Killer nearing death is ‘at peace’
LIVINGSTON — Tears trickled from Juan Garcia’s eyes, mingling with the teardrop tattoos left over from his lawless Fourth Ward gang days, as he spoke longingly of his three children — teenagers he has missed seeing grow up during the 15 years he’s spent on Texas’ death row.
His younger daughter doesn’t even know her father is scheduled to be executed Tuesday for his role in the 1998 robbery-murder of Hugo Solano, a one-time Mexican missionary who had returned to Houston so that his children could attend better schools. Garcia believes she is “hiding out,” seeking respite from the discord he said characterizes his extended family.
To his other children, a son and a daughter, Garcia, 35, has imparted this fatherly advice: Listen to your family, not the street. Stay in school.
Don’t believe everything you hear about the crime.
Garcia, whose last slim chance of avoiding execution rests on a clemency petition to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, insists “before God” that Solano’s death came as he and the victim struggled for control of Garcia’s .25-caliber handgun. The weapon accidentally fired, he said, and Garcia blacked out.
“I never intended to kill him,” Garcia said. Nor, he added, did he rob Solano of $8 — the aggravating factor that made the crime a capital offense.
“I have no reason to lie,” Garcia said.
Court documents tell a different story.
On Sept. 17, 1998, the record states, Garcia, a veteran criminal at 18, joined three accomplices in accosting Solano as the missionary sat in his van in an apartment complex in the 17000 block of Cali. Solano, 36, was shot four times in the head and neck.
“This was one in a series of events in a three-week crime spree that involved nine other aggravated robberies and the shooting of two other people,” said Lynn Hardaway, chief of the Harris County District Attorney’s Post-Conviction Writ Division.
Hardaway said Garcia was arrested when, during a traffic stop, the murder weapon was found in his possession. Garcia confessed the killing to police.
“While he was in jail awaiting trial,” Hardaway said, “he severely beat another inmate.”
Garcia’s legal team, led by University of Houston law professor David Dow, has suffered a string of defeats. After the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas last year rejected the inmate’s appeal, his lawyers turned to the U.S. Fifth Circuit of Appeals, where they again were rebuffed. In March, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the case. Dow said no further appeals are planned and did not respond to further questions.
Garcia’s petition to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals argued that he should be spared because of his low intelligence and because legal representation at his first trial was “ineffective.”
‘Future danger’
The latter claim stemmed from Garcia’s attorney calling clinical psychologist Walter Quijano as a punishment phase expert to explain why Garcia likely would not be violent if sentenced to life in prison. The question of “future danger” is one of two issues jurors must consider before assessing a death sentence. In Garcia’s trial, Quijano asserted that “blacks and Hispanics are over-represented in the ... so-called dangerous population.”
The arguments gained no traction with the appeals court, which agreed with a lower court decision that intelligence tests administered to Garcia before and after his conviction did not convincingly show him to be intellectually disabled. While an appeal to a federal court detailed Garcia’s poor school performance, inability to interact well with his peers and to perform simple tasks such as telling time, the court held that arguments failed to show the alleged shortcomings were the result of low mental functioning.
The appeals court agreed with a finding that Quijano’s comments came as part of a longer explanation of how prison regulations and practices lessened the likelihood that Garcia would continue to be violent. Judges concurred that Quinano’s comments could be interpreted as indicating minorities were “over-represented” because they had been unfairly treated by the criminal justice system.
Given punishment phase testimony about Garcia’s long criminal career, the appeals court agreed that there was “not a reasonable probability” that jurors, absent Quijano’s remarks, would have spared the defendant.
Months after Garcia’s 2000 trial, then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn identified six cases in which death sentences likely would be overturned because Quijano delivered racially charged testimony about future dangerousness. The cases resulted in new federally mandated punishment-phase trials for five, again producing death sentences. The sixth, Houston double-killer Duane Buck, was engaged in state-court actions at the time and did not get a new punishment hearing. Garcia’s case was not among those Cornyn deemed problematic.
‘I’m Catholic’
Garcia, who spends 23 hours each day in an isolation cell on the Polunksy Unit’s death row, said that, knowing his death is imminent, he has engaged in deep introspection.
“I’m at peace,” he said. “I’m Catholic.”
He said he anxiously awaited his final confession and a series of visits from his sister and other relatives, whose conversations are conducted via telephone through thick windows in the death row visiting room. He has not embraced his children since his incarceration.
His soul-searching has produced a labyrinthine story of beatings by his stepfather, the evil influence of dominating friends, the unfairness of employers who rebuffed him after his criminality had become established. Darting through the narrative is the image of Garcia as victim — a man thwarted at every turn, unable to read and write until early adulthood, essentially powerless to redirect his life from its downward trajectory.
“I was the spine of my family,” he said, noting that discord erupted whenever he was absent from the family home. And while he concedes that, as a youth, he was arrested “more times than I can remember,” he nonetheless portrays himself as a Robin Hood figure who shared the result of his crimes with his invalid mother. His mother, he said, learned of his criminality “only when she got a call from the police or the school.”
“My thing was breaking into cars,” he said of his early years in crime. “I’d take the rims, the radio, anything I could pawn and sell on the street.”
Much of the take was used to buy drugs, a practice that began at about age 9 and grew to include abuse of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and “just about everything out there.”
When he was 12, Garcia said, the youth’s stepfather was imprisoned for sexually assaulting a minor. Garcia said he was fully thrown into the streets.
State prison officials could find no record of the elder man’s incarceration.
“I left home several times,” Garcia said, but always returned to find his family in disarray. As his criminality grew, his reputation declined.
“It’s difficult to explain, but people who never lived in my shoes were quick to judge. Wherever I walked, if I had a beeper, people would say I was selling drugs. ... Even when they saw me coming home dirty and sweaty from work (in a construction job).”
Garcia said he hopes the Solano family has forgiven him. Solano’s widow, Ana, and the couple’s two children moved to New Haven, Conn., after the murder. They could not be reached for comment. During the punishment phase of Garcia’s trial, Ana Solano said she had forgiven the killer and urged that his life be spared.
“In the beginning,” she told jurors, “they (the children) didn’t want to go out. They just wanted to be around me. We were an extremely loving family. They loved their father very much. I went into intense depression. I did not want to speak to my family or talk on the phone. I knew if I continued in the same way, my children would suffer more.”
Personal scrutiny
Garcia’s personal scrutiny has revealed another revelation to him: the perception of the similarity of his travail to Christ’s.
The observation is garbled — since childhood Garcia has had difficulty expressing himself in words — but the components include Christ’s persecution, the 15 years Garcia spent on death row and fact that the execution house gurney, with its arm boards extended, resembles a cross.
Two of Garcia’s three accomplices, all convicted on charges related to the 1998 crime, remain in prison. They are Eleazar Mendoza, 37, 55 years for aggravated robbery, and Gabriel Morales, 40, life in prison for capital murder. The third accomplice, Raymond McBen, 36, was paroled in July 2014 after serving 14 years of a 30-year sentence for aggravated robbery.
“How do I feel? I hate the crime,” Garcia said. “I never intended it to happen the way it happened. I didn’t mean to kill. I had no reason to.”