Provided by Santos Vive
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Historian and author Michael Phillips, SMU Professor Rick Halperin and Hadi Jawad, co-founder and president of Human Rights Dallas, submitted the op-ed below about the upcoming anniversary of 12-year-old Santos Rodriguez’s murder on July 24.
In a just world, Santos Rodriguez would already be eligible for Social Security benefits. He might have spent the summer planning his grandchildren’s birthday parties, enjoying the World Cup, or maybe relaxing during travel paid for by a lifetime of steady, hard work.
Santos, however, never got to experience any of that. He never got to go to high school, have a first date, or drive a car.
A Dallas police officer, Darrell Cain, murdered the 12-year-old in the back of a police car on July 24, 1973. Three years previously, Cain was not indicted after his involvement in the highly questionable fatal shooting of a fleeing Black teenager, Michael Moorehead.
The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko once wrote, “Not people die, but worlds die in them.” This is particularly true when people like Santos are cut down in the prime of their youth, when so much of their world remains unexplored.
This year marks the 53rd anniversary of his death. At a time of vast institutional violence against, and harassment of, migrants by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a racist campaign that often sweeps Mexican American and other Hispanic people U.S. citizens into its net, it has never been more important to remember Santos Rodriguez and reflect on what his killing says about American society.
Dallas police officer Roy Arnold later claimed that just after 2 a.m. the day Rodriguez was shot to death, he saw three boys running from Chuck’s Fina Station at 2301 Cedar Springs Road. Police said that $8 had been stolen from a soft drink vending machine. Arnold said he recognized two of the boys, whom he identified as Santos and his 13-year-old brother David, from previous encounters.
The Rodriguez brothers lived with a foster grandparent who spoke little English. Cain awakened the elderly man and began questioning him before officers handcuffed the two boys, still shoeless and in their pajamas, dragged them to a squad car, and drove them away for a lethal interrogation.
“My boys didn’t have a chance,” their mother, Bessie Rodriguez, told WFAA-TV 47 years later.
Arnold and Cain drove the Rodriguez brothers to a vacant lot behind the service station where the robbery had taken place, far from the gaze of supervising officers and attorneys. Cain thought he could terrify Santos into a confession with a game of Russian roulette.
Cain seated Santos in the front next to Arnold. Directly behind the boy, he loaded one chamber of his .357 Magnum service revolver before spinning the cylinder.
Cain peppered Santos with questions about the robbery. The boy said he knew nothing. Cain pointed the weapon toward Santos’s head and warned him that he “better tell the truth.” He pulled the trigger; the gun clicked, but nothing happened.
We can only guess the terror the grade-schooler felt. Cain kept accusing Santos of the robbery. According to David, “I’m telling you the truth,” were Santos’s last words as Cain pulled the trigger a second time.
The flash from the revolver filled the police vehicle as a bullet struck Santos’s head. Blood covered David’s bare feet as other squad cars arrived.
Fingerprints taken at the gas station did not match those of either of the Rodriguez brothers.
Cain later improbably claimed he had no idea there was a bullet in his gun. The Rodriguez family would then suffer institutional violence.
Dallas police stripped away Cain’s badge, seized his gun, and charged him with murder. However, despite his involvement in two fatal shootings, the age of his victim, and his sadism as he toyed with a child’s life, a municipal judge set Cain’s bond at only $5,000.
After suffering more than a century of violence at the hands of white law enforcement, Black and Mexican Americans exploded in rage during a March for Justice in downtown Dallas on July 28, 1973.
More than 1,000 demonstrators marched from Kennedy Plaza to Dallas City Hall. However, the heavy police presence fueled backlash that resulted in the smashing of City Hall windows, the torching of two squad cars, and some looting of downtown department stores. Police arrested thirty, and five officers suffered injuries.
The trial of Cain, moved to Austin because of the difficulty of impaneling an impartial jury, deepened the wounds. On Nov. 16, 1973, an all-white jury sentenced Cain to a mere five years for murder with malice. He only served two-and-a-half years and, while incarcerated, gained special privileges as a prison trusty.
President Jimmy Carter’s Justice Department, at the urging of civil rights groups such as LULAC, considered federal civil rights charges against Cain, but ultimately declined to file a case.
Unlike his victim, Cain got to enjoy a long life. After prison, he moved to Lubbock and began a new career as an insurance claims adjuster before passing away in 2019 at age 75.
In spite of the high number of suspicious officer-involved shootings in Dallas since 1973, and the frequency with which suspects have died in police custody, Cain was the last Dallas Police Department officer to be convicted of murder until October 2, 2019 when Amber Guyger received a 10-year-sentence for gunning down a Black man, Botham Jean, while he sat eating ice cream in his own apartment the year before.
