Albert Gaxiola, A Tucson Courtroom, The Arivaca Home Invasion Murders

A hot July morning, I’m sitting with journalist Dave Ricker in the media room of the Pima County Superior Court in Tucson.

A windowless room, a table, a few chairs.

We’re waiting for the jury to decide if Albert Gaxiola should be sentenced to death for killing little  Brisenia Flores and her dad Raul in a bloody home invasion in the Arizona borderlands.

We’ve been in this room  before, waiting to see if the other killers would be sentenced to death for the same crimes. They were. First, Shawna Forde, a disturbed beautician from Washington state who started her own border vigilante group, was sent to death row. And then Jason Bush, an alleged serial killer and pretend war hero,  was sentenced to die.

After a long trial, prosecutors  convinced the jury that Albert Gaxiola sicked Shawna Forde and Jason  Bush on Raul Flores because Raul was competition in the drug business.  So Albert is a killer.

Now Dave and I are  waiting to see if that same jury will sentence Albert to die, or to life in prison for the killings.

Me and Dave, we’re just talking and surfing the Internet.

Then we see  Albert’s lawyers rushing into the court room, and we pack up our  Macbook Pros and race after the lawyers.

We hightail it into the courtroom and set up our computers.  There’s a problem, the bailiff says. There’s a backup in the jail. The overworked deputies can’t get Albert up to the courtroom.

Gina Gonzalez and her family rush into the courtroom too. Gina is the mom of Brisenia Flores and the widow of Raul Flores, who Albert wanted dead. Her daughter and her husband were killed in front of her. She survived by playing dead on the floor after she was shot, and then engaging in a gun battle with the killers when they came back in to her bloody trailer to finish her off.

***

Here’s what you need to know about Albert Gaxoiola: He had been a friend of Gina and Raul.  Little Brisenia adored him. But he was a drug dealer and a drug user. His mom, now an obese woman with a pink walker, couldn’t care for him when he was little.  Too many men.  So Albert’s uncle and aunt raised him in California, and once he’d grown up, he’d sold mortgages there. Then he went back to see his mom, and started dealing drugs with her. And he got caught and served a light sentence. But instead of going back to his clean life in California, he settled in Arivaca, where I met him in 2008.

I was on assignment for a magazine. Writing about the border.

Albert and this guy were talking outside a feed store in Arivaca, just a few miles north of the Mexican border. Albert’s companion was an old hippie, I think his name was something like Stinky Steve.  They saw me, a reporter with a notebook, and Stinky Steve vamoosed.

Albert was very very guarded talking to me. He said he was of Basque heritage, that his family had been in the area for centuries, that his grandma sold tacos on the streets of Arivaca, that she died and he’d come home to attend her funeral, and that he was staying in Arivaca to get away from the California rat race.  One more thing: He  felt sorry for Mexican  immigrants hoofing through town. They just wanted a bit of the American dream, he said.

I didn’t know he was a drug guy, I just knew he was, as I told you before,  guarded.

And a year later, after he was charged with the Arivaca murders, I wondered why a guy so sympathetic to the plight of unauthorized Mexican immigrants would hook up with a Mexican-hating Minutewoman.

***

Today in the courtroom I think he looks a lot like I remember him. Not real tall. Broad-shouldered.  Dark-skinned. Prominent nose. Short black hair in a businessman’s cut.

But his legs are manacled and his hands are cuffed behind him. Once the deputy unlocks the cuffs, Albert puts on  his dark tie.  And his belt.

His packaging is entirely different from the other killers. Jason Bush looked like a tall lunatic on a serious dose of psychiatric medication.  Shawna Forde: A  beautician with delusions of grandeur.

But Albert, he still looks like a man who sold mortgages in California.

Judge John Leonardo enters the courtroom, says  the jury can’t reach a unanimous decision.

Albert looks happy. Maybe he will escape lethal injection. He jokes with his legal team.

Then everyone leaves for lunch, and Albert is cuffed and taken back into a holding cell.

