Thread: Online Posts Reflect Volatile Issue

Online posts reflect volatile issue
Minorities voice injustice, while others target illegal immigration

By MIKE SNYDER
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle


Quanell X: 'What Joe Horn did was a criminal act', quanell x,houston chronicle,chron.com,texas,houston,joe horn, Quanell X, community leaders and family members protest a Harris County grand jury's decision not to indict Joe Horn. Video by Jason Witmer. July 1, 2008.Reaction to the Joe Horn decision, texas,chron.com,houston,houston chronicle,shooting,grand jury,joe horn, Houstonians talk about the grand jury's decision that Joe Horn should not be charged with a crime for killing two suspected burglars outside his neighbor's Pasadena home. Video by Meg Loucks and Karen Warren. June 30, 2008.Joe Horn cleared in Pasadena shooting, houston chronicle,texas,chron.com,houston, Joe Horn's lawyer talks after a Harris County grand jury decided that Horn should not be charged for killing two suspected burglars outside his neighbor's home in Pasadena last fall. Video by Dale Lezon, edited by Juan Elizondo. June 30, 2008.


The shooting of two burglary suspects has sparked heated debate about property rights, gun control and other issues.

If American public discourse has become an Internet-driven echo chamber, the Joe Horn case provided perfect acoustics.

The story of the Pasadena homeowner who fatally shot two illegal immigrants burglarizing his neighbor's house touched on so many sensitive issues — guns, property rights, crime, border security — that even the Web's infinite capacity seemed barely sufficient to contain the reaction.

Within a few hours, more than 1,000 comments had been posted to Monday's report on the Chronicle's Web site that a Harris County grand jury had declined to indict Horn in the Nov. 14 fatal shootings of Diego Ortiz, 30, and Hernando Riascos Torres, 38.

One of them came from Paul A. Kucherka, a Houston software engineer posting under the name pmshop4.

"YES!" Kucherka wrote approvingly of the grand jury's decision. "Now jail the fiance for knowingly aiding and abetting an illegal alien."

Kucherka said in an interview he followed the case closely from the beginning, and his comment was based on his annoyance at public statements made by Torres' fiance, Stephanie Storey, demanding that Horn be jailed.

"She should be apologizing" for protecting an illegal immigrant with a criminal record, Kucherka said.

Regarding the case itself, however, Kucherka's views are somewhat more nuanced. He said he felt compassion for the dead men and their families as well as for Horn.

Kucherka said the grand jurors faced a difficult decision, and he personally felt Horn's behavior "was a little bit much" — a decision made in the heat of the moment that Horn later said he regretted.

"It is such a fine line," said Kucherka. "There are so many what-ifs we can play out over and over again. But the victims chose to put themselves in that place at that time."

Robert Muhammad, a local Nation of Islam minister and community activist, sees a different narrative in the Horn case and public reaction to it.

Muhammad noted that many people have used Wild West analogies in commenting on Horn's decision to shoot the burglars. But something is wrong with that picture, Muhammad said.

"He offended the Western code," the minister said of Horn. "He shot men in the back."

Protests against Horn's actions and demands that he be prosecuted have come primarily from Latino and African-American leaders. This reflects the sensitivity in these communities to a long history of "selective prosecution" that tends to protect law enforcement officers who kill people of color while singling out minority defendants, Muhammad said.

A recent example, he said, was the June 2 acquittal of two Pasadena police officers in the death of a Latino man during an arrest last summer.

Stephen Klineberg, a Rice University sociology professor, said the disclosure that the men Horn killed were in the country illegally unleashed anti-immigrant sentiments that his annual surveys show have increased in Harris County in the past few years. In turn, immigrants feel increasingly vulnerable to the type of vigilante justice many of them see at work in the Horn case, he said.

Curt Collier, the president of U.S. Border Watch, a group that supports stronger enforcement of immigration laws, sees a simpler explanation.

"The American people are basically fed up with illegal immigration," Collier said. "We have had a number of high-profile criminal cases where illegal aliens have been involved. Citizens have had their fill and they are beginning to speak out."

mike.snyder@chron.com


http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/met ... 65080.html

Joe Horn for Gov. of Texas ... Wooooooooooo Hoooooooooooo

I'll be his neighbor any day of the year