Thread: A sign of justice in Mexico killing

A sign of justice in Mexico killing
Suspected killer of American woman caught on the border
By LISE OLSEN
Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
March 15, 2009, 11:10PM
Carlos Garcia Hernandez was the subject of a nine-month binational manhunt.

Carlos Garcia Hernandez stepped out of a U.S. immigration van at the Mexico border, his sixth deportation, and bragged he’d be back.

Then the skinny tattooed teen was escorted across the Rio Grande bridge into Matamoros by U.S. agents, where — in an all-too-rare display of justice — a posse of uniformed Mexican officials arrested him in the 2008 slaying of an American woman.

Up until that moment, suspect Garcia Hernandez had eluded Mexican officials by disappearing into the gangland underworld where he’d grown up in Southeast Texas. Now, he’s in a Mexican jail facing charges in the killings of two retired teachers, one American, one Mexican, in a crime that occurred more than 500 miles south of the border in Cuernavaca.

Garcia Hernandez, born in Mexico but raised in Houston and Beaumont, had been the subject of an intensive nine-month binational manhunt in 2008.

The American victim, Josefina Houghton, 73, was one of at least 230 U.S. citizens reported to have been killed in Mexico from 2003-2008, according to a Chronicle investigation in January. In her case, all four suspects who robbed and killed her and her friend, Araceli Cordoba, a Mexican citizen, were tracked down and arrested.

Few cases get solved
In most Mexican murder investigations, 20 percent of homicides lead to arrests.

And while most occur in increasingly violent border cities such as Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and Nuevo Laredo, Houghton was killed in Cuernavaca — a colonial state capital with famously mild weather where many Mexico City residents go to escape the turmoil of the world’s largest city.

Two officers — a Mexican working in Cuernavaca and an American working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Houston — ultimately cracked the case with tips from outraged neighbors and friends, a Mexican bank’s ATM photo, a gang database and cell phone records.

Houghton and Cordoba, both grandmothers, were killed on March 21, 2008, when two young thugs and their female accomplice, aided by the victim’s trusted housekeeper, invaded Houghton’s winter home in Cuernavaca, authorities allege. The invaders attacked, tortured and repeatedly stabbed Houghton and Cordoba. Then they fled with jewelry, less than $500 cash and bank cards and a pair of Houghton’s tennis shoes.

The violence — both women were tortured and Cordoba nearly beheaded — shocked residents, according to a Chronicle interview with Juan Carlos Valero Zagal, a Cuernavaca police commander who led the investigation.

Though witnesses in Mexico often hesitate, Houghton’s neighbors immediately provided police with descriptions of those they’d seen fleeing the murder scene March 21, 2008 — two days after the ladies had gathered to celebrate Houghton’s 73rd birthday.

Her son, Robert Houghton, a San Diego physician who grew up in Mexico, flew in to help.

His first visit to the 1950s-era squad room in Cuernavaca was depressing, he said. “I thought, they’re never going to find people with crummy typewriters. Police lacked equipment necessary to collect fingerprints.â€

What a terrible crime and what good police work by both the Mexicans and ICE that led to the arrests of these 4 suspects.