***

Dave and I barely get our granola bars scarfed down before the jury reaches a verdict.

Same routine. We race into the courtroom.

Albert is brought in.

“Another circus, different clowns,” a deputy tells a  prosecutor.

A reporter talks about having witnessed a lethal injection execution.  The reporter says it is an easy death.

Not like the deaths of Brisenia Flores, who begged for her life before she was shot twice in the head. Not like the death of Raul Flores, who was shot multiple times and drowned in his own blood. Not like the death of part of Gina Gonzalez, who saw all this and must live with it for the rest of her life.

Albert puts on his belt. He puts on his tie. He rocks in his chair. Rock. Rock. Rock.

The jury sentences Albert to life for arranging the hit on Raul Flores, but it can’t reach a decision on whether Albert is guilty of killing Brisenia.

Gina’s relatives seem upset. Why life? Why no decision on killing Brisenia?

The prosecutor tries to explain: This is an okay verdict. It really is. And here’s why: He’s  gonna spend the rest of his life in prison, he’s gonna be in the yard. Killers of children have a hard time in the yard.  This won’t be an easy life for Albert.  He’s scared. So scared, he’s been telling people in prison he didn’t do anything bad. He’s been putting out feelers to protect himself. Everyone knows he’s coming.

It’s not going to be easy.

I’m sitting just a few feet away from a very tall child killer.

Jason Bush photo by Dean Knuth -- Arizona Daily Star

He’s wearing a light blue green shirt and gray slacks without a belt. His skin is sallow, and he’s got a five o’clock shadow.  He’s lost a lot of weight since he was arrested about two years ago. His black second-hand shoes are too big and flop off his heels when he walks. He’s got really big brown eyes  and a straight nose. Thin lips. He’s pulled his shoulder-length dark hair into a pony tail. He has a receding hairline.

Killers look just like anyone else. They don’t stand out in a crowd.

He appears completely calm as a clerk in a Tucson courtroom reads the jury’s guilty verdict.

He has no expression on his face. But I look carefully, and I think he’s breathing faster than normal as the verdicts are read.  Guilty of two counts of murder. One count of attempted murder. Various home invasion crimes.  Burglary. Robbery.

He puts on his glasses. He takes off his glasses. He closes his eyes.

***

Back in 2009,  Jason Bush was a drifter and ex-con who pretended to be a decorated Army sniper involved in covert operations.

He had fake certificates that he showed to Shawna Forde, a beautician from Everett Washington who wanted to rob a family of money and drugs. She believed his sniper story. Shawna enlisted Jason for her little Minuteman group.

One day in May 2009, Jason painted his face black, just like in the movies.  He and  Shawna barged into a trailer in Arivaca, Arizona, just a few miles north of the border. They wore camouflage and uniforms and pretended to be officers in search of fugitives. A few minutes later, Jason killed a little girl and her father. He shot the mother, but she played dead.

After Jason and Shawna left the trailer, (disappointed that they hadn’t found drugs or money to fund Shawna’s border vigilante activities) the mother called 911.

The child was still dying,  convulsing and vomiting blood. The mother begged the 911 operator for help.

Then Shawna came back into the trailer.

Shawna  saw the mom calling 911, and yelled to Jason to come back in the trailer. There was a witness still alive, Shawna shouted, and someone had to finish the job.

The wounded mother got herself into the kitchen area, found her husband’s loaded gun.

When Jason came back in the trailer,  the mother  shot him in the leg.

He ran away.

***

That was two years ago, and Jason almost immediately confessed to the murders. Later, he  pleaded innocence.

The evidence against him is overwhelming. The mother’s testimony. The DNA on the guns and on the floor of the trailer. His lawyers didn’t even mount a defense.

They just want to spare him from the death penalty.  They plan on introducing evidence of his grim young life. His parents put him in a mental institution when he was 11. He was raped there. Then he was raped in foster homes.

The lawyers don’t want to include allegations and charges leveled by law enforcement authorities that Jason knifed a Mexican to death and then executed a “race traitor” in Washington. That was way back in 1997.

