Sunday, Sep. 07, 2008

21 years later: Trial to begin in Tri-Cities' bloodiest killing spree

Kristin M. Kraemer, Herald staff writer

One fall evening in 1987, six young men were sanding a Mercury Cougar in an east Pasco garage when two gunmen walked in and opened fire.

Minutes later five Hispanic men were dead and a sixth wounded, and Pasco got a wake-up call as the city was thrust into the national spotlight.

"It certainly sent a chilling message to the community that there was a real problem here. It kind of brought all that up to the surface," said Pasco City Manager Gary Crutchfield.

The bloody massacre spurred voters just three weeks later to approve a tax measure so the city could hire six more police officers to battle the growing cocaine and heroin trade.

"It is one of the examples where the electorate was motivated to help pay to solve a problem, and it worked," said Crutchfield.

6 men left to die on body shop floor

The 7 p.m. shooting inside Medina's Body Shop on Oct. 13, 1987, still is considered the deadliest killing spree in Tri-City history.

Police and prosecutors never have revealed the motive behind the shootings, but speculation from the start was that illegal drugs and gun trafficking played a role.

The shooters got away that night, having left all six men to die on the auto shop floor. One was arrested six years later and ultimately convicted, and now the second suspect is scheduled to face a jury this week.

Vicente Ruiz -- identified by the lone survivor -- is accused of going into the shop with his cousin, looking around, leaving and returning moments later with semi-automatic weapons. More than 20 rounds reportedly were fired.

A police diagram of the bloody crime scene shows four body outlines and multiple shell casings on the concrete garage floor, with a fifth body under a car.

Killed were: Misael Barajas, 22; Juan Antonio Lopez Garcia, 20; Eliceo Guzman Lamas, 20; and Rafael Parra Magallon, 22, all of Pasco, and Francisco Venegas Cortez, 21, of Kennewick.

Barajas was found alive but died an hour later in a Pasco hospital.

Jesse Salas Rocio, 20, survived by squirming under a car in the garage. Once the gunmen left he went to police. Rocio had been a mechanic at Medina's shop, a place where Hispanics were allowed to work on cars for a small fee.

Owner Clifford Medina, who defense attorneys believe may have been the target, wasn't in the shop at the time. He'd left an hour earlier.

Ruiz, 43, is charged in Franklin County Superior Court with five counts of aggravated first-degree murder and one count of attempted first-degree murder.

He denies having anything to do with the killings. His attorneys claim it is a case of mistaken identity, saying Ruiz's brother looked just like him at the time.

But Rocio, who also used the name Aldo Montes-Lamas, told police he got a look at Ruiz before diving under the car to avoid the gunfire.

Hit once in the stomach by a bullet, Rocio was recovering at a hospital when he picked Ruiz -- who also went by Vicente Mendez -- out of a photo montage.

Rocio later identified Ruiz's cousin, Pedro Mendez-Reyna, from a a picture as the second shooter.

Ruiz and Mendez-Reyna went to Mexico after the shootings.

Mendez-Reyna returned to the United States in 1993 and was arrested in McAllen, Texas. He is now serving life in prison after pleading guilty to avoid the death penalty.

In his plea deal with prosecutors, Mendez-Reyna named Ruiz as his partner that night.

He then told the Herald in a jailhouse interview that he went to the shop with his cousin after Ruiz was confronted earlier in the day at a Pasco restaurant by men who were at the tiny shop. The men reportedly were armed with guns.

Mendez-Reyna told his cousin to give himself up.

"I know it is very hard to always be on the run," he said. "For the past years, I have never had a single moment of rest. I've always had to look over my shoulder."

After Mendez-Reyna was arrested in 1993, some of the victims' relatives told the Herald they began to believe rumors in the Hispanic community that the case would never be solved.

"There were all these rumors that because it was Mexicans killing Mexicans, police were not paying much attention to the case," Alicia Magallon, sister-in-law of Rafael Magallon, said at the time.

