BREAKING: LONGTIME BROWNSVILLE NEWSMAN YOUNG IS DEAD

(Ed.'s Note: We have just received word that longtime newspaper and broadcasting journalist passed away early this morning. He was 83. Bill was respected by those of us who worked with him as a nuts-and-bolts old-fashioned newspaper guy cut from the old-school journalism cloth. He started at the Brownsville Herald and later expanded to broadcasting with local television stations. He was also an avid historian and contributed many pieces to state and national journals. We extend our condolences to his wife Patricia Cisneros, daughter Morgan, and to his extended family. RIP Bill. Below – as our humble tribute – we post one of the pieces he sent this blog, his last byline as it were.)

TWO SHOTS IN THE DARK ; THE MURDER OF MICHAEL SCHODTS

By Bill Young

By all accounts Austrian native Michael Schodts was one of the most prominent residents of Brownsville, Cameron County and even Matamoros. Born in Antwerp, Belgium on May 30, 1836, Schodts had come to Matamoros where he met and later married Susan Diaz. The couple had a daughter who was left motherless at three when Susan Diaz Schodts died.

It was after the untimely death of his wife that Schodts and little Maria Isabel Schodts moved to Brownsville, probably to continue the successful import business he had established in Matamoros. Instead, Schodts found himself in the lumber business with a yard at 11 th and East Monroe Streets. The business grew and Schodts prospered, expanded and branched out. By any measure, he had made his

mark in Brownsville and was received into the bosom of the community.

Even so, lumber was his specialty, with ads running in The Brownsville Herald that said, “M. Schodts, Dealer in Lumber.” 

In the 1890s one of the most popular restaurants and watering holes in Brownsville was Jagou’s, located on Elizabeth Street. It was here that Schodts and a cadre of his closest friends were in the habit of gathering for a round of drinks, a meal and perhaps a few hands of cards. So it was on February 28, 1896; Schodts sat with Adolph Bollack, another successful Brownsville merchant.

During the evening someone no doubt mentioned that 1896 was a leap year and they would enjoy an extra day on February 29. According to records at the National Weather Service February 29, 1896, would be warm, even for Brownsville, with the temperature reaching 92°. Schodts, however, wouldn’t get to enjoy the warm February day that lay in the future.

According to The Herald of February 29, 1896, Schodts was preparing to say goodnight to his companions when a stranger walked into Jagou’s. As reported by the paper “ . . . a Mexican came into the saloon and asked for a package of cigarettes. The porter handed him a pack and informed him that they were worth ten cents. The man handed them back, saying, ‘muy caro.’ He then walked to the

rear and looked through the lattice partition at the party in the back room (Schodts’s party). He then left the saloon but returned in a short while and asked for a match and again walked back to the lattice, looking at those in the other room.”

Witnesses would later say that no one could remember seeing this stranger before that night. His identity would become a factor only after the events of that fateful night played themselves out.

It was a little before 10 o’clock on the night of February 28, 1896, that the circle broke up and Schodts prepared, as usual, to walk from Jagou’s to his home on Washington Street near the entrance to the Fort Brown reservation. 

Schodts would never make it to the comfort and safety of his home. He got only as far as Washington and 11th Streets. “Two pistol shots,” reported The Herald, “startled the citizens living near the corner of Washington and 11th Streets.” Persons living nearby rushed to see what as the matter along with Fred L. Hicks, J.D. Anderson and I.D. Putegnat, the men Schodts had been visiting with at Jagou’s. What they found shocked and sickened them.

“They found,” said The Herald, “the body of Michael Schodts, dying, weltering in his life blood and already stiffening in death. . . . a bolder murder as perhaps never committed. In the heart of the city within half a block of police headquarters at the City Market.”

“Michael Schodts went to his doom, and within a few yards of his own door was shot in cold blood by the merciless hand of the assassin,” waxed The Herald. While there apparently were no eye witnesses to the shooting there were some prominent Brownsville residents who were literally a stone’s throw from the scene and who heard the shots which were mere seconds apart.

One of these was L.W.R. Cowen who The Herald had leaving his mother’s house near the murder scene when the first bullet “whistled past Mr. Cowen, going through the leaves of a tree in front of him.”

Brownsville physician Dr. C.B. Combe was reportedly the first to reach Schodts and found Schodts “at his last gasp.” Combe examined the mortally wounded Schodts and found two gunshot wounds, one to the left of his spinal column and between the shoulder blades, passing through the body. This was the bullet Cowen reportedly heard. The second bullet entered the left arm, near the shoulder and tracked

downward and was later extracted near the entrance wound caused by the second shot.

Combe suggested that the second wound was inflicted as Schodts turned, staggering, before he fell. Combe guessed the death weapon was a .44 pistol. 

So, a prominent citizen and businessman, well liked and highly regarded by the people of Brownsville had been shot down by moonlight on a clear, cool night in February of 1896. As the excitement of the murderous deed began to die down, folks began to wonder who had done this and why.

Some reported seeing the assassin flee, “pistol in hand, down 11th Street towards the river, but none of these could say who it was that did the deed.” Then they began to put two and two together: those who allegedly saw the shooter running away described him to Schodts’s friends from Jagou’s and the man who tried to buy cigarettes and the shooter seemed to one in the same.

This would-be purchaser of ten-cent cigarettes is known to have peered in at Schodts and his friends two different times as they sat in the back room at Jagou’s. After the second time he was reported crossing Elizabeth Street in front of Bloomberg & Rafael’s store, opposite the saloon. According to the report on the murder in the Leap Year Herald for February 29, the porter who told the man that the cigarettes he wanted were ten cents a pack said he’d never seen the buyer before but that “ . . . he was a strange Mexican, rather short in stature, heavy built, apparently of middle age and wore dark trousers with a striped, coffee-colored sack coat and soft hat.

“This man,” speculated The Herald, “it is supposed, was the murderer.”

There is some justification for this presumption because Schodts’s friends Hicks and Anderson both said the shooter looked like the man who came into Jagou’s and was wearing similar clothing. This same man was seen to “disappear in the cane brake near the river.”

In what turned out to be a futile effort, police were stationed on the river bank but the murderer had already made good his escape and made it to the safety of Matamoros. Mexican police reportedly were notified and asked to be on the lookout for the fugitive, and one arrest was said to have been made there, but nothing ever came of it.

Not only don’t we know who killed Michael Schodts but we don’t know why he was  killed. A murder such as his wasn’t new to Brownsville. It was a scant three years before that that Cameron County Sheriff Santiago Brito was gunned down as he drove his wagon down Washington Street in front of where the Cameron Hotel is now located. Brito’s murder was never solved. Stories abound that Brito’s killing was somehow part of an ongoing feud between the powerful Kenedy and Webb clans. 

In an interview before she died, Soyla Tijerina, the 95-year-old daughter of Brito’s chief deputy, Tomas Tijerina, said her father never discussed or mentioned the murder of his boss. We can be reasonably sure this wasn’t a random killing, but sadly, all the people who knew about Michael Schodts’s murder are long dead and barring some radical disclosure this one is truly an unsolved mystery.

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