Hector De Peña was the first lawyer assigned to defend Carlos ...

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2012] Los Tocayos Carlos, Part III, Chapter 11 953 to defense lawyers and the TV stations—Wanda called 911 not once, but twice. Although police never made the first call public, its existence was well known inside the police department. Olivia Escobedo, who had left Corpus Christi before the trial in the Diamond-Shamrock case, readily remembered the two calls when she recounted the events of Wanda’s death to an investigator years later. “I remember listening to Ms. Lopez screaming on the tape,” Escobedo said. “She had called once to say that there was a man outside with a knife, then I remember when she called back, trying to talk in a low voice” so the man wouldn’t know she was calling the police. On the second call “you could hear her all of a sudden saying she would give him what he wanted” and “screaming as he attacked her.” There were other clues, too. When the out-of-town investigators looked at the D.A.’s file on the DeLuna case in 2004, they found the Corpus Christi Police Department “call card” reporting Wanda’s 911 call to Escochea at 8:09 p.m., when she is heard screaming and struggling with someone. The record is on a “Supplementary” form, one used for follow-up situations after some earlier action initiated police contact. And there was George Aguirre’s statement to police and testimony at the DeLuna trial. He said he warned Wanda about a scary-looking Mexican guy outside with an open buck knife in his pocket and left only after hearing Wanda on the phone with the 911 operator, while the man with the knife was still outside. Aguirre saw Wanda making a different call from the one given to the defense lawyers on a tape cassette and played for the jury. The call heard by the jury began with Wanda telling Escochea that she was calling because the man she believed had a knife was already inside the store. Although no recording of the first conversation survived, both Rodriguez and TV reporter Karen Boudrie, who covered both the DeLuna and Vargas trials, helped the out-of-town investigators reconstruct it later on: “Is he in the store?,” the female 911 operator asked Wanda. “No, he’s outside.” “He’s not doing anything to hurt you?” “No.” “Call back if he does anything, if he comes inside.”
954 COLUMBIA HUMAN RIGHTS LAW REVIEW [43.3:711 Wanda hung up and waited. Customers came and went. Only then did a man she suspected of having a knife come in. She called back. The 911 operator was on another call and let the phone ring. Finally, Escochea, the dispatcher, picked it up. To Escochea the call seemed “routine” until Wanda started screaming and he realized “something had gone wrong.” At first, he was put off by what he thought was Wanda’s “attitude.” Not realizing that she had called before and been disregarded, Escochea didn’t understand why she was so impatient when he began peppering her with his own set of questions. Years later, when Rene Rodriguez described what he’d learned to the outside investigators, he was still angry: When she called, telling them she was at the Shamrock, the dispatcher, the police, everybody knew where she was, because of Wolfy’s next door and that two-story naked lady there all lit up next to the freeway. Everyone that used the freeway saw it every day. They knew it was a high crime area. They knew all that! But they tell her, call us back if it looks serious. Some little minimum wage girl calling, concerned about something happening next to a topless place at night. She’s trapped behind the counter, no place to run. No big deal to them. Then when she called back, they ask crazy questions instead of [doing] something! Rodriguez believed that most people would feel the same way and that the police knew it. When he started the trial against Shamrock, uniformed officers and detectives came in and watched, sometimes several at once. Rodriguez knew that was out of the ordinary—that some kind of message was being sent. Cops only show up in court for civil trials when they’re being sued. That’s how the cops knew Rodriguez. He’d made a good living until then defending cops in brutality cases. The police were there, Rodriguez believed, to make sure he didn’t use the trial to embarrass the Department. “They were there,” Rodriguez said, “to make sure I focused on the Shamrock and not too much on them.” Rodriguez did what he had to do for the Vargases, and they got a good settlement before the trial ended—one of the first ever from a convenience store company for putting an employee in danger. The law protects police from paying damages in cases like this, so Rodriguez didn’t sue them. Still, it galled him that they
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