DEATH COMES TO BROWNSVILLE

In the early afternoon hours a knife fight left two victims bleeding from stab wounds. The Brownsville Police Department arrived on the scene and determined the two culprits were Armando Calderon and Jaime Sanchez. After discovering Sanchez's abandoned vehicle on East 10th Street, the authorities concentrated their search in this area. They apprehended Calderon, but Sanchez remained at large.

The police did find a pawn shop receipt in Sanchez's car that included his address at 1703 East Van Buren, a working-class neighborhood on the edge of downtown. The residence, however, was empty. At approximately the same time a BPD dispatcher received a report from an anonymous caller who relayed in a slurred voice that an intoxicated individual named Luis and wearing red shorts was stumbling near Juan's Mechanic Shop and had entered a house on 1634 East Van Buren. The dispatcher relayed to the officers in the field that a suspicious person was at this address, but she failed to include the individual's first name, his inebriated state or his clothes.

An officer, en route to Sanchez's house, had coincidentally parked in front of 1634 East Van Buren. Ricardo Moreno, 60 years old, rose from the chair outside his modest clapboard structure at the same address and entered his house.

"I saw Mr. Moreno close the door to his house when I arrived," noted the officer who added that he never saw anyone else at the domicile.

Based on their dispatcher's partial information, the officers thought they might be on the trail of Sanchez. The BPD surrounded Moreno's residence. It was approximately 7 p.m. Lieutenant Adrian Mascorro took control of the situation. Police knocked at Moreno's door, but nobody answered. Officers peered through the windows and observed Moreno sitting docilely on his couch. The gathering force, described as an army by one bystander, attracted curious neighbors who informed the authorities that Moreno was a loner who never received visitors. The police, acting on the dispatcher's communication, ignored the neighbors' information and then turned aggressive.

"They told me to shut up and go inside my house," said Fernando Fernandez, a Moreno acquaintance.

"I told them to leave him alone," added Gerald Salazar. "He's not well mentally. They told me to shut up and go inside my house, but I told them I was inside my house."

"The police tasted blood and they were slipping into a feeding frenzy," suggested an anonymous source.

With reinforcements streaming to the locale, surrounding the property and sealing all exits, Mascorro attempted to talk with Moreno. The veteran officer found himself shaking his head afterwards.

"He wasn't making any sense in his statements," confessed Mascorro. "He said that he thought we were with the post office even though we announced ourselves as Brownsville PD. We were in full uniform. He was telling us to leave the mail, mumbling on and on and not making any sense in his statements, rambling on about the mail, just to leave it there."

If the situation couldn't be resolved peacefully, the macho Mascorro would resolve it violently. Without a warrant, Mascorro and a subordinate kicked open the front door. Three other officers poured inside. They retreated claiming that Moreno had threatened them with a knife.

"There's going to be a dispute as to whether or not there was a knife brandished and used," argued a Moreno sympathizer. "The killers say there was. The victim is not able to argue his position. But there are a series of interviews in which the knife has been described in more than one way."

More officers descended upon the scene. Mascorro was still calling the shots. He decided to drill holes in the damaged front door to peer inside. He next fired several canisters of pepper spray into the tiny house in order to smoke out Moreno. Under the inexplicable assault, Moreno placed a fan in a strategical location that blew the pepper spray outside the house. Moreno followed this defensive action by throwing a liquid described as coffee at the officers. It didn't wet anyone.

The police's tactics drew cackling from the growing crowd. Responding to the crisis as if their enemy was a band of Zetas, those on the ground requested more backup. A SWAT squad 19 strong, led by Sergeant Troy Arnold, armed with a variety of weapons and escorted by a Lenco Bearcat Armored Transport described in The Brownsville Herald as the police department's newest toy, massed around Moreno's house like Santa Anna's army enclosing the Alamo. Chief of Police Carlos Garcia pulled up in his vehicle to observe the operation. A crisis negotiator endeavored to establish contact with Moreno via a loudspeaker from within the armored vehicle. Moreno didn't respond.

The ineffective Mascorro stepped aside and Arnold assumed command. Like a bull in a China closet, he made Mascorro seem like a 98-pound weakling as he strode upon the scene with all the subtlety of a bully. With the spectators shaking their heads in disbelief--"You would have thought Moreno was a Muslim terrorist," opined an incredulous reporter--Arnold launched his offensive. The Taliban would have been impressed.

The SWAT team fired five canisters of CS gas into Moreno's house. Reinforcing the perimeter, the highly specialized officers employed a pole camera to view the floor plan and determine the number and location of the occupants. They established that Moreno was alone, thus dispelling any notion that Sanchez, the knife-wielding assailant from earlier in the afternoon, had sought cover in Moreno's home. Rejecting the battered front door as a point of entry, Arnold and a dozen SWAT members spearheaded by shield-holding officers in two separate groups stampeded through a second entry. They cleared every room until they found Moreno a la Osama bin Laden in his bedroom sitting on his bed.

According to the authorities, Moreno held the mysterious knife in his hand. They demanded he drop the weapon. When he proved recalcitrant, they stunned him with six non-lethal shots. With Moreno staggering under the blows, Brownsville's Best went mano-a-mano with the sexagenarian. While one of the officers thrashed Moreno with his shield, three others grappled with him physically, but they couldn't subdue him. Moreno, a mere mortal seemingly in possession of super powers, slashed Arnold. The SWAT sharpshooters turned trigger happy and in a barrage of bullets, six shots finding their mark, Moreno slumped to the floor dead. A pool of blood encircled his body. A clock, its face shattered by a stray bullet, read 9:30.

The BPA, in an impressive display of power, had gotten their man. That he might have been the wrong man was inconsequential.