by William Grigg,
Between March 2006
and November 2010, Officer Daniel
Alvarado of San Antonio’s Northside Independent School District Police was
suspended four times. Four times he was informed by supervisors that he faced
“immediate termination.” For some reason, when it came time to fire
Alvarado, his superiors just couldn’t bring themselves to pull the trigger.
Alvarado displayed no similar scruples on November 12, 2010, when he murdered
14-year-old Derek Lopez, who had just taken part in a brief scuffle with
another student.
Owing to his own troubled past, Lopez was a student at the
Bexar County Juvenile Justice Academy. At around 4:30 PM on the fatal day,
Lopez sucker-punched a 13-year-old classmate at a bus stop.
“He just hit me once,” the student later recalled in a sworn
deposition. “It wasn’t a fight. It was nothing.”
Unfortunately, Alvarado happened to be prowling the
intersection in his patrol car, and witnessed the trivial dust-up.
“Freeze!” Alvarado shouted at Lopez, who bolted from the
scene. Alvarado, in his mid-40s, briefly gave token pursuit before relating the
first of several self-serving falsehoods.
“I just had one run from me,” wheezed the winded tax-feeder.
“I saw an assault in progress. He punched the guy several times.”
A supervisor instructed Alvarado “not [to] do any big search
over there” in pursuit of the assailant. “Let’s stay with the victim and see if
we can identify [the suspect] that way.”
Rather than doing as he was ordered, Alvarado bundled the
“victim” — who was probably more terrified of the armed functionary than of his
obnoxious classmate — into the patrol car and went in pursuit of Lopez.
Lopez vaulted a nearby fence and hid in a backyard shed
containing Christmas decorations. The homeowner saw the intrusion, and a
neighbor flagged down Alvarado’s patrol car. The officer drew his gun “when he
came up the driveway,” recalled the homeowner. Within a minute or so, a single
gunshot resonated through the neighborhood. When asked by the horrified
homeowner what had happened, Alvarado — who reportedly looked “dazed or
distant” — replied that Lopez “came at me.”
“The suspect bull rushed his way out of the shed and lunged
right at me,” the timorous creature later claimed in an official report. “The
suspect was literally inches away from me, and I feared for my own safety.”
Alvarado was lying, of course. An autopsy revealed “no
evidence of close range firing [on] the wound,” and no gunpowder stains were found
on the victim’s bloody t-shirt.
By this time, the boy who had taken the punch at the bus
stop had called his mother via cell phone. She arrived shortly after Alvarado
had gunned down Lopez.
“At one point, the mother told a witness, `He shot him? Why did
he shoot him? He didn’t have to shoot him,” reports the San Antonio
News-Express.
Alvarado, who four times was on the cusp of being fired for
insubordination, disobeyed a direct order on November 12. He falsified key
details of the shooting in his official report. A 14-year-old boy was gunned
down execution-style for the venial offense of engaging in an adolescent
scuffle, and for compelling an overweight middle-aged badge-polisher to run a
few hundred yards. According to the San Antonio Police Department, this is all
perfectly acceptable: The department ruled that the murder of Derek Lopez was a
“justified” shooting.
Although he’s been removed from patrol duty, Alvarado
remains on the force, albeit in a tax-subsidized sinecure. Although he had
repeatedly been threatened with termination for sloppiness or defiance in
carrying out administrative duties, Alvarado faces neither criminal prosecution
nor professional censure for murdering a 14-year-old boy. Apparently,
insubordination in carrying out office functions is a much graver matter than
insubordination that results in the needless death of an adolescent Mundane.
Despite the fact that this incident involved two teenage
boys who attended a special school for troubled juveniles, parents should
understand that students in practically any government-run “educational”
institution can fall prey to sudden — and potentially lethal — police violence.
“Every day in communities across the United States, children
and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that
increasingly have come to resemble places of detention more than places of
learning,” observes investigative reporter Annette Fuentes in her infuriating
and valuable new book Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse.
Federally subsidized “zero tolerance” policies growing out of the “War on
Drugs” have created what Fuentes and other critics of the system call the
“school-to-prison pipeline”: “If yesterday’s prank got a slap on the wrist,
today those wrists could be slapped with handcuffs.”
As the case of Derek Lopez illustrates, a childish prank
could be treated as a capital offense, with summary execution carried out by a
corrupt cop who doesn’t have to endure so much as a slap on the wrist.