Mike Dupree's story was strange enough. Earlier this month, ("Cold as ICE," January 4) the Dallas County constable told us how he arranged to have his ex-lover arrested and deported to Honduras because the young man was on the run from a deadly gang. Dupree said that Angel Martinez, his 20-year-old ex, was grateful that the constable arranged to get him off the mean streets of West Dallas.
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"He had people after him who were looking for him, who were going to kill him," Dupree said.
That's news to Martinez, who called the Dallas Observer from his temporary home at the Rolling Plains Regional County Jail and Detention Center in Haskell. He had read Dupree's account of his actions and had this to say about it: "No, it's not true."
He then handed the phone to a friend who served as a translator for the rest of the interview.
"It's all a lie," the man said. "He wasn't into any drugs. There was no gang."
He also disputed Dupree's characterization of their relationship. The Oak Cliff-area constable had told the Observer that he and Martinez had been intimate several times before they both decided that they preferred more of a "father-son relationship." That relationship was strong until Martinez stole the constable's gun. Later, a broken Martinez met Dupree and tearfully confessed that he had fallen into a dangerous life of drugs and gangs.
"'I need help. Please help me,'" Dupree said Martinez told him. "And I said, 'OK, are you going to be mad at the way I'm helping you?' And he said, 'No Dad, I won't get mad.' That's what he called me," Dupree said.
But the translator says that while Martinez did regard the constable as a father figure, Dupree wanted Martinez as his lover, and when he began dating a young woman, Dupree acted out of jealousy.
"Dupree had him arrested because he was with a stripper," the translator says.
That now ex-stripper, Connie Jonez, corroborated Martinez's story. Jonez says that Martinez wants to stay in the United States and marry her. Throughout their relationship, Dupree would arrive at her home to pick up Martinez and make creepy comments, she claims.
"He said, 'I have pictures of the two of us that showed we used to be gay,'" Jonez says. "I was pregnant, and then Mike said, 'Don't be surprised if you don't get hepatitis B.'" Although Jonez later suffered a miscarriage, she says that neither she nor Martinez tested positive for hepatitis.
Other than Dupree, nobody says that Martinez wants to be deported. Dupree, however, told the Observer that he arranged to have Martinez arrested at the constable's own apartment after he discovered that he had two warrants for his arrest on minor charges. Dupree said Martinez was grateful.
Nobody else backs up the constable's tale. Instead Martinez's friends say that hell hath no fury like a constable scorned. "Everything happened when Martinez got a girlfriend. That's when Mike got jealous," says his friend Gracie Briones.
