April 2002 Volume 83 Number 4 "serving the protectors"
A cop re-victimized
By Brett Williams

Through the brutal murder of his young brother, a respected US police officer became a secondary victim of crime. He bravely carried on with his life but, when the killer returned to the neighbourhood, Alfred Rios was made to suffer again – this time at the hands of his police chief. Shelly Wilkison reports from Texas.

Alfred Rios was on patrol one day when he happened to glance over into a front yard and see a man who looked hauntingly familiar.

His heart began to race as he approached the house. From his patrol car, he stared in horror and utter disbelief at the man who less than 20 years earlier had shot and killed his baby brother and his cousin.

There, standing free, in the same San Angelo neighbourhood just one block from the home where Officer Rios and his two brothers and sister had grown up, was the man who had devastated his family and changed his world forever.

“My first thought was one of fear for my parents and my family,” he remembers. “Then, I was shocked when I found out he had been on parole since 1998. We didn’t know. We weren’t notified, and here he was right back in our neighbourhood.”

Officer Rios, the oldest of four children, had graduated from high school months earlier, was working in his father’s construction business and was to marry his high school sweetheart in a few months. That afternoon, he and his girlfriend, her family and some other friends were getting ready to go out for dinner. It was December 13, 1981.

His cousin was getting married in a few days, so Officer Rios’ two younger brothers joined their cousins and a friend to celebrate in a neighbourhood park that Sunday afternoon. As evening approached, Trinidad Rios, his wife and nine-year-old daughter drove down to the park to check on his sons. He asked them to come home because it would be dark soon.

Mr Rios left the parking lot, thinking his boys would soon catch up. But when he reached a traffic light several hundred yards away and didn’t see them in his rear-view mirror, he decided to turn back and prod them again. He followed another route back to the parking lot, and five minutes later he drove up on a bloodbath.

“My mother let out a scream as she practically jumped out of the car. My father stopped the vehicle and the next moments of this day became slow motion to me,” wrote Leticia Gonzales on September 21 of last year in a writing assignment for a college English class. Officer Rios says it’s the first time his sister has written about the incident she witnessed when she was only 9.

“One cousin was dead on the ground covered with blood from gunshot wounds to his face,” she wrote. “My mother dropped to her knees next to my youngest brother’s lifeless body and began pleading for help as he lay there dying. Meanwhile, my father found my other brother alive clinging to life and found the other boys were fine. At the same time, I sat in the car trying to make sense of what I was experiencing while feeling numb.”

In a story that appeared in the following day’s edition of the San Angelo Standard-Times, police “officers described the scene as reminiscent of old Chicago gang killings.”

According to newspaper accounts, the survivors said John Abel Perez, then 24, and three other men drove up on the group, jumped out of a pickup truck armed with guns and surrounded them.

Officer Rios’ brother, Steve, who was 18 at the time, was the first to be shot. Perez shot him once in the forehead with a 12-gauge shotgun and he fell backward to the ground.

The others ran as Perez continued shooting. Ricardo Rios, 17, was gunned down as he ran. An autopsy report showed he was shot through the heart. Officer Rios said his little brother left a trail of blood through the parking lot and into the grass where he fell and died minutes later in his mother’s arms.

Roger Rios, the officer’s 19-year-old cousin, was rounded up at gunpoint and brought back to Perez in the parking lot. Perez admitted he shot him in the face, killing him.

Two other boys were badly beaten.

“I think he (Perez) thought my brother (Steve) was dead until he started to leave and heard him make a noise. Steve said he looked up at him, watched him reload and all he could do was hold up his left arm as if he was trying to shield his face,” Officer Rios said.

His arm and hand were permanently injured.

A Tom Green County jury found Perez guilty of both murders and the attempted murder of Steve Rios. His punishment was 45 years on each murder count and the sentences were to run concurrently. But with good time, he was paroled after 16 years – eight years per victim. Two others who assisted Perez, brothers Daniel and Adam Suniga, pleaded guilty to aggravated assault. Daniel Suniga received 10 years probation and Adam Suniga was sentenced to seven years in prison.

The murder of the Rios cousins not only changed the lives of two families, but it traumatized San Angelo’s Hispanic community. Life-long residents of the West Texas community remember the double homicide as one of the worst crimes committed there in recent history. One local musician even wrote a Spanish ballad about the incident.

Officer Rios and his cousin Gonzalo Rios, the eldest siblings in their families, channelled their losses into something positive for their community. Gonzalo Rios, whose brother Roger was murdered, became an attorney and is a leader in San Angelo’s Hispanic community.

After the shootings, Officer Rios worked another year in his father’s construction business, married his high school sweetheart and then joined the Army. After 10 years of distinguished military service, he joined the local police department in 1992.

