Thread: Texas Robbers Killed by Jim Horn were ILLEGAL ALIENS !

The video was awesome, looks like some angry Americans have had it.

I think the guy who shot the robbers did the right thing and maybe the thievs will think again before breaking and entering again, again, and again.

Here in New Hampshire just about everyone has a gun in their homes in their trucks and on their person.

Robbers beware

This isn't good.
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Autopsy: Burglary Suspects Shot In Back

updated 7:37 a.m. PT, Sat., Dec. 8, 2007
HOUSTON - An autopsy showed two burglary suspects were shot in the back allegedly by a Pasadena neighbor who witnessed their crime, KPRC Local 2 reported Friday. The suspects were also in this country illegally, according to authorities. Pasadena police said suspects Diego Ortiz and Hernando Torres should not have been in the United States. Police said they made the discovery while investigating the fatal shootings of the two men from Colombia using multiple names. Pasadena police spokesman Capt. Bud Corbett said, "We understand that one of the suspects originally identified as DeJesus, later identified as Hermano Torres, was incidentally deported in 1999 back to Colombia."

Police said Torres was arrested in 1994 and charged with possession of cocaine with the intent to deliver. He got a 25-year sentence, started serving time in prison, but was paroled and deported back to Colombia in 1999.

Corbett said, "Their alien status doesn't really change anything about what we do."

The autopsies showed the suspects were shot in the back. Police first thought the chest and side wounds were the bullets' entrances. Instead, police said, they were the exit wounds.

Pasadena resident Joe Horn said he shot and killed the two men after he saw them breaking into his neighbor's home.

The 911 call taker repeatedly told Horn not to shoot. Some in Pasadena say no one would have been shot had they not broken the law.

Manuel Palomarez said, "They've broken the law twice over -- once being illegal here and twice breaking and entering. It doesn't matter."

New Black Panther leader Quanell X has protested in front of Horn's home. He wants Horn to face murder charges.

Quanell X said, "We understand clearly that they were in the country illegally. But that's for the immigration and ICE officials to handle. Mr. Horn, what he did was murder. He shot both men in the back."

Horn's attorney did not wish to comment for this story.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22152984/

Hopefully his attorney won't be dumb enough to chose a judge over a jury!!!! Where are they going to find a jury to convict him?

Texas shootings test the limit of new law on self-defense
By Ralph Blumenthal

Thursday, December 13, 2007
PASADENA, Texas: Joe Horn's home was his castle, but what about his neighbor's home?

When Horn, a 61-year-old retiree living with his daughter and her family in a growing subdivision in this Houston suburb, saw two burglars breaking into the house next door on Nov. 14, he called 911 and grabbed his shotgun.

Moments later, after what the police say was a confrontation on Horn's front lawn, the two men - both illegal immigrants - lay dead on the winding Timberline Drive, leaving behind a pillowcase stuffed with jewelry and about $2,000 in cash.

One of them, identified by the police as Hernando Torres, a.k.a. Miguel Antonio DeJesus, 38, was found across the street beside a sleigh and a Santa Claus cow with a sign, "Have a Moo-ry Christmas," at the house of a police officer.

The other, Diego Ortiz, 30, fell on a neighbor's lawn. Bloodstains were still visible on the sidewalk this week.

"The fire department did some pressure washing, but you can still see where he was," said the neighbor, who did not want her name used. "You don't know who is tied to them, who may still retaliate."

The shootings in Village Grove East - where the biggest excitement is usually the comings and goings of school buses - have brought up a number of issues.

"There's the First Amendment," said Charles Lamont, a neighbor and a Marine captain who served in Iraq, citing the protests for and against Horn that have convulsed the neighborhood. The Pasadena City Council on Tuesday gave preliminary approval to a ban on demonstrations outside private residences.

Then there was Horn's claim of self-defense under the Legislature's reformulation of the "castle doctrine" that, as of September, no longer requires a Texan to retreat before using deadly force at his own "habitation" in the face of a perceived lethal threat. But protecting a neighbor's property is not included.

Some protesters have made race an issue. Horn is white and the burglars, he told the 911 operator, were black. The neighbors whose house Horn was protecting are Vietnamese. They later said they thought the two men had been stalking them.

A police report suggests Torres and Ortiz may have been shot in the back. Both, the police say, were illegal immigrants from Colombia, Ortiz having been deported in 1999 after being sentenced to 25 years in prison for cocaine convictions.

Horn went into seclusion even before a death threat was left on an answering machine in the Harris County district attorney's office. He has been too upset to comment, said his lawyer, Charles Lambrecht.

