This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha (3 page)

T
he city of Grand Prairie was unaccustomed to violent murder. In a community where burglary was considered a rare crime, murder was extraordinary. It was a small city with a small crime-fighting budget. When news of Javier Calzada’s murder hit the local papers, it shook the sleepy community to its core.

Mr. and Mrs. Calzada were Latino immigrants who owned a two-bedroom home in a middle-class Latino neighborhood just south of Farmers Branch and north of Dallas Love Field Airport. Marisa was a short Mexican lady with a naturally kind face. She moved slowly, with deliberation and purpose. Her husband, Ben, was slightly taller. His forearms rippled with muscles developed by working long hours with his hands. He liked to wear a baseball cap and tilted it back slightly on his head in a relaxed way when he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Ben often carried an easy, half-parted grin. The Calzadas were a happy, well-matched couple who had emigrated from Mexico in the 1980s and met in the United States. They had two relatively well behaved sons, Luis and Javier. Dallas had been their home for years, and the family never had any street gang trouble or disciplinary problems with Javier or his older brother.

Before leaving for Grand Prairie on the night he was killed, Javier turned to his mom and said, “I’ll be right back.” A little while later, he called to let her know he was giving a couple of new friends a ride to
Grand Prairie, then he’d come straight home. No problem. Javier was in high school, but his mom was accustomed to him calling to give her regular updates, even if his friends gave him a hard time for being a mama’s boy. He was a good kid. She did not expect Javier to take too long.

Midnight came and went. Marisa and Ben sat up in the living room, waiting for Javier to come home. They couldn’t help but worry. Something was wrong. Javier was usually mindful of his mother, and he often called her, even when he was out cruising around with his friends. He didn’t drink or smoke, nor did he stay out late. Normally he would come home at a decent hour, but he didn’t come home that night.

The next morning, Marisa was distraught. Her red-rimmed eyes burned from a long night of waiting up for her son. When she left the house at first light to drive around and look for him, she hadn’t taken the time to pull herself together. Her son was missing, and she knew nothing. With increasing anxiety, she visited all the hospitals in her neighborhood, all within miles of Bachman Lake Park. As she drove around, her eyes never stopped moving. Her heart leaped from her chest when she thought she saw him, but her eyes were tired, her vision blurred by the lack of sleep and the tears that were on the verge of falling.

That afternoon, she printed dozens of
MISSING
posters and put them up around the neighborhood and in areas where she knew her son hung out. All day she kept repeating the phrase “I’ll be right back” in her mind even as she began to fear the worst. It was not like Javier to keep his mother worrying, and when he did, it was never for this long.

While his wife visited local hospitals and posted
MISSING
signs on lampposts, bus stops, and gas stations, Ben drove to the Dallas Police Department to file a missing-persons report. He was distrustful of the local police; he felt like they never came around when they were needed. When they did show up, the men in uniform wore smug expressions and never took off their sunglasses. They asked too many questions and harassed hardworking people. Ben was in the country legally and would never have trouble with the hard realities of deportation, but he still avoided the police. He didn’t want to push his luck with local cops or the
federales
with immigration enforcement. Yet as much as he didn’t want to engage the police, Ben had no choice. He needed their help.

Two days passed before a Dallas policeman found Javier’s car in the mud off Walnut Hill Lane on December 19, less than ten miles
from Ben and Marisa’s home. That same day, a construction worker discovered Javier’s wallet off Interstate 35, which ran north-south through Dallas. When Ben and Marisa received the news, it felt like a punch in the stomach. Reality crushed their hope: the odds were against finding Javier alive. But there was still no body. He might have been robbed, but he could still be alive somewhere, they thought. The Calzadas grasped at what hope remained.

Sleep was impossible. Marisa was in shambles. She cried continually. Each time they called the Dallas police, they found out there were no leads. Ben grew impatient. He couldn’t just wait. Early one morning during the first week after Javier’s disappearance, Ben went out to look for his son in the surrounding countryside. He took a backpack, food, and water. He was up before dawn and spent the whole day away from the house. When he returned home, Marisa was furious. She thought he had been out commiserating and drinking with his friends, but, no, he explained to his wife. With a tight hug he told her he had been looking for their lost boy.

By the end of the first week of Javier’s disappearance, the Calzadas’ natural joy and easygoing natures had been extinguished. With each night, the sorrow deepened. With each day, the weight of despair increased. Marisa’s happiness was broken, but not her will to find out what had happened. He would be right back, her son had told her. She needed to know why he had never returned.

