man he'd pulled out of the bayou had been listed in police custody. A pair of firefighters paid Freeman's boat operation a visit. Pappy Bond was pissed, they told him. The police are going to kill you, man. They don't like you. And then I started carrying my.45 Colt Commander to protect myself. Get out of town for a while, they advised J.C. Freeman. And he listened.

He pulled two of his boats out of the water and left one down there, reducing his business to its bare bones. And then he left the city. While Freeman was in hiding, Dolores Perez, Jose's aunt, saw on the news that a body had been found in Buffalo Bayou and called the morgue. She and her husband then went to the morgue to try to identify their missing nephew. Officials kept the Perez's from seeing the decomposed body, so they described the clothes that José wore the day he disappeared, army fatigue and boots, a white t-shirt, and a belt

buckle featuring an Apache Indian. Though the Apache belt buckle was in the morgue, officials could not confirm to the Pérezes that the body was José's until the next day, when he was positively identified using his fingerprints. Dolores and her husband now had the unimaginable task of breaking the news to Jose's parents. The Torres family, including young Janie, were all at a movie theater watching Jaws. As a lurking shark stalked its victims on screen, Janie's aunt and uncle opened the theater door, flooding it with light. They quickly found Janie's father, and the whole family followed them out to the parking lot.

My dad was talking to my uncle. My uncle was talking to him. All of a sudden, I just saw my dad just yell out and turned around and just grabbed my mom and just grabbed my mom. Mama, they found our boy. Mama, they found our boy. Mama, somebody killed our boy. Janie's older sister was pacing around the parking lot. Her younger sister was grabbing for her mother. Janie just clutched her shirt, shaking.

All I could do was just see my mom, just her. She had no way of carrying her weight anymore. And my dad just was trying to hold her up. I was like, oh man. It's a horrible feeling. Janie's mother collapsed against the side of the car. That day was Mother's Day. We were at the theater celebrating Mother's Day.

When we found out what they did to my brother. The family decided on a closed casket funeral due to the state of Jose's body. Still, the signs of abuse had already been well documented and the questions were swirling. As the Torres family grieved, the story of Jose's death spread. A fire was lit.

People were angry, including a small but headstrong and powerful community organizer named Mamie Garcia. They call him a wetback. He was not a wetback. He was a veteran. A veteran. Excuse me. You're bringing me memories that I still have feelings. Mamie was an organizer for LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens. And for Mamie Garcia, like for so many, Jose Campos Torres's death was the last straw. Her organization's attorney, Alice Barrera, helped her turn her anger into something that would create change. Before you open your mouth, you have to have the data. And we put all the data together, the happenings, what was going on at that time. And I said we need

to meet, we need to have a press conference. And it turned out to be a rally at Guadalupe Church. Mamie and Lulac put the word out to hold a press conference, and that press conference became an event, a rally at Guadalupe Church. The turnout was enormous, and people spilled out of the church into the plaza, onto the streets. Everyone had heard the anecdotes, but collectively, from 1973 to 1977, Houston police had shot and killed 28 people. And there were plenty of other stories about rampant police abuse of power. Mamie and the other organizers that day had unlocked something. Now these experiences were being spoken about, heard, clocked. Mamie joined Travis Morales and many others who were called to action. This shook up so many people in Houston, not just the Chicanos, but people of all nationalities, people of different middle class and working class,

who were extremely upset. This was an event that would change the course of many people's lives. It would shape the next few decades of Mamie's career and the trajectory of Travis Morales' activism. And for Janie, it also marked the start of a new chapter in her life. It was very scary because, as a kid, that's not the way life's supposed to be.

You know, marching in the streets, holding signs, yelling at the cops, you know. We did a lot of those. The protest, inspired by Jose's death, stirred up Houston. They impacted every one of the activists you've heard from, Mamie, Travis, and Carlos. But here's the funny thing, and I have to say this because it feels relevant to today. These activists, they didn't agree on everything. Each one of them would take a

different approach to fixing the problems they saw. But Jose's death brought them all together for one purpose, to demand justice. As the investigation ran its course, the officers involved had time to solidify their alibi. They'd insist, if they were asked, that they had dropped him off at a hospital. Then came the autopsy, as Dwight Watson recalled. Jahemchak was the coroner at that time. And he says that it was homicide, but it was worse than that. He said Torres had bruises all over his body, even the bottom of his feet. The cause of death was drowning. In fact, when we received the autopsy report, the first page lists the cause of

death as drowning-homicide. It was obvious to the coroner this was no simple drowning. It was getting harder for the department to distance itself from José Campos Torres's death. And it would get even harder because of a man named Carlos Elliott. As the Torres family searched for where Jose could be, across town, a veteran HPD officer, Luis Elliott, noticed something was wrong with his son, Carlos, a rookie cop also with the Houston police. Carlos and his fellow officers were called to drag Jose Campos Torres out of a bar.

