Dateline Houston

UPDATE: Raul Rodriguez is sentenced to 40 years in prison for murdering Kelly Danaher. 4:00 PM

 

 

A Harris County jury is deep in deliberations today over the sentencing of Raul Rodriguez, convicted of murdering Kelly Danaher, his unarmed neighbor, in a 2010 confrontation over loud music. Dateline Houston reported on Rodriguez earlier this month, comparing his guilty verdict with that of a Houston police officer who also thought wrongly that his life was in danger. Rodriguez videotaped the encounter, recording himself saying what he believed to be the magic words: “My life is in danger” and “I’m standing my ground here.”

During sentencing, the prosecution said Rodriguez should get life in prison and called his act premeditated, based on his taped statements and armed initiation of the conflict. The defense argued that Rodriguez made “the wrong call” because of Texas’s “Stand Your Ground” laws, and that he should get the minimum, five years in prison.

Quoth the Chronicle: “’And as we go forward into the future, other people will make the wrong call’ because of misunderstanding about laws that permit the use of force when someone feels threatened, said attorney Bill Stradley. ‘And they will find themselves, like Raul Rodriguez, charged with murder.’”

It’s an interesting twist; usually criticism of “Stand Your Ground” laws comes from advocates for victims, but in this case, the defense seemed to be suggesting Rodriguez was the victim of a bad, easily misinterpreted law.

Midday today, the jury asked for a fresh-air break. We’ll report when deliberations end.

 

Here are a few more updates on previous Dateline Houston stories:

—In May, DH brought you the saga of Chad Holley, who in 2010 was videotaped (allegedly) being stomped, kicked, and punched during his arrest for suspected burglary, for which he was later convicted. Holley was 15 at the time. In May, the first of the officers charged with official oppression for the violent arrest was found not guilty by an all-white jury (Holley is black), prompting cries of racism.

Well, Holley is in the news again: now 18, he was arrested mid-June for burglary. Again. Three other officers are still charged and waiting to be tried for Holley’s alleged beating, and attorneys for two of those officers have already said they’ll try to get Holley’s second arrest admitted as evidence. In the most cynical view, this might change the trial’s central question from, “Did the officer use unnecessary violence?” to “Did the kid deserve it?”

 

—In lighter news, everyone’s favorite Houston City Council member Helena Brown continues her quest to single-handedly bring fiscal responsibility to Houston—this time, by defaulting on its obligations. Of the several amendments to the 2013 city budget that Brown proposed, one was “Default on the City’s contribution to the Pension Plans…so that the issue will be moved before the Texas Supreme Court to bring to question the state constitutionality of obliging them to maintain an unsustainable pension plan.”

Brown also wants to “Default on all Tax Bonds,” adding by way of explanation only, “It is the fiduciary responsibility of investment banks and advisors to know their financial risk before taking them.” Suckers.

Other ideas: “Outsource EMS,” “Take Parks and Recreation…and relinquish control over to county, citizens, or private sector,” or just the squirrels, whatever, and have the city “look into possibly requiring or only hiring first responders who live within the city limits so that they have ‘skin-in-the-game!’” Exclamation point, obviously, hers.

One more thing: “Decrease the water rate 20%.”

 

—Houston’s controversial restrictions on feeding the homeless go into effect at the end of this week, which DH reported on in April. Volunteers are scrambling to get enough petition signatures to trigger a charter amendment vote in November to repeal the ordinance. The Houston Press looks at the old-school efforts of the Kubosh brothers, who lately canvassed the city with 30,000 pamphlets about the petition, while the Chronicle has a grim assessment of the ordinance’s effects even before enforcement: only six organizations have registered with the city to give food, and, “So far, the city has approved only one feeding site, a city-owned vacant lot at the corner of Franklin and Chartres.”

This month, New York Times columnist Gail Collins published As Texas Goes… How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda. It’s an often funny, studiously researched traipse through Texas issues Observer readers will know well: abstinence education, textbook meddling, environmental deregulation and the like. As the subtitle suggests, Collins makes a case for how some of the more catastrophic national policy developments got their start in our backyard. Locals (ahem) might be torn between recognizing the harsh political realities Collins describes and resenting having them pointed out by a Yankee—but more in the full Observer review here.

Collins is speaking at the Progressive Forum in Houston on Tuesday night at the Wortham Center’s Cullen Theater, and last I checked, tickets are still available. I spoke to Collins by phone Thursday afternoon as she prepared for her swing through the Lone Star State.

Dateline Houston: First of all, who’s your audience?

Gail Collins: People who do not live in Texas, actually. It’s for the outside world. This is an outsider’s view of how Texas has influenced the rest of the country. And I’ve talked to many people, lovely people in Texas who say, “Well, I don’t disagree with your general conclusions, but you aren’t, you don’t have the nitty gritty, you don’t understand the texture and the subtleties of life in Texas.” I totally agree with that. Texas has ten billion great writers and I trust them to produce that story. My story is about what Texas is doing to the outside world.

