After Decades and a Documentary, Dallas Is Finally Remembering the Murder of Santos Rodriguez

On July 24, 1973, 12-year-old Santos Rodriguez and his 13-year-old brother David sat in the backseat of a Dallas police patrol car in their neighborhood, Little Mexico. One of the two officers who detained them, Darrell Lee Cain, wanted to extract a confession from the kids over a small-time burglary at a nearby gas station.

The children braced when Cain started a game of Russian roulette, pointing a gun at Santos' head as he questioned him about an $8 theft from a soda machine. The second time Cain pulled the trigger, he sent a bullet into the boy's head, killing him in front of his brother. (Cain was later convicted of murder and sentenced to five years in prison, serving half that time, according to the Fort Worth-Star Telegram.)

On Monday, PBS stations throughout Texas aired Santos Vive, a documentary about the life of the young Mexican-American. The airing came 50 years following Santos’ death and just ahead of Mexican American Heritage Month.

Santos grew up in Dallas’ Little Mexico in the 1960s, an area which has now been redeveloped and gentrified into Uptown Dallas. As a kid, he attended William B. Travis Elementary School and owned a Carlos Santana cassette.

The Mexican community has been a part of Dallas since the city’s earliest times, with the first groups coming in the 1870s to help build the railroad. Little Mexico was settled in 1910 and existed until the 1980s.

Overall, Dallas has resisted acknowledging the murder of Santos Rodriguez. In 2013, former Mayor Mike Rawlings formally apologized for the murder on behalf of the city. In 2021, Dallas police Chief Eddie García did the same.

The stunning murder had somehow evaded public consciousness — something Rick Halpern, the director of Southern Methodist University’s human rights program, and activist Hadi Jawad wanted to change. So they asked filmmaker and Dallas native Byron C. Hunter if he could help them. At the time, Hunter was producing commercials in New York City, having lived most of his adult life there and in Europe. Hunter's father was a prominent civil rights leader in Dallas.

“Putting everything in perspective, my family, we integrated Oak Cliff,” Hunter says. “When we moved in 1968, there were no people of color in Oak Cliff. Period. I'm the only young African American male in my neighborhood within 2 or 3 miles and then you have a Mexican kid who gets shot in the head down the way.”

Hunter’s father’s activity in Dallas’ civil rights community meant that he was acutely aware of what was going on around the city. He remembers his dad sitting him down to tell him about Santos’ death.

“So within 42 or 48 hours of Santos being murdered I knew about it,” says Hunter, who was 9 years old at the time. “A lot of the Latino leaders were actually in our house trying to set a strategy with my dad. So I’ve known about this since the day it happened. I’ve been carrying this with me for 50 years since the day it happened.”

When Halpern and Jawad approached Hunter in April 2018, they originally set out to complete a 5- or 10-minute documentary that could be aired on TV in time to honor the 45th anniversary of Santos' death on July 24. “Prior to doing the film, I said I need to talk to [his mother] Bessie: 'I need to sit down with Bessie Rodriguez myself,'" Hunter says.

He told Bessie Rodriguez that she would have to be willing to tell her story too if the film was going to work. She took the day to consider the proposition and called Hunter back, saying that she would be willing to open up for the film.

“The impetus for making this film was not [Halpern and Jawad] asking me, but was her accepting and being willing to be that key figure in the film,” Hunter says.

So his work began. A month late, Hunter took to the streets, asking people attending a local Cinco de Mayo celebration about Santos.

“When I started working on the film in 2018, Cinco de Mayo happened, and I walked through the Cinco de Mayo parade on Jefferson and spoke with about 300 people, asking them with pictures and everything, ‘Have you heard of Santos Rodriguez? Do you know about this? Have you heard about this crime?’ I talked to about 300 people, and I would say about 10 knew,” Hunter says. “At that point, I knew we had a situation here.”

This collective oblivion was not always the case, however. At one point, Santos’ story was widely covered.

Hunter asked the archivists at the SMU Jones Film and Video Library if they knew about Santos Rodriguez.

“I asked the people who worked there, do you know anything about Santos Rodriguez? He got murdered around this time,” says Hunter. “They were like ‘I've never heard of Santos Rodriguez. What are you talking about?’”

Hunter asked them to take a look. One of the archivists gave him a call soon after. Hunter remembers them saying to him, “We are humbled." They had gone through the last 50 years of WFAA footage and found that requests to reuse Santos Rodriguez reporting in the archives were second only to footage from the JFK assassination.

Since the project’s beginning, though, much has changed.

“When I turned on the cameras in 2018 to do this, nobody in Dallas even knew who he was,” Hunter says. “Now there’s a recreation center named after him, there’s a statue in his honor talking about how he got murdered.”

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Santos’ family and the group behind Vive Santos, various events are planned to honor Santos Rodriguez this year. The Texas Theatre showed Santos Vive on July 23, followed by a rally and memorial services for Santos at Pike Park. The following day, City Council member Jesse Moreno, Hunter and other community leaders spoke about Santos’ life at Dallas City Hall before the TV premiere of Santos Vive later that night on KERA-TV Dallas and other stations across Texas.