By Dianne Solis
21:13 July 23, 2020 CDT – Updated at 06:00 on July 24, 2020 CDT
Bessie Rodriguez describes the murder of her 12-year-old son Santos through a Dallas police officer as “the coldest of them all.”
The chain of deaths of blacks and Latinos through law enforcement only underscores the mother’s confidence that replacement is imminent.
Rodriguez is now 75 years old, drives a 200,000-mile car and lives in a small apartment in Dallas. But his wit was strong when he spoke of his son’s “murder” on July 24, 1973.
“What they did to Santos was the coldest of them all,” Rodriguez said.
What happened with unsontable brutality.
Santos ripped him out of his home before dawn, without shoes, with his brother David, 13. Police sought to question them for a minor robbery. The boys were loaded into the back seat of a patrol car. Santos, handcuffed, denied taking the $8 value of replacing a vending machine.
Officer Darrell Cain thought he could force a confession by pointing his Array357 Magnum near Santos’ left sien. As the questions continued, Erin pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
Then he shot again.
Santos died from the bullet, his body collapsed in a white, sleeveless suit and trousers in the front seat of the vehicle, according to court testimony and a crime scene photo.
“They were handcuffed, ” said his mother. “They may just not escape. David’s handcuffed too, and he may not help. That’s why David feels so bad.
Bessie would lose another son and granddaughter in tragic deaths. Her two sisters would die, adding her twin. David and his pain were at the center of worries, even today.
In recent years, multimillion-dollar agreements have been made for grieving families who have lost their sons and daughters to police violence. Rodriguez’s circle of relatives won nothing. A civil lawsuit in 1973 failed.
But the officer, Erin, convicted of murder. He sentenced him to five years in prison.
Cain died last year in Lubbock, where his obituary says he worked as an insurance expert. He never talked about his time as a Dallas police officer.
The dallas protests against the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the video of an officer with his knee in the black man’s neck horrified Bessie Rodriguez. “The guy who screams he can’t breathe, ” said the mother. “The other cop did nothing. It’s possible he just stopped it.
But she doesn’t do it in the injustice of Latinos and blacks. She just doesn’t think things get any better.
“It will stop,” he said in one of the series of interviews this summer after multigenerational protests erupted across the country following Floyd’s death.
When protesters took to the streets of Dallas in May and June, Rodriguez found it too familiar.
She recalls that most Of the Mexican-American protesters marched through downtown Dallas in 1973 and businesses broke. His adventure ended at the former Dallas City Hall, a Beaux-Arts-style building with royal columns on Harwood and Main streets. Around the corner, Jack Ruby shot and killed Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, while Oswald was in custody.
Seeing the Dallas news this summer about Floyd’s murder, he wondered what would follow. “I think it can happen over and over again, ” he said.
Bessie Rodriguez lived for many years a Spartan but quiet life, with the scale of her sisters, children, nieces and grandchildren. Then, as the 40th anniversary of the murder of his son Santos approached in 2013, he agreed to an interview with The Dallas Morning News when the reporter showed up near his home. She then pointed out as she does now: “He was handcuffed. They didn’t give him any respite. You know, he couldn’t protect his life.”
To mark four decades since his death, members of the network held a dark memorial service at Warm July at Oakland Historical Cemetery. His son is buried in the middle of the cemetery in a circular lot with several dozen graves. There, a majestic obelisk anchors the cemetery with ordinary statues of angels and tombstones.
That year, Bessie Rodriguez made humble demands on the dignity she sought to return to her family: she demanded an apology from the city.
He got it in July. But in September 2013, then-Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings apologized at a public event that explored racial issues.
Rodriguez’s not there. When he heard of the apology, he temporarily demanded an apology in person. A few weeks later, it also happened at a lunuring where Rawlings said it was an honor to meet her. He called her a “strong, witty woman that anyone would be proud to have as a mother.”
Rodriguez also asked for some kind of memorial to be given to his son. Surprisingly, in 2015, a scholarship was established at southern Methist University for reading applicants in its human rights program. It was funded through the Latino Center for Leadership Development, an initiative of local entrepreneur Jorge Baldor.
In 2015, Rodriguez visited a small Seattle park at the Downtown Los Angeles Raza Community Center named after his son years ago through advocates who defied police practices in Seattle decades ago. The revered mom in the middle of the net with the Day of the Dead festivities that identified the death of Santos and the Blos angelesck Lives Matter movement.
In 2016, a lawn was dug in Pike Park next to the recreation center for a imaginable monument. In 2018, the center was renamed in honor of Santos Rodríguez. And next spring is expected to be completed a bronze statue of Saints two and a half meters by Texan sculptor Seth Vandable, commissioned through the city of Dallas. A clay style of the statue shows a smiling child with outstretched hands and hunting.
“You need art to heal,” Vandable says. “I care deeply about what other people are going through. Array… Let’s hope we’re at the breaking point of something transformative.
But some like Bessie Rodriguez, mothers who have noticed too many black and Latino murders, still feel a pain that makes it highly unlikely that the transformation is near.
From Trayvon Martin to Tamir Rice. Breonna Taylor to Botham Jean. Freddie Gray to Michael Brown. Gerardo Pinedo to Rubén García Villalpando. Antonio Zambrano-Montes of Atatiana Jefferson.
The poet Elizabeth Alexander called those who grew up for more than 25 years knowing those names the Trayvon generation. But before the Trayvon generation, there’s the Santos generation.
Cora Cardona moved to Dallas in the 1980s, about a decade after Santos’ death. She and her husband, Jeff Hurst, founded the Dallas Theater, a successful theatrical company that still organizes plays, its founders retired to Mexico City.
At dinners and other meetings, Cardona met with Mexican-Americans who raised Santos as if the collective trauma of his murder was still fresh. Cardona would make two plays about Santos’ death. It’s a kind of therapy, she says.
Looking back through decades of gunfights, Cardona said, “The beyond is the afterlife.”
The first Bessie Rodriguez lost Santos. Then son and granddaughter died tragically. His two faithful sisters died, adding up his dual who died three months ago. As for the other black and Latino men, women and young men who died in police violence, she doesn’t see an ending for hashtags and grieving mothers.
“It still happens even when other people are fighting the problem,” he said. “It happens over and over again.”
On July 25, 2020, a caravan gathers at Pike Park at nine a.m. to Oakland Cemetery at 3nine00 Oakland Circle in block 3nine00 Malcolm X Boulevard reminiscent of Santos Rodriguez.
Dianne Solis. Dianne covers immigration and social justice issues. The award-winner is a Wall Street Journal alumnus and former foreign correspondent founded in Mexico. She was a Nieman Scholar at Harvard and holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and Cal State University, Fresno.
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