Fights are No. 1 motive for slayings here and in U.S.
By Joseph Barrios
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Police say Tucson's most sensational crimes last year - those in which people were killed for their cars or for no apparent reason at all - are among the rarest.
But police agencies and community leaders don't always agree on how much the average Tucsonan should worry about random violence.
Lucila Bojorquez and her two children, Brandon Esquer, 6, and Jenny Bojorquez, 7, were killed on Aug. 4. Police suspect Ralph David Cruz, 16, killed the three for Bojorquez's car wheels.
The bodies of Amanda Gerber and Dana Hall were found on Nov. 29. Police suspect Frankie Lee Rodriguez and John Michael Harper, both 18, carjacked Gerber and Hall and killed them so there would be no witnesses to the crime.
But the most common circumstances in which people were slain last year were fights, in which an argument or physical confrontation escalated into deadly violence. These included fights between strangers at a bar or drunken brawls between friends at home. Eighteen people were killed in Pima County during fights in 2000.
James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northwestern University, said fights continue to be the most common known motive in homicides across the nation. But the classification can encompass many different situations.
For example, two men were killed in Oro Valley over an argument between workers at a job site. On June 20, Ubaldo M. Contreras-Figueroa, 35, and Jose Arturo Robles-Estrada, 23, were found shot at the entrance to Honey Bee Canyon. "It was a violence-in-the-workplace kind of case," said Oro Valley police Sgt. Joe Corona. "These were two groups of construction workers that just did not get along."
Other people killed in local fights included Brad M. Oneill, 35, a sailor visiting from Virginia, who was stabbed at a Northwest Side bar, and Georgios Delfakis, 58, who died of a heart attack after a pedestrian allegedly threw a rock at his van in traffic, striking the windshield.
The next most common instances were domestic-violence situations, including people who were killed by their spouses and children slain by parents or step-parents. Investigators were called to four murder-suicide investigations, in which someone killed a family member, housemate or former lover, and then committed suicide.
There are categories in which police say "lifestyle choices" may have played a role in the person's death. Those high-risk lifestyles, including drugs, gangs and committing homicides during the commission of other crimes, made up 12 percent of the killings in which a motive was determined. Drug-related crimes alone made up 16 percent of all homicides in which a motive was made public.
Deputy Pima County Attorney Bill Dickinson said a "base level" of homicides will always result from fights involving alcohol or domestic-violence situations. But in the past few years, Dickinson has "anecdotally" seen more homicides and other violent crimes stemming from drug sales. Drug-related homicides are tough to solve and to prosecute.
"Every witness comes with a lot of baggage. Juries don't like them," Dickinson said. "It seems as though juries ask the question, 'Why do we care about this?' What they don't get is it raises the level of violence in the community."
But there's another reason for the community to care about drug-related criminals. "They have a propensity for getting the wrong house. And they're lousy shots, so they take innocent people with them because they're incompetent," Dickinson said.
Dickinson said there was one instance in 2000 in which drug dealers committed a home invasion on the wrong house. The homeowner was not seriously hurt, Dickinson said, but the botched invasion led to two slayings in Tucson last year and one in Phoenix. He refused to provide any more details about those cases.
"If you are a member of an illegal street gang or have a family member who is in a criminal street gang or you are a prostitute or in illegal drug trade, your chances of becoming hurt or killed increase. That's a high-risk lifestyle," said Sgt. Michael G. O'Connor, head of the Pima County Sheriff's Department's homicide unit.
"Your chances of becoming a random victim are minuscule," O'Connor said.
But Gail Leland, who works with Homicide Survivors, an advocacy group that offers counseling and financial assistance to victims' families and friends, is skeptical. Motives have not been determined in 31 of last year's homicides, she notes. She doesn't agree that people who aren't involved in dangerous or illegal activity have little reason to worry.
"What they're basing that on are the crimes that are solved. The crimes that are unsolved, many of them, are stranger-related crimes. That's why they're so damn hard to solve," Leland said. "I think everybody should worry. It's not that I want to strike fear in the community."
Assistant Tucson Police Chief Robert Lehner agrees in part with Leland.
"I do think that in general what she says is true when applied to one category of cases," Lehner said. "But there have been cases where a drug debt is paid off in the desert somewhere and those cases are very difficult to solve."
James Clarke, a University of Arizona professor who has written four books about violent crime, is conducting a study of nearly 200 people convicted of homicides. He said he is not familiar with last year's cases and has not yet analyzed his study's data, but said it appears that more young people are killing for "entrepreneurial" reasons.
"The motives for these kind of heinous crimes are so trivial. These aren't crimes of passion where somebody finds a person they love in a compromising position. These are acts motivated by greed and self-interest," Clarke said.
Clarke said a recent example of such violence involved the 1999 killing of three Pizza Hut employees in a petty robbery.
"They don't connect with anyone," Clarke said. "These are scary people. Where are they coming from?"
Clarke said convicted killers were often victims themselves of neglect or abuse as children and learn to become indifferent toward anybody but themselves.
The only sex-related homicide in 2000 involved the sexual assault and slaying of Irene Johnson, 88. She was found beaten inside her Sam Hughes neighborhood apartment on July 24. Police later arrested Ed Sanders, 44, a drifter, after police found a corn-chip bag with his fingerprints at the site of an attempted sexual assault on another elderly woman.
And the only slaying officially classified as gang-related for the year 2000 involved the shooting death of Aounttwann Llaveeson Simmons, 23, who was shot Oct. 15 outside a Downtown nightclub.
Overall, Tucson police gang investigators handled six homicide investigations last year and assisted on two others.
A motive has not been determined in one-third of the county's 90 homicides.
And even when detectives know a motive, they still may not understand why someone was killed.
Tucson Police Detective Joe Sowards was off-duty when he was called on Aug. 4 to an apartment complex on the city's West Side, where Lucila Bojorquez lay dead. He arrived about 5:45 p.m. and soon learned that Bojorquez's two young children were nowhere to be found. Huddled in the parking lot, police quickly put together a search plan.
But their adrenaline levels soon plunged and sorrow kicked in. Sheriff's detectives called police to say they had found the children's bodies dumped near Gates Pass.
Even after a suspect was arrested and the case was considered solved, Sowards still doesn't understand why the children had to die.
* Contact Joseph Barrios at 629-9412 or at jbarrios@azstarnet.com.
