Not even a month had passed in 2022 when a national, headline-grabbing homicide occurred in Pharr.
Two brothers were arrested for accusations they beat their stepfather to death on Jan. 19 after learning he allegedly sexually abused their 9-year-old half sister.
One of the brothers, 17-year-old Christian Treviño, and a friend, 19-year-old Juan Eduardo Melendez, are charged with capital murder over the beating death of 42-year-old Gabriel Quintanilla.
Alejandro, who wasn’t present during Quintanilla’s final moments, is charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
All three have pleaded not guilty.
NOT GUILTY
In March, after nearly 18 hours of deliberation, a jury in Hidalgo County issued its verdict for a 42-year-old Reynosa man accused of shooting a security guard dead in 1998 at South Texas College in a crowded classroom where students were registering for classes.
The suspect had been facing a capital murder charge, but the jury instead convicted Roberto Ivonovich Ojeda Hernandez, who was not arrested until 2019, of aggravated robbery. Jurors sentenced him to seven years in prison after more than four hours of deliberating his punishment instead of life in prison, which prosecutors had recommended.
Ojeda had been accused of shooting 32-year-old Carlos Hernandez to death at STC on Jan. 13, 1998. That shooting also sent two sisters and a college employee to the hospital.
At the time of his conviction, Ojeda was eligible for parole because of the time he had already spent at the Hidalgo County Adult Detention Center prior to his trial.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice projects that he will be released July 14, 2025.
NIGHTMARE ALLEGATIONS
Significant developments occurred in 2022 in the case of a mother and son accused of operating a decades-long sex trafficking operation at a Mission bar.
Initially arrested on state charges in 2019, a federal grand jury indicted Genaro Fuentes and Rita Martinez for accusations they smuggled girls and women from the Mexican states of Coahuila and Durango from 1996 to 2019 under the guise that they would work in Martinez’s restaurant or clean houses.
Instead, Martinez told them they owed her a smuggling debt, which they needed to pay off by working at her bar at 7700 W. Mile 7 Road. After some days or weeks, Martinez arranged for the women or girls to have commercial sex, according to the indictment, which also details allegations of beatings by Martinez and sexual assaults by Fuentes.
Martinez faces 11 counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion while Fuentes faces six counts.
Federal court records indicate Fuentes is heading toward a guilty plea while Martinez has pleaded not guilty.
MASS SHOOTING TRIAL
A jury this year found a 32-year-old Mission man guilty for a notorious mass shooting at a Palmview H-E-B in 2016.
Raul Lopez pursued a rare insanity defense during his trial on a charge of murder, a count of attempted capital murder, three counts of attempted murder and three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
The jurors rejected that defense from Lopez, who never denied that at 3:30 a.m. on Nov. 28, 2016, he used a Desert Eagle to shoot 19 times through a window into the breakroom of the grocery store at Goodwin Road and U.S. Expressway 83, where overnight workers were eating lunch.
Lopez killed 48-year-old Mario Pulido, who suffered nine gunshot wounds, and shot and injured Billy Joe Martinez, then 33, Rafael Martinez, then 37, and Frailan Garza, then 51.
During the trial, two court-appointed experts testified that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.
Following the guilty verdicts, state District Judge Fernando Mancias sentenced Lopez to two life sentences and a combined 90 years on the other charges.
In handing down the sentence, Mancias said he wished he could turn back time so Lopez could get the mental health treatment necessary to prevent the outburst of violence that November day.
But he couldn’t and Mancias noted that testimony during the trial indicated Lopez would continue to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia for the rest of his life and that he would likely remain a danger to society who would potentially continue harming people in the future.
FIERY CRASH
One of this year’s most heart-wrenching tragedies was the death of an 18-year-old Mercedes High School senior who was struck and killed by an alleged drunk driver in Weslaco who was fleeing from Progreso’s chief of police.
Authorities have charged 27-year-old Pharr resident Daena Gonzalez for the April 30 death of Jaime Garcia Jr., who was on his way to visit friends at the time of his death.
The fatal sequence of events began at 7:16 p.m. that day when someone called to report that a woman in a blue Ford Explorer was vomiting at a Stripes on the corner of Military Highway and Farm-to-Market Road 1015.
Progreso Police Chief Cesar Solis pulled Gonzalez over on FM 1015, just south of Baker Road, but as he requested backup from the Texas Department of Public Safety, Gonzalez got back in her vehicle and sped away.
The chase ended in Weslaco when Gonzalez hit Garcia’s vehicle. The crash pinned Garcia inside his vehicle, which instantly became engulfed in flames.
Weslaco police said her speedometer was stuck at 90 mph after the crash.
She has been indicted on charges of murder, intoxication manslaughter with a vehicle and evading arrest or detention causing death.
She has pleaded not guilty and a trial date has not yet been scheduled.
TRAGIC DEATH
The community grieved this summer following the death of a 5-year-old boy found in a vehicle at Dr. Americo Paredes Elementary who likely died from being left in a hot car.
The tragedy happened on Aug. 25 on a day where the National Weather Service recorded a high temperature of 101 degrees.
The La Joya Independent School District police and the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office investigated the death of the boy who was found unresponsive in the vehicle of one of his relatives at the Mission campus.
A little less than a month following the child’s death, authorities arrested 37-year-old Mission resident Diana Treviño-Montelongo on a charge of criminal negligent homicide.
She is a relative of the boy who died and she taught at the elementary school where the child was found following a 911 call.
She bailed out of the Hidalgo County Adult Detention Center on a $50,000 personal recognizance bond on Sept. 15, the day she was arrested.
UNOFFICIAL BUSINESS
While it’s not unusual for readers to see news reports about various smuggling schemes The Monitor reports on in and around the Rio Grande Valley, it is unusual when a government vehicle is used in such an alleged scheme.
That’s just what happened near Victoria on Dec. 7 when the sheriff’s office there pulled over a Starr County District Attorney’s Office vehicle in which they found four people in the country illegally who were being smuggled to Houston.
That traffic stop resulted in the arrests of Magaly Rosa and her husband, Juan Antonio Charles.
That particular vehicle was under the control of Bernice Annette Garza, the now-fired crime victims coordinator for the Starr County District Attorney’s Office.
Following Rosa’s arrest, she told investigators that Garza recruited her to smuggle people from Starr County using that vehicle since June and Garza told investigators that they had successfully smuggled people in the vehicle through interior immigration checkpoints nearly 50 times, according to a criminal complaint.
Since then, authorities have issued an arrest warrant for Mari Cruz Rosa, who has been indicted on federal charges along with Garza, Magaly Rosa and Charles.
The case caught the ire of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott who tweeted that because of the case, which is at the federal level, he wants to change Texas’ laws to set a five-year minimum prison sentence for state-level charges.
“I’m getting damn tired of Texas residents smuggling people into our country illegally,” Abbott said in the tweet. “I will be seeking a mandatory minimum of at least five years in prison for anyone caught committing this crime.”
Garza, Magaly Rosa and Charles pleaded not guilty to the indictment on Wednesday and it’s not immediately clear whether Mari Cruz Rosa has been arrested.