***

In Arizona, a jury, not a judge, will decide whether Jason should be executed by lethal injection.

You’re getting a real time report. Right now, as Jason puts on his glasses one more time, then takes them off,  the jury exits to a room where it will decide whether Jason’s crimes merit consideration for the death penalty. If it decides, in the next hour or so, that the crimes do merit the death penalty, Jason’s lawyers will present evidence in the next couple of weeks indicating he is a broken soul who should live.

Jason swings in his chair. Jason watches a young girl who just walked into the courtroom.

Now the guards take Jason away. He shuffles in his leg chains. Those white socks. Those floppy black shoes.

A few minutes later, he hobbles  back in the room.  It took about 15 minutes for the jury to decide that Jason’s crimes were horrific and cruel, and merit consideration for the death penalty.

Jason just sits.

***

Shawna Forde was sentenced to death for masterminding the murders. In the next weeks, we will learn if  Jason Bush will face the same fate.

***

UPDATE: Jason Bush was sentenced to death by lethal injection. As I wrote in my verdict story in The Daily Beast, he is a suspected serial killer.

After he was sentenced to death, he looked down at his lawyer and appeared to say: “This sucks.”

Migrants crossing Arizona’s parched borderlands this month have been dying at an unusually high rate, The Arizona Daily Star’s Brady McCombs reports today.

“The fact that the deaths continue at such high numbers despite widespread indications that fewer people are crossing the border has led many experts to conclude that illegal border crossers face a deadlier trek than ever across Arizona’s desert,” McCombs writes.

It is hot in the desert.

Migrants who can’t keep up with groups are left to die.

If you haven’t seen the newspaper’s database on migrant crossing deaths, it is a worthwhile resource.

In Phoenix, with upcoming hearings on whether SB1070 should be enjoined, and heated primaries focused on illegal immigration, the “deadlier trek” is sometimes forgotten. Or the global forces that drive illegal immigration, which I write about in one chapter in my book.

PINAL COUNTY SHERIFF IN MCCAIN AD HAS PROBLEMS BACKING UP CLAIMS OF “ILLEGAL ALIEN” VIOLENCE

On these pages, I’ve been honored to introduce you to the work of some of the top journalists in Arizona. Brady McCombs, a reporter for The Arizona Daily Star, is one such journalist. He’s been writing about immigration in Arizona for years, and he has a nose for lies and  half truths.

McCombs recently questioned Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, who claims that crimes committed by undocumented immigrants are “off the charts.Babeu  appeared in the recent \”dang fence\” ad for John McCain, who’s fighting a tough mano-a-mano in the Republican senate primary against J.D. Hayworth.

Babeu is an ally of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and the boss of the Pinal County deputy who allegedly got grazed with the bullets of  an Ak-47-type weapon by faceless Mexican drug traffickers with Sinaloan accents. Paul Rubin, another fine reporter, has called this shooting into question, as I noted in this post and this post.  As you can see, Pinal County borders Maricopa County, which is the most populous county because it encompasses the Phoenix metro area.

Was the Pinal County shooting a hoax?

And are Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu’s numbers backing up the violence committed by “illegals” exaggerated?

Once again, you be the judge, after reading Brady McComb’s fine reportage.

At the very least you’ve got to wonder: What was John McCain thinking?

UPDATE: MCCOMBS POSTED AN UPDATE ON MAY 27.

The revised stats from the Pinal County Sheriff’s office appear to have changed.

“ILLEGAL, LIFE AND DEATH IN ARIZONA’S IMMIGRATION WAR ZONE”

By Terry Greene Sterling

I have been covering the immigration battles in Arizona for the last year and a half. This book was written after many, many hours in the trenches. This is the cover.

The book comes out in June, but you can buy it now here.

Please join me on this intimate journey. The people in the shadows want you to know their stories.