In the middle of a town awash with Christmas carols, candy canes, and Papá Noel, the family felt hollowed out with despair. As everyone around them drew together in groups of family and friends, the Calzadas felt drained and listless. They sang no carols. A sad, gray Christmas came and went. It was the first time Ben, Marisa, and Luis had spent the holidays without Javier. And they still didn’t know what had happened.

E
arly in the afternoon, two days after Christmas, a local fisherman parked his car in a gravel lot near the highway and next to a cement pipe factory off MacArthur Boulevard. He grabbed a pole and some tackle before setting off down the old access road toward Bluebonnet Lake, one of his favorite fishing holes. After a short walk, he noticed out of the corner of his eye a bundle of clothes and something that looked like bones in the bushes off the side of the road. Curious, he walked a little closer to the clothes and realized with a grimace that he was looking at decomposed human remains.

The skeleton was splayed at awkward angles on the ground, twisted in dried brush and leaves. White sport Polo socks clung to the partially fleshed feet. The shoes were missing. A blue fleece jacket and a navy blue shirt were twisted about the neck and shoulders. The words
ALPHA CHI OMEGA, KAPPA SIGMA, SPRING
2000 were printed on the torn shirt.

The remains had been in the woods long enough for insects, stray dogs, and other animals to destroy recognizable features, ripping clothes off the skeleton and making the body all but unidentifiable. The midsection was empty of organs. Lungs, kidneys, heart, stomach, intestines, and liver had all been eaten. The flesh on the skull had eroded. The fingers on the left hand were missing, and some ribs had been torn from the torso. Those that remained were stripped clean, along with the spinal cord and pelvis. Flesh lingered on the arms
and upper chest where the torn and muddy clothes had protected the skin, but there was little left to make any sense of what had happened or when.

The stunned fisherman called the Grand Prairie Police Department to describe the scene and the location. Within minutes, department personnel notified Sergeant Alan Patton, head of the Major Crimes Unit. Patton quickly grabbed his partner and drove out to the cement pipe factory.

Sergeant Patton was born and raised in Grand Prairie. He was a hometown cop who had the appearance of an old-school Texas Ranger, the kind who considered a horse his best friend and took pride in protecting the frontier. As a senior officer in Grand Prairie, Patton had served ten years as a major-crimes investigator and eight years as a detective.

Patton and his young partner arrived at the parking lot after a short drive and speculative conversation over what might have happened. Passing under the highway, Patton pulled off the road and stopped his car next to the police cruiser that was the first responder on the scene. He got out of the car and told his partner to stay close before walking down the access road toward a small group of men gathered by the body. The first two patrolmen on the scene were finishing up their interview with the fisherman who had found the remains. As Patton walked up to the group, the sight of the remains filled his vision. He furrowed his brow as his eyes swept across the scene. It was not pretty.

The gruesome sight was a first in Patton’s long years working homicide. The accelerated body decomposition combined with the animal activity struck a chord he’d not felt since he was a rookie, experiencing everything for the first time. He thought he had seen everything, but a first look at the remains reminded him that he hadn’t.

A moment later, Patton’s sense of time and place returned. His partner and the other two cops stood nearby, patiently waiting for orders. Patton began running through the routine of securing the scene, ordering the two patrolmen to cordon off the area. Then he told everyone to stay put until the crime scene investigators arrived. While they waited, Patton took the fisherman aside and asked him some questions, but he didn’t have much to add to what he’d already told the two patrolmen who had interviewed him, so Patton let him go and told the two patrol cops to make sure a detailed report was on his desk by the time he got back to the station. Patton was going to wait with his part
ner until the crime scene investigators finished their work, and then head back to the station to sort out this mess. The investigators took their time collecting soil samples, taking pictures of the scene, and inspecting the remains. A van from the medical examiner’s officer arrived. The scene technicians helped place the remains in a body bag and carry it back to the medical examiner’s vehicle, which set off to transport the body to the Dallas County medical examiner’s office for an autopsy. This was the beginning of a long investigation.

Patton was silent on the short drive back to the office. He needed to think. He knew the body had been there for some time, but there was no indication of the cause of death. Nothing at the scene suggested a crime, but he had to treat it that way, as any evidence the crime scene investigators recorded might be useful in the future. But the first task was to identify the body.