She said Magallon, a field worker who'd been in the area for three years, had gone to the body shop that night to deliver a wedding invitation for a cousin.

Other relatives told the Herald they suspected the gunmen were just after one person but felt they needed to kill everyone else who was there.

For 19 years, the FBI knew where to find their second suspect, but couldn't touch Ruiz in large part because of Mexico's extradition treaty that until several years ago protected criminal defendants facing potential life sentences from being returned to the U.S.

So over the years, they kept an eye on him until prosecutors, with the help of the federal government, could finally get a provisional arrest warrant.

Ruiz was arrested in September 2006 in Tecomn, outside of Colima City. He sat in a Mexican prison for nearly nine months before being returned to American soil.

Police found new focus

Though it has been nearly 21 years, former Herald reporter Wanda Briggs vividly recalls the tension at the scene that night and the crime's aftermath on the community.

Briggs was working the late shift when a call came across the police scanner about a shooting in Pasco. "You're sent out and you don't know what you're going into and the scene was, well, scary is the word," she said.

She arrived at 1101 E. A St. to find "a beehive of activity" with "officers and cars and people all over" and police trying to keep the "sidewalk gawkers" back.

"Everybody was a little bit jumpy" because police didn't yet know who was responsible.

So when a dark-colored car similar to the reported getaway vehicle slowly passed and the driver rolled down a window, officers shoved Briggs to the ground "to get me out of harm's way because they didn't know if this was the bad guy going by or not. And it turned out later that it wasn't, but it sent chills up everybody's spine."

Briggs interviewed Stan Moore, a retired Franklin County prosecutor, the day after the slayings about the drug trade in Pasco and Franklin County. He told her that most of the police and media attention previously had been on the black community, "and this massacre from that night on focused very much on what had become at that point a heavy drug trade among a Hispanic group," Briggs said.

"It's the few who taint the reputation for all," she said, because it put the focus on the Hispanic population in a negative way.

"That massacre was headlined in every newspaper in this state for days and days because you just don't get five people gunned down," she said. "Pasco probably got a hit on its reputation that was hard for them to overcome because people outside the Tri-Cities looked at Pasco as this haven for drug dealings."

Then-police Chief Don Francis told reporters that his "immediate assumption" tied the slayings to a sour drug deal.

"If this is drug-connected, it points up the seriousness of the drug problem in Pasco and in the Tri-Cities. This helps to make the case for additional police resources in Pasco," he said at the time.

And the voters responded in November 1987, approving a measure that gave police more money and officers to fight the drug epidemic.

Cleaning up community

The Pasco Police Department had 29 officers at the time, including patrolmen and detectives. The year before, the city had gotten the dubious distinction of having the highest murder rate per person in the state, and was third for overall crime rate per capita.

The city and its residents decided it was time to clean up the community.

Crutchfield had been the city manager for three years when Pasco was pushed into the spotlight. He acknowledged the city got its share of negative press from the massacre, but said "it's one of those kind of bittersweet things."

"It was ugly from the standpoint of the black eye it brought us from the national (attention)," he said. "But the silver lining of that is it helped motivate the community to fix the problem."

The drug trade had been prevalent for some time in the Yakima Valley, Crutchfield said, with trafficking coming up from Mexico through California, Oregon and Eastern Washington. It all came to a head in the late '80s.

City leaders were then forced to pull their heads out of the sand, accept they had a problem and start doing something about it, Crutchfield said.

The council started revoking the business licenses of downtown bars -- closing down at least six or seven -- once they learned of the owner's involvement in illegal drug activity and substantiated those allegations.

Over the next five years, the city got their hands around the problem and "kind of turned the tide," Crutchfield said. And he credits the citizens for helping police and the city turn the tragedy's negative into a positive.

"It is one of the things that I'll always look back on as being a real success for the community," he said. "The council, staff and voters all fulfilled their roles, so it worked."