Eugene Rodriguez is a fourth generation Mexican American.  He attended Cal Santa Cruz and received a Master’s degree  in classical music from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. For the last sixteen years,  the forty-eight -year -old classical guitarist has been at the helm of  Los Cenzontles, a non-profit cultural center in San Pablo,  California that he founded.

At Los Cenzontles, he and his staff have encouraged kids to work hard, practice, take joy, dance, make wonderful music and art. Musicians at the center have  collaborated musically with The Chieftans, Taj Mahal, and Linda Ronstadt, among other accomplished singers and musicians.

Eugene Rodriguez has dark skin and black hair, and like many Mexican-Americans, he was taught to assimilate.

And there was a reason for this.

Self-preservation.

“Mexican Americans have a strategy,” he tells me,  ”Blend in and don’t make waves.”

He says: There’s been an undercurrent in the United States that Mexicans are less than human.

So very few Mexican Americans made waves.

Now all that has changed, because Arizona has passed a new immigration law. It requires all policemen in the state who “reasonably suspect” someone to be in the country illegally to stop them. And if they don’t have papers, to arrest them. Reasonable suspicion that a guy is an unauthorized immigrant must be accompanied by  a law being broken — your tail light is out, for instance, or you have a messy front yard, in the eyes of the policeman.   Next, the cop must have more than one reason to reasonably suspect you’re an undocumented immigrant. For instance, a person who dresses in a way a policeman thinks indicates that a person is an “illegal alien,” and travels down known smuggling corridors (that would be almost any road in Arizona) could arouse sufficient “reasonable suspicion” to be arrested if he’s not carrying papers.

Honestly, I didn’t make that up.

It’s in an instructional training video for  Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s deputies. The guy in the video is Kris Kobach, who wrote the law and is called a “nativist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

As for Kobach’s video on what constitutes “reasonable suspicion,” you can see it here.

This  explains why Rodriguez, an accomplished American with degrees and  honors, intuits he could be stopped by any policeman in Arizona who “reasonably” suspects that he’s an unauthorized immigrant.

That outrages him.

His great grandfather was an Arizona pioneer.

“It’s too much,” he says.

In a way he’s grateful for the new law, because in his view the law has  given voice and shape to discrimination against Mexicans that  has been festering in the United States for decades.

So Rodriguez, a guy who says he never made waves, is now giving voice to a reaction to Arizona’s  law: An outraged call to action.

In a song.

Rodriguez wrote a corrido, which is a stylized Mexican ballad about a current event. This particular  corrido is about Arizona’s new law, and it’s called  ”Estado de Verguenza,” which  means “State of Shame.” It calls for Mexican Americans to fight Arizona’s fear-based racism with money, votes, and pride.

It calls for them to make waves.

You can hear it here. And also see it. It’s on YouTube.

AN ARIZONA IMMIGRATION HOAX? QUESTIONS ARISE OVER SHOOTING OF PINAL COUNTY SHERIFF DEPUTY

A week after Arizona’s governor signed the toughest immigration law in the nation, SB 1070, a Pinal County Sheriff’s deputy claimed he was shot with an AK-47 type weapon in an ambush with five drug traffickers. Bullets whizzed, he said. The ambushers disappeared, even after a massive search by Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s deputies and other law-enforcement groups, like the Border Patrol. The suspects: drug traffickers from Sinaloa, Mexico.

The deputy, Louie Puroll,  was released from the hospital a few hours after he was admitted. He’d been grazed by either one or two bullets.  He’s not talking to the press.

Now at least one journalist, and a very good one at that, is calling the shooting into question.

And here’s  the latest update, from a rival newspaper, in response to the story questioning the shooting.

You be the judge.

NO ONE KNOWS WHO KILLED RANCHER ROBERT KRENTZ, BUT THE MURDER HAS BECOME CENTRAL TO THE IMMIGRATION DEBATE.