Captain Bud Corbett, a spokesman for the Pasadena Police Department, said that Horn had cooperated with the investigation. He said a grand jury would decide whether Horn will face homicide charges.

The shootings were denounced by scores of black demonstrators, including Quanell X, the leader of the Houston-based New Black Panther Nation, who led a march to the site on Dec. 2. He denounced Horn as "judge, jury and executioner" amid scuffles with white biker counter-protesters who revved their motorcycles in support of Horn.

A vital piece of evidence is certain to be the audiotape of Horn's 911 calls. In a low and steady voice, he said he saw the men breaking in and asked: "I've got a shotgun; do you want me to stop them?"

The Pasadena emergency operator responded: "Nope. Don't do that. Ain't no property worth shooting somebody over, O.K.?"

Horn said: "But hurry up, man. Catch these guys will you? Cause, I ain't going to let them go."

Horn then said he would get his shotgun.

The operator said, "No, no." But Horn said: "I can't take a chance of getting killed over this, O.K.? I'm going to shoot."

The operator told him not to go out with a gun because the police would be arriving.

"O.K.," Horn said. "But I have a right to protect myself too, sir," adding: "The laws have been changed in this country since September the first, and you know it."

The operator warned, "You're going to get yourself shot." But Horn replied, "You want to make a bet? I'm going to kill them."

Moments later he said, "Well here it goes, buddy. You hear the shotgun clicking and I'm going."

Then he said: "Move, you're dead."

There were two quick explosions, then a third, and the 911 call ended.

"I had no choice," Horn said when he called 911 back. "They came in the front yard with me, man."

Corbett said that a plainclothes officer had pulled up just in time to see Horn pointing his shotgun at both men across his front yard, that Ortiz had started to run in a way that took him closer to Horn and that both men "received gunfire from the rear."

But that fact, alone, was not necessarily conclusive, Corbett said. "It tells an investigator something, but not everything," he added. "They could still have been seen as a threat."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/13/ ... /texas.php

Originally Posted by Cakers

This has been puzzling me.......If these two were illegals from Colombia, why were the "Black Panthers" protesting?

All they saw was black faces and assumed they were black. I must say I was surprised to see Quanell X speaking out for these illegals from Colombia.

Originally Posted by CitizenJustice

Hopefully his attorney won't be dumb enough to chose a judge over a jury!!!! Where are they going to find a jury to convict him?

I suspect he will need a really smart attorney, since he shot the burglers in the back. His attorney was on Glen Beck. He seemed to be a "seasoned" lawyer. He's an old friend of the shooter's. I just hope he's up to the task.

Dec. 15, 2007, 11:26PM
At heart of Horn debate: empowerment
Experts say the sense that citizens should step up is driving his support


By MIKE SNYDER
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

He had the thief in his sights, but chose not to take the shot. More than a decade later, Bill Thomas of Kemah still agonizes over that decision.

"That night still lives in my mind like it was yesterday," Thomas said, recalling the evening when he confronted a man he saw breaking into a van in the parking lot of a San Antonio motel.

Like Joe Horn of Pasadena, who some consider a hero for fatally shooting two men who broke into his neighbor's house Nov. 14, Thomas was defending someone else's property. Horn pulled the trigger of his shotgun three times; Thomas lowered his weapon, only to learn later that the thief he allowed to flee into the night may have gone on to rob a convenience store and kill a clerk.

Like many others who have publicly expressed support for Horn's actions, Thomas is frustrated. Frustrated because police, he says, have all but shrugged off burglaries of his home and his truck. Frustrated because the nation's porous borders make it possible for illegal immigrants such as the men Horn shot to prey on hard-working Americans.


Enormous public reaction
This sense that private citizens must step in to do the job they believe their government is failing to do is a key factor driving the surge of public support for Horn, according to interviews with academic experts and a review of hundreds of comments on news articles, letters to the editor and radio talk-show conversations.

"This is the rationale whenever a citizen tries to take the law into his own hands: Law-abiding citizens must protect themselves," said Stephen Klineberg, a Rice University sociology professor who directs the annual Houston Area Survey of local attitudes and demographic characteristics. "It's fueled by the belief in a corrupt and incompetent government."

Lacking a scientific poll, it's impossible to gauge the divide between those who believe Horn's actions were justified and those who think he went too far. His supporters have greatly outnumbered critics at protests in Horn's neighborhood and in forums where people comment on the case.

The Horn case has triggered an enormous public reaction, sociologists say, because it touches on so many themes that resonate today in American culture: guns, property rights, anxiety about crime and concern about illegal immigration.

Horn, 61, who has been in seclusion while police investigate the shootings, had no way of knowing that the two men he observed breaking into his neighbor's house were illegal immigrants from Colombia, one of whom had been deported after a cocaine-related conviction.