Back at the station, Patton walked quickly up the steps and toward his office, through a tightly packed group of cubicles, ignoring the usual chatter of patrolmen and investigators who were procrastinating in filing routine paperwork. He closed the door and sat down to punch out a press release. It was the first task he had to complete before moving forward with this case. Patton wanted to use the local newspapers to get the word out on the fisherman’s discovery. It was the most logical step toward pulling together any information that might help him figure out who belonged to the remains.

Since Javier’s disappearance on December 17, Ben Calzada had been scanning the news for anything that could even remotely connect with his son. When he saw the article about the body that had been discovered, he thought with some dread that it could be his son. He gathered his keys and coat and immediately drove out to the Grand Prairie police station. As Ben sped down the highway toward Grand Prairie, he allowed himself to hope for news, answers, or at least something more than nothing.

It had been two agonizing weeks since Ben and Marisa’s son had gone missing. No one had responded to the posters. No one at the hospitals knew anything. No one had called. Ben had hiked miles of backcountry trails looking for his son. Marisa had spent countless hours driving around their neighborhood, looking for any signs of their son’s presence. She had called everyone she knew, conducting her own investigation, but no one had any idea what had happened to Javier. The Calzadas couldn’t think of any reason why Javier would
run away, and they still couldn’t bear the thought that he might have been kidnapped—or worse.

Ben swung his van into the parking lot and half walked, half jogged into the station’s front hall. He headed straight for the reception and rang the bell, pacing until someone came to the front desk. Ben told the patrolman on duty why he was there. Before the patrolman responded, Ben began telling his story, speaking fast and passionately. The officer let him talk and silently took notes. When Ben finished, the patrolman said he couldn’t comment on the John Doe case, but someone would be in touch with him soon. Ben took a pause to look the man in the eye. There had to be something else. But the patrolman spun on his heel and walked away. Deflated and powerless, Ben walked back to his van to return home. He still didn’t have any answers.

That same day, Patton sat in his office and explored the theory that the remains might belong to a murder victim. The area where the fisherman had found the body was heavily wooded and relatively isolated. Was it possible that someone had dragged the victim there, knowing that no one would walk by and witness the murder? And there was a time issue: long years of investigation had taught Patton that the best time to catch a killer was within forty-eight hours of a crime. If he couldn’t catch the murderer within that critical time frame, the chances of solving a case were cut in half.

The poor state of the remains made it obvious that well over forty-eight hours had passed. Without identifying the body, it would be nearly impossible to move forward with the investigation. Patton was also frustrated that his press release had generated so little activity, but he had to push ahead. Against his better judgment, Patton decided to move from words to images. He picked up the phone and began dialing local television stations. Then he called the medical examiner to request some photos of the clothes found with the remains. He would need them for the cameras.

Patton held a press conference just before the New Year and showed the photos of the clothes found with the body. Four local news stations carried the story. Standing in front of the reporters, Patton read his statement and looked directly into the cameras, hoping there was someone out there who would recognize the clothes and make the phone call he needed to move this case forward.

Home from work after another long day, Ben Calzada was watching the local news with his wife when he saw Sergeant Patton holding
up pictures of his son’s clothing. He nearly fell out of his chair, scrambling for the telephone in the kitchen. He called the station and in a shaky voice told the attendant that he had information on the clothes Sergeant Patton had held up before the cameras.

Patton had just sat down in his office at the end of a long day with still no leads when the switchboard operator passed him the call from Ben Calzada.

This name is vaguely familiar, Patton thought, before picking up the receiver. As Ben Calzada spoke, Patton realized he was the same man who had earlier filed a report about his missing son. Ben was speaking quickly, in broken English. He’s nervous, Patton thought, as Ben insisted the clothes belonged to his son. Through all his nervousness and broken speech, Patton detected Calzada’s sorrow and pain. This was a desperate man who clearly recognized the clothes. Patton allowed himself to consider that the body in the morgue might be Mr. Calzada’s missing son.

As Ben talked to the sergeant, Marisa whispered that she had bought two identical shirts from a garage sale. The one she gave Javier, she said, was the same shirt that was on the news. Marisa felt her stomach constrict even as the words left her mouth. She was certain. What she had feared the most might actually be true.

Before he concluded the conversation, Patton asked the Calzadas to come in to the station. They wanted to come immediately, but Patton told them it would be best to wait until just after the holiday. They reluctantly agreed to visit the station on the second day of the New Year.

When Ben hung up the phone, he looked at his wife and knew what she was thinking. The saddened couple hugged each other and cried. Both felt their last strands of hope dissolve and their worst fear confirmed. Their baby boy was dead.