“I work in the same neighbourhood I grew up in, and that’s important to me,” he said. “I became a police officer because I wanted to do something to help make a difference here. And I guess I thought if I was out here patrolling the barrio, nothing like that (double homicide) would ever happen again.”

His father tried to discourage him from joining the police force. “He had already lost one son, and he didn’t want to lose another,” Officer Rios remembers him saying. His mother was equally fearful.

Over the years, just as his family has grown more accustomed to his career choice, the Hispanic community has also come to count on Officer Rios. He is active in his church and in the local Knights of Columbus, and has become a role model for Hispanic youth. A father of three, he uses every opportunity to encourage young people to stay off alcohol and drugs and stay away from gangs.

The return of a killer

While time had eased some of their pain, the return of the killer into their lives has created new anguish for the Rios family.

Last year, Officer Rios, who also has a construction business, was preparing to leave a job site when he noticed Perez talking with another parolee across the street. After Perez left, the officer walked over and warned him that he shouldn’t be talking to Perez. As parolees, the law prohibited them from communicating with each other. He advised the man that the next time he saw them together, he would have to write him up.

When Perez heard of the conversation days later, he complained to San Angelo Police Chief Joe Gibson that Officer Rios was harassing him by trying to keep him from getting a job. Officer Rios said he didn’t talk to Perez and didn’t know he was seeking employment.

In June, Officer Rios and another officer observed Perez in a bar, another violation of his parole. Perez claimed to be doing concrete work there, but there was no evidence of that, the officers said.

In July, Steve Rios called his brother late one night after being in that same bar. He had seen Perez there drinking. But instead of going down to the bar himself, Officer Rios notified the officer on duty in the area. Later, that officer went by the bar, found Perez, and wrote him up for violating parole.

Two days later on July 24, Officer Rios was called into the Chief’s office and placed on administrative leave. He would have to stay inside his house from 8am to 4pm Monday through Friday.

The Chief sent Perez’s complaints against the officer to a Grand Jury, which no-billed him in mid-August. Included in the Grand Jury findings was a letter to the Chief encouraging him to put the officer back to work right away because he had done nothing wrong. But instead of complying with the wishes of the Grand Jury, the Chief launched an internal affairs investigation of Officer Rios and kept him under house arrest an additional two months until October 30.

“One day, I caught internal affairs sneaking around in the bushes behind my house,” Officer Rios said. “He was trying to make sure I was inside where I was supposed to be.

“I couldn’t do anything. I had to ask permission to take a kid to the doctor or run an errand, yet this parolee, this murderer, was free to do as he wished,” he said.

After the first few weeks of house arrest, Officer Rios and his wife began having financial problems.

“When it came time to pay bills, she would ask me what I was going to do,” he said. “There was nothing I could do.”

Because he was confined to his house, he was unable to supervise work crews and building jobs fell behind schedule. He had to lay off workers and do the work himself on the weekends.

“This has become a very volatile situation,” he said. “My family is very angry and believes the system failed them. This guy committed a double homicide and was able to come right back here, within a block of my parents. He served less than half of his sentence.”

Officer Rios says he fears most for his brother Steve, now 38, because he is still so angry. He doesn’t think Perez has recognized his brother yet because he looks very different from the day he shot him in the park.

“His hair would never grow back where he was shot, so he shaves his head now,” he said. “When he has a cold or when he sneezes, he still spits out pellets.”

Officer Rios says after all these years he still regularly comes into his parents’ home and hears his father crying in a back room. He said his mother cries for her son frequently.

“I cry, too, once in a while. It feels like there’s a big void in my life,” he said. “I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive him (Perez) for what he did, and for what he’s done to my family. The pain is always going to be there.”

Officer Rios remembers going to the crime scene for the first time the day after the shooting in 1981. He was with his cousin, Gonzalo.

“There were still pools of blood everywhere. There was blood in a path from where my brother was shot to where he fell in the grass. My cousin found part of his brother’s gum on the pavement, and he said, ‘they couldn’t even pick him all up.’ “

Every day, Officer Rios has to pass Ben Ficklin Park where his brother and cousin were killed. He says it’s a habit for him to turn his head and look over at the spot in the grass where his baby brother took his last breath.

“Sometimes I think about what happened there, and other times I don’t,” he said. “But I can’t keep myself from looking.”

These stories first appeared in the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas magazine, Family First.

Rank-and-file cops stand up to police chief
By Shelly Wilkison

The day before the event, San Angelo police officers say their chief was running scared. Never in recent history had local officers stood up to police management in such a public way, and the elected police chief was visibly nervous.

“We just couldn’t stand by and watch this administration continue to bully this officer when he was only doing his job,” said San Angelo Coalition of Police vice-president, Chris Walling.

Despite being cleared of charges of official oppression in mid-August by a Tom Green County Grand Jury, Officer Alfred Rios was kept under house arrest for more than two months longer.