The other five officers that had been with him that night were all more experienced. He'd been the only rookie. Carlos Elliott came from a police family. He'd grown up with a deep respect and love for the department. But now, he was holding on to information that could hurt it, along with his career and maybe his family's name. The other officers from that night had told him to shut up and not worry about it.

The guilt of carrying this secret began to weigh on Carlos. He couldn't shake it. The day after they'd found Jose Campos Torres's body, Carlos Elliott told his father everything about what he thought he'd seen between the shadows on the night of May 5th, 1977. He told his father about the bar, the first beating, the attempt to take Jose Campos Torres to jail, and then the final beating. Carlos recounted the words he heard just before the splash, when the intoxicated, mangled man fell into the murky waters below. Let's see if this wetback can swim. Imagine being a veteran that had served his country and having heard the word wetback as he died. that term went back.

It's something I heard all the time as a kid in the Rio Grande Valley. Louis Elliott knew what they had to do. They'd have to be careful, though. The police culture of silence and retaliation was real. Carlos' father confided in someone he trusted, who then relayed the story to Pappy. When he heard the story, he knew HPD was in big trouble. Huge sigh from Pappy. And they said you could hear him moan.

The press already knew about the body. And now there was a witness, one of HPD's own, accusing his fellow officers of something that sounded like murder. If Chief Bond thought this would go away, he was mistaken. The fallout over Jose Campos Torres's death wasn't even close to being done, and as the shockwaves made their way through Houston and through HPD, it was about to change five young Latino patrol officers' lives forever. This season on Chicano Squad. In the aftermath of Jose Campos Torres' death,

the Houston Police Department lost the one thing it needed most, trust. Things just politically exploded in Houston. While the mayor-in-chief tried to take control of the department, tensions between it and the Mexican-American community in Houston began to boil, until eventually, they exploded. The Mexican-American community is in uproar.

They broke store windows and they burned cars. They burned several police cars. The residents of a Mexican-American neighborhood north of downtown Houston today began surveying the damage. We saw smoke and sirens and someone came over and told us that the police had come in and people responded with rocks and bottles shouting viva Jose Campos Torres, viva Joe Torres. With an influx of Spanish-speaking residents and a skyrocketing murder rate, something had to be done. And so a new police chief announced a special assignment for a group of five young Latino officers.

We were just told, basically, that there were so many unsolved homicides in the Hispanic community that were not being solved because of a language barrier. And that we needed to go into the community and build that bridge. With no prior training and almost no resources, the small band of Latino patrol officers would leave their squad cars behind and take up a post in the Homicide Division. They had 90 days to investigate and close as many murder

cases from Houston's Latino neighborhoods as possible. None of us knew what we were up against. They would face discrimination from within their own department. You're just a opachuco. You're a northside boy. You're a bad guy. I don't care how many suits I wore. They always looked at me as the bad guy. I had a Mexican flag on my desk, and they came over and told me, hey, the lieutenant doesn't want that Mexican flag over there. They faced drug cartels that were better armed and funded than they were.

We're on a mission to clear all those Colombian cases, and we fear nothing. And a community with every reason to distrust them. We made them feel like, no, you are part of the community. I'm not an immigration officer. You were a victim, and I'm gonna treat you as a victim. The squad would find themselves trapped between the uniform they wore and the communities they had grown up in.

Huzzled, she says, look at the way the policemen treat your brothers. I said, that's why. I want to see what's the other side of that fence. Everything was stacked against them. There's one table, one typewriter, that's it. No interviewing experience, no interrogation experience, nothing. But nobody wants to hear a story about a bunch of guys against incredible odds who failed, right? This is the story of the Chicano Squad. We'll be a rising tide When we unify Chicano Squad is a production of Frequency Machine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Eva Ruth Moravec and Dominique Ferrari. Associate producers are Melanie Rodriguez and Cynthia Bitubiza. Episode 1 was written by Eva Ruth Moravec and edited by Nishat Kroa and Stacey Book. Engineering and sound design come from Brandon McFarlane. Our theme music was composed for the series by Brownout. Editorial support on this episode from Garrett Crow. Fact-checking by Charlotte Silver. Special thanks to Dwight Watson. Chicano Squad is executive produced by Nisha Kroa for Vox Media and Stacey Book, Dominique Ferrari, and Avi Glijansky for Frequency Machine.

I'm Cristela Alonso. If you liked this episode, it's because you have great taste, and you think this story is important. So one of the best ways to support the show is to share it with your friends and family. Find out more at FrequencyMachine.com slash ChicanoSquad. Thank you for listening. Don't forget to subscribe to the show.

I'll see you in episode two.