The disclosure of the burglars' immigration status in early December, however, triggered a new wave of public outrage about the case.

Klineberg said the immigration factor is what distinguishes reaction to the Horn case from public attitudes he observed in the mid-1990s, when anxiety about crime fueled a sense that citizens must take action to protect their families and neighbors.

"What's new here is the feeding into the additional furor against illegal immigrants who have broken our laws and have come here to hurt our country," Klineberg said.


Justice rarely seen
Thomas said the federal government responds to illegal immigration with the same near-indifference he's seen in local police response to nonviolent property crimes such as burglary.

"The federal government has looked at illegal immigration and border crossings as kind of a petty crime," said Thomas, a 59-year-old salesman. "If the border were locked, would this situation (in Pasadena) even have happened?"

Numerous comments on news articles and letters to the editor have echoed the theme that victims of certain crimes rarely see justice.

"As a homeowner who has been burgled six times in the past 18 years, resulting in thousands of dollars of losses, I can say with no doubt that even if a homeowner knows the name of the doer, an arrest and/or conviction is unlikely," Bob Shoquist of Conroe wrote in a letter to the Houston Chronicle.

Houston's clearance rate for burglaries is typically 7 percent to 8 percent each year, said Capt. Ceaser Moore of the Houston Police Department's burglary and theft division. The division has fewer than 100 investigators to handle about 144,000 cases annually, he said, and violent crimes take priority over property crimes.

In addition, Moore said, many people unwittingly aid criminals by failing to keep records of the serial numbers of property that's stolen and by leaving doors and windows unlocked and burglar alarms switched off.

Nestor Rodriguez, a University of Houston sociology professor and co-director of UH's Center for Immigration Research, said frustration about immigration, crime and other issues can lead people to shoot burglars at their neighbor's property or form citizen groups such as the Minutemen to police the borders.

But such actions, Rodriguez said, can have unintended consequences.

"Too often, people think the government can't protect them so they have to take matters into their own hands," Rodriguez said.

"But if you follow that to its logical conclusion, we'd all be shooting each other. The solution is not to start doing government's work, but to make government work" by electing more effective leaders.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/met ... 82190.html

March 20, 2008, 11:26AM
County fights release of autopsy of burglar shot by Horn
By ERIC HANSON and RUTH RENDON
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

Comments (363) Recommend (2)
The autopsy report on one of the burglars shot by a Pasadena resident last year has been completed, but Harris County officials are seeking to prevent the document's release to the public.

The county attorney is asking the Texas attorney general for authority to withhold the autopsy report on Diego Ortiz on grounds that the report is part of a pending criminal investigation.

Ortiz and Hernando Riascos Torres were shot on Nov. 14 by Joe Horn after Horn reported seeing them break into a neighbor's home. The Torres autopsy report has not been completed.

Horn called 911 and said he had heard breaking glass and had seen two men climb through a window into his next-door neighbor's home.

A 911 operator cautioned Horn, 61, to stay in his house. He went outside, however, and came face-to-face with Ortiz and Torres as they emerged from the neighbor's house.

Horn told the pair, "move and you're dead," according to the police investigation. Ortiz, 30, and Torres, 38, died near Horn's house in the 7400 block of Timberline Drive.

Both had been shot in the back with a 12-gauge shotgun, Pasadena police said.

The request by County Attorney Mike Stafford to the attorney general was made on behalf of the Harris County District Attorney's Office.

Horn has not been charged in the case. The Pasadena Police Department has presented its findings to the District Attorney's Office.

Vance Mitchell, a police spokesman, said the department has forwarded all of its findings except for results of a ballistics test, which is not complete.

The case has not yet been scheduled for presentation to a county grand jury.

The Houston Chronicle and KTRK-TV asked for the autopsy report under the Texas Public Information Act.

"The Harris County District Attorney's Office has provided an affidavit indicating that the matter has not yet been concluded and requesting that the reports be withheld," David Swope, an assistant county attorney, wrote to Attorney General Greg Abbott on Monday.

County officials contend that the autopsy report is exempt from public disclosure under a section of the Public Information Act that allows law enforcement agencies to withhold documents if releasing them would interfere with the investigation or prosecution of a crime.

Pasadena police released information in December, based on the preliminary autopsy findings showing that Ortiz and Torres were shot in the back.

eric.hanson@chron.com ruth.rendon@chron.com
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/met ... 35549.html

Joe Horn was willing to do the JOB that our Elitist Politicians refuse to do, PROTECT UNITED STATES CITIZENS from the invasion of ILLEGALS!!!!