From its founding, Dallas has feared that honestly confronting its frequently violent past endangers its carefully cultivated image as a safe place to invest and run a business. City leaders long have embraced a culture of civic amnesia.
It took 164 years for the city to properly mark the site where Dallas leaders lynched three enslaved men scapegoated for a fire that destroyed much of Dallas in 1860. It took 111 years for Dallas to erect a marker noting the site of Allen Brooks’ 1910 lynching.
After the Kennedy assassination in 1963, former Dallas mayor R.L. Thornton let everyone within earshot know that he didn’t want any memorial in the city that would remind him that a president was killed here and suggested that they build one in Washington, D.C. instead. The Kennedy Memorial in downtown Dallas didn’t open until 1970, to a less-than-warm reception.
It’s tragic but not surprising that Dallas elites immediately wanted to bury the memory of Santos Rodriguez as well. Of course, if you forget about the past, it’s impossible to learn from it.
Human Rights Dallas essentially formed out of the effort to make sure that Santos’s life and death were remembered. Because of that group’s patient lobbying, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings finally apologized to Bessie Rodriguez in 2013 at the City Performance Hall. Those words of regret came forty years after the atrocity committed against her son. The audience erupted in deafening applause. Then-Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia offered his own heartfelt apology to Santos’ mother at the boy’s gravesite in 2021.
Seattle, almost 2,100 miles from the murder scene, established a Santos Rodriguez Memorial Park in 2015. The city where the slaying took place took another seven years to make a similar gesture. Dallas officials dedicated a statue of the murdered child at the recently named Santos Rodriguez Recreation Center in 2022, one year before the half-century anniversary of his killing. Southern Methodist University now offers a Santos Rodriguez Memorial Endowed Scholarship for students studying human rights.
More than words, some substantial reforms followed the Rodriguez murder. For the first time, Dallas Police hired a Latina, Cynthia Villarreal, as an officer in 1975. About half of a once-stubbornly-Jim Crow police department is now made up of Black and Hispanic officers.
But that’s not nearly enough to redeem meaning from Santos Rodriguez’s death.
In the 1980s, the decade after Santos died, Dallas led the nation in per capita police killings among large cities. In response, the city appointed a toothless citizens review board that, as local journalist Tyler Hicks pointed out, “never issued any recommendations to improve policing. It also never had a budget for investigations.” By 2015, Dallas ranked third in the nation for police-involved shootings and the victims remained disproportionately Black and Brown.
In 2019, in the wake of the Botham Jean murder, the city commissioned a new Community Police Oversight Board (made up of 15 volunteers), which receives reports on officer abuses from a “monitor.” The new board, unlike its predecessor, has a budget and is allowed to recommend investigation into police brutality.
Community activists, however, point out the new body still has little actual power and its volunteer members identify too closely with the police department it is supposed to oversee. This is a formula for another Cain-style murder to unfold.
As the Dallas-based group Mothers Against Police Brutality puts it, “In Dallas, the pervasive police ‘code of silence’ has been embraced by leaders across the political spectrum. City officials rarely discuss excessive force issues publicly, refusing to answer the most basic questions… An extrajudicial killing by a police officer is typically termed a ‘tragedy,’ not a crime; ‘regrettable,’ not preventable.”
In the memory of Santos Rodriguez, Botham Jean, and other victims of police violence, Dallas city leaders need to work with the state Legislature to create a truly independent police review board that includes local reform activists. This new board should have subpoena powers and the authority to directly dismiss officers with a demonstrated record of abusing authority.
This could save lives and, along the way, save Dallas litigation costs stemming from police abuse claims, which amounted to just over $10 million between 2010 and 2020. Meanwhile, Dallas police should be required to learn about the Santos Rodriguez case as part of their training, perhaps including viewings of the documentary film Santos Vive by local filmmaker Byron Hunter, first screened in time for the 45th anniversary of the murder in 2018.
Meanwhile, several local groups are working to keep Santos’s memory alive. On Friday, July 24 at 6:30 p.m., Human Rights Dallas and the Herrera Dance Project will hold an open-to-the-public event, “Remembering Santos: 53 Years Later,” at the La Cantera Arts Conservatory, 1050 N. Westmoreland. Also, The Friends of Oakland Cemetery and several human rights organizations have invited the public to visit Santos’ grave at Oakland Cemetery, 3900 Oakland Circle, in Dallas, to place flowers or offer prayers from 7 a.m.- 4 p.m. on July 25 & Sunday, July 26.
Activists hope remembrances like this might, in the future, prevent the dazzling worlds other children like Santos represent from being prematurely extinguished by lawless men poisoned with power and hate.