In 2004, I met Robert Krentz, the Arizona rancher who was gunned down in his ATV on March 27. When I met Krentz, I was on assignment for Arizona Highways, for a 2005 story about the Malpai Borderlands Group, a band of ranchers that teamed up to preserve their borderlands ranches from ecological ruin and wildcat development.  I also wrote a story for The Washington Post on the  group. I venture to say this group of men and women with divergent points of views on border enforcement will be tested mightily by the Krentz killing.

I remember sitting outside the Krentz house in 2004 and listening to Rob Krentz vent  about illegal immigration and drug trafficking,  which, given his apparent experiences with expensive vandalism, was understandable. He preferred riding his ATV to a cow pony, and he was almost always armed when he went out to check his borderlands ranch. If trespassers came on his property, he called the Border Patrol.

Of course, we don’t know who murdered Krentz, but his killing has become central to the immigration debate because people are speculating the killer was an undocumented immigrant or drug trafficker. Embattled Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, who is being investigated by the FBI and the State Bar of Arizona for ethical violations, today used the Krentz murder as a reason to resign from office and run for Arizona Attorney General.

Of course Thomas isn’t the only politco using the Krentz killing for  ambitious political advantage. I wrote about my visit with Krentz and the political fallout of his unsolved death for The Daily Beast today, and I hope you enjoy the story.

It’s time to step back a  minute and let things cool off.

Remember, we don’t know who killed Krentz.

The murder is unsolved.

Julián LeBarón has the soul of a Mexican, and it might kill him.

Let me explain.

Julián LeBarón was born in Mexico and lives in a town called Colonia LeBarón in Chihuahua, a Mexican border state where thousands of men, women, and children have been  slaughtered in a “drug war”  that  is increasingly difficult to comprehend or even define.

It began in 2006 as President Felipe Calderón launched an ongoing attack against some enterprising drug cartels who made billions selling coke and heroin and speed and pot to the largest consumer of drugs in the world — the United States of America.

So far, at least 16,000 people have died in that war.

That’s according to  a great study called Drug Violence in Mexico, published by the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.

The  bloodbath is inchoate, incomprehensible. The average Mexican may not  know who is on what side. Is the soldier really working for the narcotrafficker? Is the narcotrafficker really working for the government? And God knows how many have joined  the splinter (often coked out or tweaked out) gangs of kidnappers and for-hire murderers  in military outfits who kill and torture just to make a few bucks for themselves.

Of all the states in Mexico, Chihuahua endured the most killings in 2009 — Mexican newspaper reports range from 3,637 to 2,079, according to the Trans-Border Institute.

That death toll includes Julián’s brother, Benjamín. He had refused to pay a $1 million ransom for his kid brother, who was kidnapped near town.  The kid brother was eventually released unharmed and without ransom by the perplexed kidnappers, but they didn’t like Benjamín’s tough-on-crime attitude.

Benjamín organized his  extended family (it’s a very large extended family,  we’ll get to why soon) against kidnapping and killing and thuggery and wanton violence in  Colonia LeBarón. Then masked men  broke into his home, kidnapped him and a brother-in-law,  and shot them to death.

Besides Benjamín and his brother-in-law, Julían tells me over the phone, five others have been murdered, and Julián has gotten death threats and  was recently assaulted by four masked creeps  in the middle of town in the middle of the day and everyone knows who they were but no one’s done anything about it.

“I’m not safe at all,” he tells me. “I am threatened with death all the time. At least five people have told me I’m on a hit list.”

He refuses to run, to give in to the bad guys.

He could go to the United States, where he holds dual citizenship with Mexico. But he’s always been more comfortable in the country where he was born. So instead of running, he writes. In  early January, he  published a manifesto against violence, in Spanish, on the Internet.

In this manifesto, he proposes a non-violent national organized opposition to violence.

Mexicans are strong courageous people who should rise up and say “BASTA” to the slaughter, the manifesto says.

“You might think I’m crazy,” Julián tells me, “but it can be done.”

The manifesto serves another purpose — it attracts press attention, spotlights Julián’s predicament. The more  publicity, perhaps, the less danger.

And to think that just a few years ago, Colonia LeBarón was a peaceful little town.

