WALKING THE SAFE WALK
After boy’s brutal stabbing death, woman set out to help reclaim her old neighborhood
Stella Mireles recounts the horror as if she lived it.
She walks down a sunny sidewalk in near Northside, where school has just let out and clusters of middle-schoolers amble toward bus stops and aging houses with windows sealed in foil and iron bars.
The steady tick of Mireles’ flipflops on the pavement hastens as she counts down the last moments of an 11-year-old’s life.
“He kept looking back, kind of nervous,” she says, citing surveillance footage from that day, May 17, as Josue Flores walked home from Marshall Middle School.
This is where he started running, she tells me. This is where he was thrown against the fence, she says, pointing to a warped patch of rusted chain-link. And this, she says, as we stand on Fulton Street across from the shuttered shell of a former church, is where he was stabbed. Twenty times.
He was three blocks from home.
“With all this traffic going on,” she says, her words faint against the whoosh of passing cars. “And no one stopped to help him.”
Aman who heard the boy screaming called an ambulance, but it was too late. Authorities eventually charged a homeless veteran living at the nearby Salvation Army shelter with the murder.
Mireles was 30 minutes away, at home in Humble, when her sister told her to turn on the TV news. She watched and cried.
What had happened to the neighborhood where she grew up? The place where she lived in a rented bungalow and served as senior class officer in the female drum and bugle corps. The streets where she felt safe.
She had to find out. Mireles, a semi-retired medical technician, returned to near Northside for the first time in decades. Curbs were strewn with garbage. Gaunt-faced men paced and roamed everywhere, often lingering where children gathered — bus stops, schools, the library. Many are addicts, felons, she would learn, drawn by the Metrorail, or the homeless shelters, or flop houses that cater to those who can’t get a bed anywhere else.
Everyone was closed in, she explains. Doors shut. They didn’t want to stir up problems.
This wasn’t the neighborhood she remembered, but it was still hers.
“With a lot of prayer and a lot of tears, I just followed my heart and followed the way I was led spiritually,” she says. “I came to
a big meeting they were having. I walked in there and I said: ‘I have an idea, and I’m here to help.’ They said, ‘Who are you?’ ”
She explained, then she made her pitch: She wanted to start a program in which neighbors would keep watch — everywhere from front porches to street corners — as kids walked to and from school each day. She wanted to work with law enforcement to train residents in first aid and how to respond to a crime taking place. She wanted to empower people to report crime and suspicious activity, get it on the books, so police would have to take notice and increase patrols. ‘Cold anger’
The idea took off, in part because the ground was fertile. Her group, Safe Walk Home Northside, built on years of earlier efforts by groups such as Avenue CDC, and it seized on “cold anger” over a crime that everyone knew would happen someday, said Jenifer Wagley, deputy director of the nonprofit focused on community-building and affordable housing in near Northside.
“The death of Josue, that murder, it shook people out of their isolation,” Wagley said.
So did Mireles’ passion. The mother of two sons, including one with cerebral palsy, knows how to fight, and how to connect. She drew the joiners and the old classmates, but also people who had been afraid to get involved.
“She’s tapped a group that was hard to tap,” Wagley says.
That includes undocumented immigrants, who Mireles says not only attend training but “stick their neck out” to report crime, which they now understand they can do anonymously. So far, Mireles says the group has trained about 60 people in first aid. Around 100 attend meetings, she says, and the group’s Facebook page has more than 300 members.
Mireles has a tight group of dedicated volunteers who help her knock on doors, hold meetings, show up to community events.
One of them is Edgar Gil-Haro, a pharmacist who lives in the nearby Lindale area.
“We’re in this because we don’t want to see this happen again — not a murder like Josue’s, not an assault like Ricky Davila’s,” Gil-Haro told me one night after a meeting with law enforcement. He was referring to the 19-year-old former high school basketball player who suffered severe spinal cord damage after he was stabbed 10 times over the holidays while waiting in line at a burger joint.
“We need help, and we need it now,” Mireles told city leaders at a news conference after the incident, begging them to crack down on bunk houses where Davila’s alleged attacker stayed. Hitting the streets
And she does more than talk. She walks the walk.
Every weekday, she braves traffic in a 45-minute commute from her part-time job in Baytown to beat the school dismissal bell at Marshall Middle School, where white paper cups wedged in a fence spell a sacred reminder: “RIP J.F.” Mireles, a petite woman with shades perched on her head and reading glasses dangling from her neck, grabs her phone, her pepper spray canister — pink, same as her toenails — and hits the streets.
On a recent afternoon, she waves at Mario, a mural artist in a brightblue Safe Walk Home shirt manning a curb. She greets an assistant principal who says he’s glad for the extra sets of eyes. She stops to talk with Joe, a former classmate who never left the neighborhood and worries about drug activity among neighbors and brazen thefts in his own yard, including his disabled brother’s walker.
“Now I don’t go out anymore. I stay indoors. I don’t go to Fiesta at night,” he says of the grocery store a stone’s throw from his driveway. Safety, not gratitude
Joe keeps watch over the students from his front porch, where this afternoon he’s charging Mireles’ cellphone near a metal table fastened to a cinder block.
I ask Rita, a high school senior waiting for a private bus outside Fiesta, if she feels safe.
“Can I be honest? Not really,” she says, detailing what she witnesses regularly: men yelling, urinating and selling drugs. Other students mostly seem oblivious to Mireles’ presence, which is fine with her. It’s their safety she’s after, not their gratitude. Help needed
If she weren’t here, the 62-year-old Mireles might be at a book club meeting, outside pruning her hibiscus, or spending time with her husband when he’s not repairing elevators. Her family worries about her, she says. Her husband tells her to pace herself.
“That’s why I keep asking for help,” she says. “So it will not be so overwhelming.”
But in Josue’s death, she has found meaning. Every success, no matter how small, keeps her going. Anew stop sign. A crossing guard who shows up, most of the time. More people reporting crimes and sharing incidents on Facebook. And something she is deeply heartened to see: strangers growing into neighbors.
The work continues, and it will for a long time. Just last week, a family reported being chased by a man and having to duck inside an elementary school for safety. Vagrant addicts and felons still surround young girls at bus stops, expose themselves and call to passing students.
When the task seems daunting, Mireles focuses on the most important goal.
It’s one she repeats as we leave Josue’s memorial, a faded display of crosses, candles and fabric flowers, a few feet from where he was killed.
“Today is a good day,” she says. “No one got hurt.”