Chief Joe Gibson, who is one of only four elected police chiefs in the state, was told by the Grand Jury to return the officer to work. However, Chief Gibson wasn’t satisfied with that finding. So, almost a week after the Grand Jury no-billed the officer, the chief announced he would conduct his own internal investigation into complaints made by a paroled murderer against the veteran officer.

Twenty years ago, the parolee, John Abel Perez, was convicted of the murders of Officer Rios’ youngest brother and his cousin.

Michael Rickman, an attorney for the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas who represents Officer Rios, said during the course of his client’s home confinement, he inquired repeatedly as to the status of the internal investigation. However, there was no response until the morning of October 30 – just hours before a news conference and community rally for Officer Rios was set to begin.

“He called Alfred in that morning and told him he was putting him back to work,” said Mr Rickman.

“He appeared visibly shaken, and told me things had gone too far and it should all stop then and there,” Officer Rios said. “It was clear he wanted me to stop the event from happening that afternoon.”

Mr Rickman said while the chief told Officer Rios to return to work, he placed conditions on him that are unacceptable and possibly violate state civil service law.

Officer Rios was taken off patrol duty and sent to the Property Room where he will spend most of his shifts for an indefinite period. On Sundays, he will work the Information Desk. The chief also ordered the officer to seek psychological counselling.

“There were no sustained charges against Officer Rios, therefore, we consider him to be exonerated. He should be returned to patrol duty,” said Mr Rickman.

Officer Rios said he believes he was assigned to the Property Room because a close friend of the chief also works there.

“Everybody knows that’s where officers go who are being punished for something. I think they put me there so the chief could keep an eye on me,” he said.

“Officer Rios did nothing wrong,” said Mr Rickman. “Even a Grand Jury said he did nothing wrong and told the chief he should be put back on the street.

“By reassigning him and ordering him to see a psychiatrist, the chief basically thumbed his nose at the Grand Jury and took it upon himself to convict and punish this respected officer,” he continued. “This is an outrage!”

Mr Rickman said the officer shouldn’t have been ordered to seek psychological counselling because there was no evidence indicating he lacked the mental capacity to perform his job. Civil service law requires management to provide such proof before an officer may be directed to seek such attention, he said.

“I don’t believe there was ever a legitimate internal investigation of Officer Rios,” said Mr Rickman. “The chief convicted him on the word of a murderer long before the Grand Jury ever reached a finding.”

Internal Affairs investigators took statements from Officer Rios and from Perez, but they never contacted witnesses to the three incidents where the officer was accused of harassing the felon, Mr Rickman said.

Officer Rios was called into the chief’s office periodically during his administrative leave. But his attorney says the impromptu meetings effectively shut him out of the process. Mr Rickman is based in Mesquite.

“They made him go in there alone so they could try to intimidate him,” he said.

Mr Rickman said he was taken aback by this chief’s ruthless aggression toward his own officer.

“For months, they forced Officer Rios to stay at home knowing his business would suffer and his family would be pushed into dire financial straits,” said Mr Rickman. “I believe they kept him home hoping to bankrupt him or force his resignation.

“Officer Rios and his family are the victims of one of the most heinous crimes ever committed in this community. They have been through trauma the likes of which most officers may never experience. Even when this chief first learned over a year ago that the murderer had returned, he never once expressed concern for the safety of this officer or his family,” Mr Rickman added.

Yet when the press came knocking at his door after the association came to the side of their fellow patrolman, the chief claimed he was looking out for the safety of Officer Rios when he reassigned him.

“A threat of violence has never been made by any party throughout this period of time,” said Mr Rickman. “The chief’s suggestion that such a threat existed was false.”

Association members and their families, along with dozens of citizens from the Hispanic community, lined the steps of the police department at 4pm October 30. Many carried signs calling on the chief to put Officer Rios back to work, and some even called the chief a racist.

“The people of this community want Officer Rios back on the street,” said Officer Walling. “He is very well respected!”

Officer Walling said the officers association has rallied to the side of their friend and co-worker. In fact, the group has never been so united in purpose and committed to each other.

“This chief took the word of a convicted killer over the word of his own sworn officer,” said Charley Wilkison, CLEAT’s political division director. Mr Wilkison criticized the chief during a news conference that began after Officer Rios was released from the day’s home confinement.

Those who attended the event said they saw the chief watching from his office window above where he could clearly see television camera crews and local reporters engaging Mr Wilkison, the Rios family and the officers themselves.

“The chief blinked,” said Mr Wilkison. “When he heard this rally was going to happen and he couldn’t stop it, he capitulated and invited Officer Rios to come back to work. The chief couldn’t stand up to public pressure because he knows he’s made some serious errors in judgment.

“He had his day, and now the fight has just begun,” he continued. “The chief will eventually rue the day that he forgot which side he was on.”

Photos by Trent Kemp.

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