DH: If you were asked to be interviewed on air by Fox News, would you do it?

GC: I don’t know. It would depend on who it was. Do you have an invitation?

DH: No… no, we don’t speak. But if I were an outsider and I read this book, I would think, Oh my gosh, all my craziest, zaniest, nastiest, kitschiest ideas I ever had about Texas are all true. Then I think about how I regard Fox News as the cartoon version of this certain kind of Republican—

GC: Well, I’m pained to be compared to Fox News, but I appreciate your thought.

DH: What I meant was, is that an audience you’d approach?

GC: My next stop is going to be in Texas, and that’s going to be a challenge enough. Although people in Texas do, I think, agree with me that, which other people outside of Texas do not in general appreciate, how important the state is. I think most people in Texas would agree with me that the state has been underestimated by the rest of the country. Also, when I go around in the North and the East and the West, I always try to point out to the audiences that the people of Texas are truly amazing, and wonderful, and that I doubt very much that, if, say, Newark was hit by a hurricane, that New Yorkers would [as Houston did after Katrina] as readily invite 200,000 refugees into their town—

DH: And then tell them to go home, but…

GC: They did tell them to go home, but at least there was that first impetus, which was not something I think you would have gotten from a lot of places that fancy themselves to be way more liberal than Texas is. I try to make it a point to bring that up every place I go. In fact, I was at an event in Washington yesterday and a guy got up and said, “Well, if the people in Texas are so nice, how come their politics is so weird?”

DH: I have always had that question myself.

GC: My answer is, it goes back to the theory that I have about empty places and crowded places. If you believe yourself to be living in an empty place, you tend to be hostile to the very notion of government because you don’t really see any good effect of it. You think you’re on your own, you’re in an empty place, you take care of yourself, all government does is tax you or get in the way. The interesting thing for me is that although that division between empty places, the philosophies, have been around since Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, in recent years it’s become more of a mental state than an actual physical state. I was in Washington, the state of Washington, last week and I ran into people who live in the forest but they have this vision of themselves as part of this very large, maybe planetary community of people with needs and responsibilities and that they’re very much intertwined in and they think of themselves as being crowded-place people, even though they can’t see any neighbor from where they live. And on the other hand, you have people who live in 400-unit condos in Boca Raton who are convinced they don’t need the government for anything whatsoever, even if they’re living off social security. So one of the reasons Texas is so powerful in this kind of empty-places philosophy is because people in Texas, I did find, generally think they live in an empty place, even when they live in a city, because there is so much empty space, because you have to drive so far to get anywhere. There’s a sense, that sort of sense of wide-open spaces even if you’re in a metropolitan area, which 80 percent of people in Texas are.

DH: The book is a pretty good rundown of Texas’s issues and the often pretty tragic results of our policies. Was it a challenge to maintain the kind of wry tone that you have in your columns over the length of a book, and a book that’s about things that are very sad and often very dark?

GC: It is. It was hard. The other books I’ve written have mostly been histories, and they were political commentary, and I, while I attempted to make them readable, I didn’t have that same feeling of a need to really hit a tone that would keep people going. As a writer, as a columnist, as a political writer, it’s always been my goal to use humor to get people through the reading of information that they might not actually make their way through if left to their own devices. I’m really happiest when people say, “I never would have gotten through a whole column on savings and loan deregulation or the education privatization or whatever.” If you maintain a certain level of humor, people can stay with you for a lot longer. That was my goal in this book. It would be hard otherwise to keep people who do not live in Texas going through an entire book about the politics of Texas without some encouragement.

DH: Were there times when you were doing the research that, in your writing, you wanted to get overtly angry or upset or sad?

GC: It’s always been a goal of mine in writing—I told myself this when I started really writing in New York—that I didn’t want people to come away from what I wrote beating their head against the wall or wanting to throw themselves out the window. I wanted to give them a sort of sense of cheerfulness in spite of unpleasantness on occasion.

DH: Did you ever see anything out of Texas during your research, like the sonogram law, and go, “Oh my gosh, that’s great for my book!”

GC: Yeah, it’s very strange when you do what I do, you sort of try to balance that. You try not to say, “Oh great, something terrible has happened, therefore it’s going to really improve [my column].” I must admit, I do get a certain amount of glee when something just really funny and outrageous happens.

DH: Like Perry.

