Kevan Baker wanted to forget Wanda Lopez's final moments. He ...

736 COLUMBIA HUMAN RIGHTS LAW REVIEW [43.3:711
the phone. Police evidently gave this tape to the TV stations to use. It
is the only tape police disclosed to the public after Wanda’s death.
The other tape contains forty-two minutes and thirty-one
seconds of telephone and radio calls to and from Jesse Escochea, the
Corpus Christi Police Department’s untrained, twenty-two-year-old
radio dispatcher. It was police practice to record over the master tape
of 911 calls and radio dispatches every forty-five days or so, but they
made a copy of this 911 call and the forty-plus minutes of radio traffic
that followed it during a massive manhunt for the attacker.
Although Escochea went over the manhunt tape with a state’s
attorney several months later, the tape’s existence was unknown to
anyone outside law enforcement until private investigators tracked it
down twenty-two years later in Escochea’s possession in Los Angeles.
Not long after Wanda’s murder, Escochea had left Corpus
Christi for L.A., where he worked for a time as an LAPD dispatcher.
Later, he took occasional roles as an actor in cops-and-robbers TV
shows, and made a living tracking and filming police emergency runs
and turning them into reality videos for foreign markets. He kept a
copy of the manhunt tape as a souvenir of what he told a news
reporter was one of his most memorable moments as a dispatcher.
The forty-two-minute manhunt tape begins with Wanda’s 911
call, which Escochea answered by happenstance. As the dispatcher,
he wasn’t supposed to pick up the phone, but he did because the
incoming-call light had been flashing for a long time, and neither of
the regular operators had answered it. The remainder of the tape
records radio traffic between Escochea and police officers in the field
during the chaotic manhunt for Wanda’s attacker. It ends with Carlos
DeLuna’s arrest.
* * * * *
Escochea took Wanda’s call at 8:09 p.m. Immediately, she
said what she needed: “Yes, can you have an officer come to 2602
South Padre Island Drive? I have [a] suspect with a knife inside the
store.” The 21-year-old Escochea didn’t like the caller’s tone of voice.
Listening to the tape years later, he recalled thinking Wanda had “a
little bit of an attitude.”
For well over a minute, Escochea questioned Wanda about the
“Mexican” man inside the store, what he looked like and what he was
doing. Then he heard Wanda try to give the man the money from the
cash drawer: “You want it? I’ll give it to you. I’m not going to do
nothing to you. Please!!!”