HATE can't hide
Killing by a local cop changes the course of American justice
FRANK HAYES wore a simple tin star as marshal of Castroville, Tex., but he acted like it was a jeweled crown.
After a long Air Force career, Hayes swaggered into the small-town cop job in the early ’70s.
Castroville, west of San Antonio, was founded by Alsatian immigrant farmers who were welcomed to Texas in the 1840s with land giveaways. Most new arrivals were Hispanic by Hayes’ time, and they found the place decidedly less hospitable.
Hayes made a habit of bullying Mexican-Americans. And in 1975, he leveled his stink eye on a poor laborer named Ricardo Morales.
Morales, 26, had been paid by a man for several calves that he failed to deliver. Charged in a warrant, Morales appeared in court on Sept. 12, 1975, as the criminal case against him began to wend its way through the system.
But the king of Castroville couldn’t wait for traditional American justice.
At 10 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 14, Hayes ordered two minions, Donald McCall and James Worthy, to seize Morales from his home and deliver him to an isolated spot on a country road — the Texas version of a rough ride.
As the minions watched, the marshal jabbed Morales in the gut with a shotgun.
“You’re a thieving bastard, and I’m gonna kill your ass,” Hayes sneered. “I’ve killed me one Mexican, and I’m fixin’ to kill me another.”
As the underlings drove off on Hayes’ orders, they heard a blast and hurried back. Hayes said he shot Morales — accidentally. What followed was no accident. Hayes stowed the body in his car trunk, then prevailed upon his wife, Dorothy; his teenage daughter, Jeanne; and his sister-inlaw, Alice Baldwin, to drive the evidence 375 miles east and bury it on family property near the Louisiana border.
The corpse was barely cold when county authorities began getting tips about the disappearance. The body was unearthed, and Hayes and his kin were soon in custody.
The local prosecutor managed a murder indictment, but Hayes got the case transferred from largely Latino Medina County 200 miles away to San Angelo, where a jury of 11 whites and one black was empaneled.
Hayes claimed the shooting happened as he and Morales tussled over the shotgun. Jurors bought the story, rejecting the murder charge and convicting him of assault. He was sentenced to two to 10 years in prison but was expected to serve as few as 18 months.
His body-burying wife, convicted of evidence tampering, paid a $50 fine and walked free.
Mexican-Americans in Texas, already seething after a surge in police violence against Latinos, were outraged.
Ruben Sandoval, a firebrand attorney, said, “You might have all the statistics, a thousand witnesses, all the case factors and circumstances on your side. Yet you can’t get a jury to see beyond that badge and uniform.”
Fed up with state inaction, Sandoval and allies took their grievances to Washington. And their protests helped make the Morales case a game-changer for cops who run roughshod on civil rights — a transformation that continues to resonate today.
Since the 1950s, Washington had a handsoff policy on all but the most egregious civil rights abuses. States did not like federal meddling, and the feds maintained political peace by looking away from civil rights atrocities in the South and big cities during the 1960s.
But Sandoval and Henry Gonzalez, a U.S. representative from San Antonio, persuaded prominent Anglo Texas politicians — U.S. Sens. Lloyd Bentsen and John Tower and Gov. Dolph Briscoe — to join the call for federal intervention.
President Gerald Ford resisted, but U.S. Attorney General Griffin Bell made a new investigation of the Morales slaying a priority after he was appointed following Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in January 1977.
Three weeks later, on Feb. 11, Bell announced, “In this instance, the allegations of abuse of authority by a law enforcement officer are so serious that they would merit presentation to a federal grand jury, even had death not resulted.”
In effect, Bell and Carter had changed federal policy, enabling the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to consider simultaneous prosecutions, regardless of state investigations.
The policy is intact today and has been used in a number of recent controversial deaths involving police, including cases in Ferguson, Mo., Staten Island, Baltimore and North Charleston, S.C. Hayes and the women were indicted by a federal grand jury, and the outcome of that trial, held in Waco in 1977, was quite different from the San Angelo whitewash.
Hayes, his wife and his sisterin-law were convicted of violating Morales’ rights. After sticking to his story that the shooting was an accident, Hayes mustered contrition as he faced sentencing. He apologized to the Morales family “for all the anguish which, through my negligence, I brought upon them.”
He was sent away to prison for life.
His wife, who blamed “family loyalty and panic,” was sentenced to three years for burying Morales in the piney woods. Her sister got 18 months.
Frank Hayes died in 1998, at age 74.
His convictions did not negate a debt that America owed him for 28 years of military service, from World War II to Vietnam. A resting place was waiting for Hayes at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio.