AS COLD CASES GO, DA SHOULD LOOK INTO HIS OWN HOUSE

By Juan Montoya

For the past two years, Cameron County Luis V. Saenz has been resurrecting "cold cases" of at least two murders that happened 15 and 20 years ago and has generated the predictable headlines in the local news media, a la NCIS.

Old cases are the favorite of defense attorneys.

Not only is the evidence dated, witnesses memories have faded, and police officers and prosecutors involved in the investigations either dead or gone, but the constitutional guarantees to the defendants of confronting and cross examining your accuser are almost nil.

These are cases that require the prosecutors to build up such a formidable case based on circumstantial evidence that in the majority of cases they can't prevail.

But they make for damn good press and elicit the sympathy of the victims, relatives and friends.

Just in the last two years, two such cases have been reopened by the DA's Office under Saenz.

The first was that of Antonio Santos, accused of killing his wife Evelyn Santos back on October 12th, 1998.  According to the original police report,officers found no signs of a forced entry but a bloody crime scene inside their home. They reported finding blood and clumps of hair in what what looked like the scene of a domestic disturbance. 

Santos claimed he gave her CPR and tried to revive her by slapping her, shaking her and throwing water in her face but nothing worked. He said that he even tried to carry her but ended up having to pull her by her hair because she became heavy.

Prosecutors now believe that Santos used his hand to suffocate his wife and Saenz  decided that they had enough evidence to go forward with the charges.

The other case involved a 41-year-old Brownsville man who was questioned about the 1993 disappearance of a 17-year-old High School student Carol Reed who was last seen walking into a now-defunct Lopez Supermarket off Ringgold Street in Brownsville.

It is not clear what role Medina might have played in the disappearance of Reed, and authorities have not yet charged him in the case.

The details of how he was arrested also raised some eyebrows since Medina jumped a fence at a football game in Brownsville after his son was injured on the field. He was charged with criminal trespassing, disorderly conduct and driving with a suspended license.That’s when investigators learned he was wanted for questioning in the Reed case.

In the Santos case, 138th District Court Judge Arturo Nelson granted a lowering of his bond from $200,000 to $150, despite pleas by Assistant District Attorney Gustavo “Gus” Garza who opposed the bond reduction. Defense attorney Louis Sorola told the court that prior to the 1998 murder accusations, Santos was under investigation by the federal government for money laundering, a crime to which he pleaded guilty. He served time in prison from 2001 until 2006.

Sorola told the court that Santos had since remarried, lived in San Antonio, and was making $90,000 a year plus bonuses before his arrest that cost him his job.

It is curious how Saenz has chosen to resurrect these two cold cases just now.

Loose tongues say that if he wanted to clean his files, he might have started with a case involving the son of one of his Asst. DAs who was never brought to trial after he was caught taking money to lower bonds at a county office.

The incident happened during the former DA Armando Villalobos administration who heeded the request of a district judge to allow him to take care of the charges "in-house." No charges were ever field against the man and the case was never made against him.

In fact, since it never got to the stage when it could be brought before a grand jury and the statute of limitations has probably already come and gone, it is not only a "cold case," but rather a dead and buried one, not to say swept under the judicial rug.