GC: Yeah. Rick Perry was just a blessing from God. It’s very hard to do a column off the news when the news is happening, and I tend to do them whenever there’s a debate on Wednesday night, which is my deadline night. It’s a challenge, because the deadline for the column is nine o’clock, and the debates tend to end at nine o’clock our time. I was doing one of the debates and I was sort of—it’s really not the easiest thing in the world—and that was the moment that Perry forgot his third agency that he wanted to close. And it was just like the heavens opened up and the angels sang.

DH: Did you know that he was going to implode?

GC: No, I didn’t. But I didn’t write the book because of him. I was writing the book before he announced. But I had thought he would be potentially, I mean on paper, he looked good, although I was suspicious of the fact that he hadn’t debated when he ran for governor last time. He did seem to have a history of avoiding debates whenever possible, so I guess I should have been more suspicious.

DH: Governor Goodhair.

GC: He’s got great hair.

DH: This book came out in the middle of an election year, and there’s the court cases about the voter ID ongoing and the delayed primaries—were you worried about there being big changes happening on the way to print?

GC: Yeah, whenever you’re writing a book like this, that’s always a challenge. There are a lot of things in the book I was a little less specific about than I would have been if I was absolutely sure what was going to happen in a court case or a primary election or whatever by the time the book was out. Things change all the time. You just have to do the best you can and move forward.

DH: Who are some of your favorite Texans?

GC: Do they have to be famous people?

DH: No.

GC: One of the reasons I got involved in this entire project is, the book that I did before this was a book about American women and what had happened to them in the last 50 years. I went looking for people all around, women, whose stories I could tell in the book. Somebody directed me to Sylvia Acevedo, who lives in Austin. She was trained as an engineer, she’s now a businesswoman, and she just has an amazing life story. It, in every single way, was fascinating. When I got to Texas to publicize the book, she took me around, to various projects—she was a person of many, many projects—that she was working on, that involved young parents and trying to bring young Hispanic parents into the school system to get them more comfortable helping their kids to learn. She took me around to meet various people who were working on family planning issues and other things. She’s very into demographics and told me a lot about the demographics of Texas, and was one of the people who really convinced me that Texas was the future of the country, because of the size of the state and the size of the birth rate. She really brought me around on this whole thing. I would have to say she was one of my favorite people, all told. When I think of Texas, I also think of people like Sylvia. It’s not all Rick Perry.

Hernan Trujillo doesn’t have a cell phone. He doesn’t have a car. Getting to and from his two jobs takes about two hours on Metro buses, if he doesn’t miss any connections and the traffic is light. From 9 a.m. until 4 p.m., Trujillo washes dishes at a restaurant. From 5 p.m. until 9:30 p.m., he cleans more than 200 elevator landings at Reliant Energy Plaza, a skyscraper in downtown Houston. He lives in a two-bedroom apartment with four other people and spends much of his money supporting his parents, both of whom are sick and uninsured. His mother needs a knee replacement, but can’t afford it, so Trujillo pays for her pain medication. He is 29.

“Even if you work two or three jobs, it’s never enough,” he says.

Trujillo is one of 3,200 janitors represented by Local 1, the Houston-area janitors’ union organized by the Service Employees International Union. You can see him here getting knocked down by a police horse during a protest last Thursday in front of the JP Morgan Chase building. Local 1 has protested daily since mid-May, when negotiations over their new contract broke down. The janitors work for seven companies that provide cleaning services to some of Houston’s largest companies, including Exxon and Chevron. Their contract expired at the end of May.

Houston’s janitors unionized in 2006, before which they made minimum wage. Unionized Houston janitors now earn $8.35 an hour. Few of them are allowed to work 40 hours a week, so the average local janitor makes less than $9,000 a year. (The federal poverty line for one person is $11,170.) They want a $1.65 raise over the next three years, which would bring their hourly pay to $10. Their employers have offered a 50-cent raise over five years. Paloma Martinez, of the SEIU, calls that “insulting.”

“The industry could do so much better,” she says. “Fifty cents isn’t going to make a difference in people’s lives.”

Martinez points out that in other cities, such as Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, the real estate market is worse than Houston’s—vacancy rates are higher and rents are lower—but their janitors make between $10.25 and $15.45, according to 2012 first-quarter data. Those janitors are also regularly allowed 40-hour work weeks, dramatically increasing their annual pay.

Local 1 held three limited strikes on June 5, 6, and 7, protesting alleged unfair labor practices, intimidation, and threats. Eleven workers were replaced after a one-day strike in Greenspoint, which the union says is illegal. They plan to file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.

None of the negotiators for the seven cleaning companies returned calls for comment.

Houston’s janitors are not alone in their struggle for a living wage. The asterisk to Perry’s much-crowed-over job creation is that many of those jobs paid very little and offered no benefits. Almost 10 percent of Texas jobs pay minimum wage ($7.25) or less, which ties the state with Mississippi for the greatest proportion of low-paying jobs.