“The (Calderón) drug war is not something most Mexicans agree with,” he says.

In the old days, before the Drug War, drug dealers were seen as Robin Hoods who sold “poison” to the gringos who deserved it because they screwed Mexico with trade agreements that made people even more poor than they already were, he tells me. And he makes sure I know that he doesn’t believe gringos should be poisoned with drugs, and that he has never had any association with drug dealers or drugs.

The problem now is that Mexicans themselves are consuming the “poison” that they were selling to gringos, he says.

I’ve seen newspaper photos of the little desert farming town where he lives. It’s got a lot of pecan orchards. It sits near mountains. It’s  called Colonia LeBarón because it is inhabited mostly by LeBaróns, who trace their roots to fundamentalist Mormon polygamists who moved to Mexico in the 1880′s. They came south in part to escape growing controversy and outrage over their lifestyle, which was espoused by the founding Mormon prophet, Joseph Smith.

The  LeBaróns have cousins  in places like Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah and ElDorado, Texas. These fundamentalist polygamous Mormon cults have been disavowed by  mainstream Mormons since polygamy was outlawed in the 1890′s. Such  standoffish polygamous sects in the American West face increasing scrutiny and several cult leaders have been sentenced to prison in connection with marrying underage girls.

In the history of fundamentalist Mormons, the LeBarón name isn’t without controversy. An ancestor, Ervil LeBarón, died in prison in 1981 while serving time for  murder. He issued dicta from prison that allegedly set off a killing spree of  his enemies.

This, of course, has nothing to do with Julián LeBaron, who was a baby  at the time of the killings and who tells me he despises everything  about Ervil LeBarón.

Julián is a devout Mormon fundamentalist, and belongs to a religious group that believes in the practice of polygamy, also called “plural marriage.”  (He has never practiced it himself, and doesn’t intend to, and doesn’t want his name associated with it, he says.)

According to Julián, the  Chihuahua LeBaróns may believe plural marriage but they  differ from their gringo counterparts in a number of ways. The sister wives at Colonia LeBarón don’t wear prairie dresses and pull their hair on top of their heads. The guys don’t marry underage girls. They own land and property individually, instead of communally. And there’s no strict ban on alcohol — Julián himself downs a cold one every now and again, although he points out he’s no drunkard.

Julián is thirty-two years old, and for many years he traveled north to the United States to earn a living as a bilingual framer.  He saved his money, sent it down to Mexico to his family, just like a lot of Mexicans.

He tells me he’s  framed  buildings “all over the country,” including in New Orleans right  after Hurricane Katrina. His first job in New Orleans: Repairing  a funeral home. There were so many dead bodies.

Now he’s trying to stay alive, keep himself from being a stiff in a funeral home.

Julián knows he could come to the United States and run away from the violence.

But he won’t, because Mexico is in his soul.

The other day, I wrote about Arizona’s  polygamists and it got me to thinking about how undocumented immigrants aren’t the only  underdogs in the Grand Canyon state.

So-called “sister wives”  in some Arizona polygamist enclaves are  married off as teens to old men and then reassigned to other old men, all for the glory of God and, critics say, the political well being of whoever happens to be prophet at the time. The women go along with the degradation because they choose to believe it is their only route to eternal salvation.

Sister wives are American citizens. They could enjoy all sorts of rights and liberties if they wanted them.

But they don’t.

Undocumented immigrants, on the other hand, aren’t American citizens. In Arizona, they  can’t legally drive or work. College is out of the question for most, because they’re barred from paying in-state tuition, even though many undocumented kids have  lived here for most of their lives. They pay taxes, but enjoy few of the benefits afforded to taxpayers. You’d think these people would want to go back to their homelands after they get arrested for jaywalking or working or having broken tail lights, but many  choose to spend the equivalent of a whole year’s salary  to hire a lawyer to fight  deportation. They don’t want to leave, despite the hardships.

So who has the most American spirit?

The sister wives?

Or the undocumented immigrants?