FORGOTTEN, UNMARKED GRAVE FOR BPD OFFICER WHO GAVE HIS LIFE

By Juan Montoya

Each May, as part of National Police Week, the Brownsville Police Department holds a memorial for police officers who have fallen in the line of duty, and holds a ceremony honoring the four local men who died by gunfire over the years.

The first ones – City Marshal Joseph L. Crixell and Toribio Rodriguez – died three months apart, August and November in 1912, respectively. Crixell was shot five times at close range without warning by a rouge Texas Ranger who was a Cameron County sheriff deputy while he was walking towards his brother's bar. He didn't have time to draw his gun. The former Ranger was granted a change of venue and was ultimately acquitted by a jury in Lavaca County.

The last one, Capt. Alfred Basler, was shot and killed on March, 1945.

In between, on September 19, 1913, another officer, 27-year-old Lieutenant Octavio Monico Puig, died after being shot nine times when he entered a house of ill repute to question several men who were carousing in the house of prostitution just past 12 a.m. that morning. 

To make mattes worse – and causing a huge controversy at the time coming a year after Crixell's murder – the main suspects were then-Cameron County Sheriff T.C. Ryan and nine deputies and two hack drivers who were in the salon of the house when Puig arrived with several police officers. Ryan, then 33, was elected on November 8, 1910 and  re-elected on November 5, 1912. He was backed by the powerful James B. Wells political machine.  

It was in the wee hours of the morning – just after midnight that September night – when a messenger came to the Brownsville Police Department station to report that someone was discharging a firearm in the vicinity of a local prostitution house at the corner of Fronton and 6th streets. 

Puig and the other officers knew the house. 

It was run by Flossie Westcott, a well-known madam, and while five officers stood outside, Puig and officer Henry Harve knocked on the door, and stood in the doorway. According to news reports and testimony of the men, Puig – who did not draw or fire his service revolver – stood just outside the door of the salon and pointed with his hand at the sheriff and his men and cited them to appear that morning at corporation court and answer before a judge for firing their weapons inside the city limits.

Then all hell broke loose, and a gunfight erupted. In all, investigators reported that more than 40 gunshots were fired by both groups. Some of the sheriff deputies, including Sheriff Ryan, lost their fingers, and others were injured. Miraculously, only Puig was fatally shot, but not before he lingered for three hours and bled to death on the floor of Flossie Westcott's house of ill repute.

One shot entered the neck, one in the abdomen, just two above the left breast, and three in the back. Almost any of these shots might have proved fatal. He lasted until three o'clock and was conscious almost until he expired.  

Puig, who had been with the department for about a year and a half after having worked as a clerk in the Brownsville post office, rose through the ranks rapidly and – according to the Brownsville Herald's account – was well-liked and serviceable. Before he died, he was able to give a death-bed statement on how the shootout occurred. His statement was witnessed by several people, including Dr. Harry Kalman Loew, who attended to his wounds.

His Death Statement

"I think I'm going and I wish to make a statement of the occurrence of this night. I came inside the house of Flossie Westcott. I saw Mr. Price, the jailer, Mr. Oliver, Mr. Harry Wallace, Sheriff Ryan, Jose Longoria and Bert Mitchell. I told them they were all under arrest to appear at City Hall at 9 a.m. They got up. 'Why do you arrest us?,' they said and the shooting began, first by Price, Longoria, and the others came toward me all shooting. I went to the ground. I saw nobody afterwards. I did not shoot. My gun shows it. That's all. I make this statement knowing I am going to die. Price shot me I know. I went to the floor giving them my back, falling facing the wall." 

Octavio Puig (X, his mark)

Puig was survived by a wife, Maria C. Pecina. Their son, Juan Octavio Puig, died in infancy one month after he was born - a common occurrence in those years - on May 1907 and his grave is besides his father's crypt. Over time, it has also crumbled into a heap of bricks (see photo at top). He is buried in Block 2, Lot 7, of the Old City Cemetery. 

In response, the Sheriff's department counter-filed attempted murder charges against the five police officers who were with Puig at the time of the confrontation alleging that the sheriff and the deputies "were present at the scene of the trouble for the purpose of preserving order" and that "they were there in response to a call for that purpose and that the trouble grew out of and was incident to an unlawful and unwarranted effort on the part of the police force to arrest the sheriff's department and thereby to jeopardize them."    

Further research is needed to determine who, if anyone, was convicted in Puig's death, although the record indicates that Sheriff Ryan continued serving for another three years until 1915, when Wells chose his successor because of the continuous violence in the county's rural areas under Ryan's administration.

But today, when the memorial for fallen officers ceremony is observed at the Brownsville Police Department, almost exactly one block away in the old city cemetery lies the crumbling, abandoned, crypt where Officer Octavio Monico Puig rests, forgotten by the city and the people for whom he gave his life.