The Schoolteacher Murder...

"It was the one time God decided to take a day off..." - Resident of Rio Hondo

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

RIO HONDO, Texas - Earlier that day, schoolteacher Sonia Perez had checked her cellphone messages and seen one she had not liked: I know what you're up to, and I'm pissed. It had come in Spanish, from her husband, a jealous man who'd fathered her two daughters, but always suspected there had been another man in her life.

Sonia Perez shook her head, as she always did when she read his nonsense. Things had gotten worse at home and she now feared for her life. The man she'd married told everyone he worked for God as a pastor at an area Pentacostal church, but she knew another side of him. There had been those times when he'd raised his hand to hit her, once punching her on the shoulder so hard that the pain lingered for two weeks. Still, she was holding hard to her marriage, staying with her wedding vows and not at all interested in breaking them by running away, or by filing for divorce. She had made that vow in church. God had heard her speak the hallowed words of marriage: "...in sickness and in health...for richer or for poorer." Sonia Perez had it rough for several long weeks that felt like years. She had grown used to deep sighs, to crying to herself, to wondering when he would become the man she had loved for many years. Everything said leave, but she would stick it out.

One cool night earlier this year, investigators found her body slumped inside her vehicle. Two gunshot wounds told part of the story, one to the head and the other to the side of her body. Sonia Perez was dead, murdered on a lonely Cameron County road. It was shortly after 10:30 p.m. when a noisy ambulance raced to the scene. A routine request by the officers at the scene had scrambled the two paramedics that made the unneeded trip. It was clear she had died soon after being shot, still strapped to her seat, her purse within reach in the passenger seat to the right. No discernible look of distress could be found on her face. She looked as if she had slumped-over from being drunk or had been cold-cocked from behind. If death has a look of clear fright, Sonia Perez did not show it.

The popular third grade teacher at tiny Rio Hondo Intermediate School in this dusty town known for nothing, really, was gone. It would be later in the day that some of her students and fellow teachers would get the word from the news media. The death was quickly labeled a homicide and the word went out that police and sheriff's deputies were on the hunt for the killer. Early-on, no one suspected her husband, the seemingly proper pastor, was involved. That would change in the days after the murder.

In his office, Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio wrestled with the case. He hated unsolved crimes and this one had few clues and the markings of a random killing. He told the press there were no suspects at the end of the first day. Lucio, an elderly man with decades of law enforcement experience, took the case home, walking into his home and heading for the booze cabinet. There, he reached for a bottle of bourbon and poured himself a glass. The alcohol went down like a raging fire, he would later say, like something that would nag him until the case was solved. No weapons or even shell casings had been found at the scene. The sheriff finished off three more drinks and then called his lead investigator to tell him he was on the case immediately. In his rare dream, Lucio that night saw images of a priest chasing the teacher in a small sedan for miles and then forcing her to stop. When he walked up to the driver-side window, he saw the young teacher smiling at the priest and asking if everything was alright in a calm, friendly voice.

Then, Lucio was jolted by the sound of a high-calibre pistol going off on the teacher's face, her skull exploding as if a small watermelon dropped from a tall building. Lucio lifted his head in total fear. He rose and left the bedroom and went for another drink, taking it to an easy chair in his home's living room, where he sat in his pajamas for almost two hours, working mental angles he thought would bring the teacher's killer out of the dark.

There was nothing to check-out. No marital problems had surfaced and the family finances seemed okay, well, as okay as could be expected for a poor Mexican-America family doing its best to raise two young, precocious girls. Lucio fell asleep in the comfortable leather chair he'd loved from the day his wife had brought it home from the furniture store. The alcohol had helped roust his brain in thinking in a manner that criminals think. This one would be solved, he promised himself. In the shower a bit later, he turned on the cold water and stood under the faucet spray for long minutes, wanting his bones to cry out for warmer water. A cold shower, he knew, did something for the brain. You don't go around shooting and killing teachers in my goddamned county, he'd wanted to tell the press.

To be cont'd...

- 30 -

[Editor's Note: We offer this as a re-creation of a murder that caught the attention and interest of many residents of the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. It is a false memoir, the essence of the story being true, but many of the details coming from what we call literary license. The Paz Files will tell one story of this teacher's death in installments...]