“Everybody’s talking about the American dream, when you work hard, you get ahead,” Trujillo says, “but for us, that’s not true. Many of my coworkers don’t dare to turn on the air conditioning because the electricity bill will be so high they cannot pay it. What are you going to do? Put food on the table or pay the electricity bill? And the people who drive, are they going to put gas in the car or buy shoes for their children?”

“We’re just asking for fairness. We’re not trying to get rich,” he says. “You cannot leave this job and go to another place because the next person that is going to come to this job is going to have to face the same problem. We’re going to keep marching, we’re going to go on strike if it is needed, but we are not going to stop.”

In the three-and-a-half months since Trayvon Martin was killed, Houston courts have heard two cases involving the shooting of unarmed civilians and decided them very differently.

Last night, a Harris County jury found Raul Rodriguez guilty of murder for shooting his neighbor in 2010 over a noisy party. Kelly Danaher, a 36-year-old elementary school teacher, was having a birthday party for his wife and young daughter. Angry about the noise, Rodriguez armed himself with a handgun and video camera and recorded himself telling a police dispatcher, “my life is in danger now,” “these people are going to try and kill me,” and “I’m standing my ground here.” Rodriguez fatally shot Danaher in the street after someone tried to grab his video camera.

Dateline Houston wishes this were a depressing postmodern play about the dangerous, aggrandizing fantasies engendered by constant self-documentation in the social media age—but it’s not. It’s a real news story about a retired firefighter with a concealed carry permit and the Stand Your Ground law that made him think that saying aloud that he believed his life was in danger would protect him from all consequences.

The problem is, Rodriguez wasn’t a cop.

In April, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against two Houston-area cops who shot an unarmed black man, Robbie Tolan, in his driveway in 2008.

Here’s what happened—and please note, these events are not disputed; the issue at stake in the lawsuit was whether these events violated Tolan’s constitutional rights.

Tolan and his cousin were driving home in the wee hours of December 31. Officer John C. Edwards (who is white) was on patrol in the Bellaire neighborhood and ran Cooper’s plates—you know, just because. The plates came back as stolen—because Edwards had entered the plate number wrong.

Edwards called for back-up and confronted Tolan and his cousin on the front lawn, ordering them to the ground. Tolan’s parents heard the commotion and came outside in their pajamas, trying to explain that Tolan lived there and the car was theirs. One of the officers pushed Tolan’s mother toward the garage door and Tolan started to get up, objecting. Sgt. Jeffrey Wayne Cotton, who had been on the scene for 32 seconds, shot Tolan. Per the Chronicle: “Cotton said he thought Tolan was reaching for a gun in his waistband.”

Cotton was charged with first-degree aggravated assault by a public servant and found not guilty at trial in 2010. Naturally. Then the Toban family sued. They lost.

“Sergeant Cotton misinterpreted Robbie Tolan’s intended actions,” the judge wrote, “but his firing on Robbie Tolan did not violate Robbie Tolan’s constitutional rights because Sergeant Cotton feared for his life and could reasonably have believed the shooting was necessary.”

The firing of Jasper’s first black police chief, only a year after his appointment, has brought race tensions to the fore again, and residents are scared.

In June of 1998, three white supremacists in Jasper, dragged James Byrd Jr. behind a pickup truck until his head came off.

Thirteen years later, the city council, which at the time had four black council members and one white, named Rodney Pearson Jasper’s first black police chief. While the town was 46 percent white and 44 percent black, the police force had always been vastly white. Grumbles at the time suggested the pick was racially motivated and that Pearson, who had been Jasper’s first black highway patrolman, was unqualified. Three white candidates sued the city for “reverse discrimination.” Others pointed to the fact that Pearson, when he was 21, had been convicted of a class C misdemeanor for writing a hot check worth less than $20, which he neglected to mention on his application. (This is what conservative outlets claim is Pearson’s main disqualification.)

But Pearson hung on to his post—until now. In the year since Pearson’s appointment, white residents in Jasper organized the city’s first-ever recall election, (in which voter fraud was alleged) ousting three of the four black councilmembers and replacing them with whites, so that now the council’s balance is 4/5 white.

Last night, Pearson was fired. The reason? Job performance, they say, specifically that he allegedly took four unauthorized vacation days. The council is meeting today to discuss the firing. Council members swear up and down that his race is not the reason for the dismissal.

A white Jasper resident, who asked not to be named, told Dateline Houston that the Black Panthers are on their way to the city and that she fears the KKK will also come and there may be violence. “Regardless of what groups come, this is a big deal,” she says. “The white people are saying, ‘This isn’t about race at all!’ But it so obviously is.”

“When it has anything to do with racism, people get really angry. And when people get angry, they get stupid.” She adds, “We’re just going to stay in our house for a few days.”

We’ll keep you posted.