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Sunday, Jun. 14, 1998
Small-town gangs claim connection to the occult
Texas police believe it, but national experts say kids are disturbed, and gangs are just copycats
By MADELINE BARO
Associated PressDONNA -- The first homicide victim of the year in this South Texas town was 12-year-old David Cardenas, whose mutilated body was found under some aluminum slabs in a bushy, tree-tangled field.
The boy apparently had fallen in with a rough group of kids in an attempt to fit in. Police believe that one night during the weekend of April 17, two young men from that crowd killed David in a shed outside a rundown mobile home.
His body was then partly dragged, partly carried through a grassy alley, across a street and dumped in a field a few hundred feet away behind a graffiti-covered building.
A trail of blood from the site of the murder to the place where the body was found helped investigators trace the steps of whoever killed David and tried to cover it up.
The boy's slaying, with publicized accounts that his body was missing both arms, a foot, several teeth and his scalp, created quite a stir in this border town of 14,000 people.
But the fact that he was killed on either April 17 or early April 18 was of special interest to the police. Both dates are important holidays on a satanic calendar the police use as a reference.
Both dates call for a human sacrifice.
``When I saw this child and the way they did the things they did to him I said, `Jesus Christ, I don't think these people have a heart or anything,' '' said Donna Police Chief Miguel Carreon. ``It affected all of us.''
Police will not point to ritual sacrifice as the clear motive in the case, although increasingly detailed news reports of the boy's mutilation have kept the sacrifice theory afloat.
The two people charged with capital murder in the case, 21-year-old Pablo Lucio Vasquez and a 15-year-old boy, reportedly have confessed to the slaying, with robbery the apparent motive. Five others are accused of helping cover up the crime.
The Donna police department's anti-gang efforts have identified 23 gangs in the area, including three whose rituals have been labeled as satanic. Gang members have been known to flash gang symbols they say symbolize the devil. Some buildings in town are tagged with the numbers 666 and pentagrams.
Detective David Fuentes, the department's resident gang expert, has been studying gangs with ties to the occult during his 2 years on the force.
In his office, among the pictures of graffiti and incantations to demons, he has pictures of a skinned dog that was found earlier this year, its limbs and tail missing. The dog was on ice, apparently waiting to be used in a ritual. Symbols found with the dog were deciphered by police to mean that the dog was part of a magic spell intended to kill someone.
The dog was not the first to be found mutilated in Donna, Fuentes said. Meanwhile, an increased number of ``lost dog'' posters keep popping up around town.
Tales of small-town satanism, however, have experts like Susan Robbins shaking their heads.
Robbins is the associate dean for academic affairs and an associate professor at the University of Houston Graduate School of Social Work.
She and others who've researched the subject say there is no evidence of widespread organized satanic activity involving kidnapping, ritual abuse, murder or mutilation of children and animals.
A recent case linking teens and satanic rituals involved Luke Woodham, the 17-year-old Mississippi boy accused of opening fire on classmates, killing two girls and wounding several others.
Woodham supposedly was involved in a cult-like group of teen-agers called the ``Kroth'' that practiced so-called satanic rituals.
Such crimes with ``satanic themes'' are usually committed by young people who are self-proclaimed satanists, Robbins said. They form ideas of what satanic worship is from songs, television, movies, the Internet and books, then come up with a set of rituals, she said.
People guilty of such crimes are disturbed and would commit the crimes no matter whether they were affiliated with the self-proclaimed satanic groups, Robbins said.
However, Carreon said members of occult gangs have moved to the Rio Grande Valley, organized local gangs and taught them rituals.
Kids in the gangs who practice paranormal rituals are recruited the same way kids in other gangs are recruited. The potential gang members are looking for a place to belong; the gang takes them in and makes them feel like they're a part of a family while encouraging illegal behavior like drug and alcohol abuse.
Dabbling in the paranormal is nothing new in the Rio Grande Valley. One of the most sensational cases in the region involved ritual killings in Matamoros, Mexico, by drug smugglers seeking protection for their trafficking through human sacrifices. Police discovered the remains of 13 victims, including a University of Texas student who turned up missing while on spring break, at a Matamoros ranch in 1989.
Last month, Dora Cisneros, a Brownsville mother, was convicted in federal court for the 1993 murder-for-hire of her daughter's ex-boyfriend, Joey Fischer. She went through a folk healer to hire the men who killed Fischer for breaking her daughter's heart. According to testimony, the folk healer had done a tarot card reading and determined that Cisneros' daughter would not end up with Fischer, spurring Cisneros to have him killed.
Although the place where Cardenas' body was found is on the edge of town, Cardenas died only a few miles from the main city and down the street from a school, but no one came forward to say they saw any suspicious activity that night and the crime wasn't discovered until the following week.
Therein lies what the police department says is its problem in trying to curb gang activity -- getting the community to speak up. Although fear of gang reprisals has kept residents quiet, Carreon believes Cardenas' murder was a wake up call.
Community leaders have since mobilized to offer young people jobs and other alternatives to street life.
``It was a tragedy, but we learned things that we could have maybe done a little bit earlier to prevent it,'' Carreon said. ``Could we have prevented it? We'll never know that.
``Hopefully, because of this, citizens are getting involved.''Post your comments about Texas newsFront Page || Main Index || News || Business || Texas || South Texas Outdoors || Birdwatching || Sports || Entertainment || Selena || Education || South Texas Attractions || World Wide Web