Jose Campos Torres’ sister hopes Houston continues to learn from his death

Janie Torres never wants Houston to forget her brother, who was killed by Houston police officers when she was 10 years old.

She used duct tape and a rubber band to hastily attach a sign with her brother’s portrait to her Jeep for an annual march honoring her brother, 23-year-old Army veteran Jose “Joe” Campos. Torres, killed on May 5. , 1977. She started the march in 2016 to try to replicate the route police officers might have taken with her brother after he was arrested for a fight in an East End bar and to raise awareness about police brutality.

The officers beat his brother and first transported him to the city jail, where authorities refused to incarcerate the bloodied and beaten Vietnam veteran and ordered him taken to Ben Taub for his injuries . Instead, the officers took him to a secluded area of ​​Buffalo Bayou known as “The Hole,” beat him again and pushed him into the murky water below.

Torres, 57, was hesitant about the memorial this year because of the weather, but four friends, all civil rights activists eager to keep the event alive, waved her out. The death and impunity of his killers helped spark more than a thousand riots in Moody Park nearly 50 years ago. But she fears many have already forgotten her brother and others killed by law enforcement.

“How can we move forward when we still have these murders today,” she asked. “How can we heal? »

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On May 11, the group stood outside what was once Club 21, the cantina where Torres said his brother started a drunken brawl after someone stole his prized radio and plotted a route.

After she and the others left at 10:30 a.m. in a caravan of cars, Torres slowed and honked her horn as she approached a weekend market on the Esplanade on Navigation. Buyers watched. Torres wondered if they realized the importance of what was happening to them. Some raised their arms to record video of his vehicle and the trailer.

A woman from the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) recognized Torres and hugged her through the driver’s side window.
Another woman approached Torres, concerned about the growing line of cars behind her. Other drivers tried to get around Torres, with one man gesturing angrily out the window as he passed her on the narrow road. She didn’t care.

“That’s the idea,” Torres said. “Many forget until it happens to them and then they want to say something.”

On May 6, 1977, her brother did not come home or show up for work after his bar fight, resulting in a missing person report.

As his absence dragged on, an uncle interrupted his family’s Mother’s Day outing to a movie theater on Canal and Lockwood, a block from the cantina.

His uncle told his father, his brother’s namesake, that a body had been found.

“What did you do, Joe,” she recalled asking her mother.

His father became angry and then slammed his fist on their car.

“They found our boy, mom,” he cried. “They killed him, our boy.”

His parents, Margaret and Joe Torres Sr., joined growing protests in the city over the police killing and were also tried for resisting arrest. A jury acquitted them.

She remembers family members gathering around a television to watch reports of the growing scandal.

The department fired patrol officers Terry Denson, Joe Janisch, Glenn Brinkmeyer, Louis Kinney and Stephen Orlando after another officer reported what he witnessed to their superiors. A grand jury indicted Denson and Orlando in state district court that year, when the Justice Department declined to take on the case. This wave of publicity prompted a judge to move their trial to Huntsville, where jurors found the two guilty and sentenced them to probation. Weeks after the trial ended, federal indictments were issued against these officers and the three others. The trial resulted in minimum prison sentences for Denson and Orlando the following year.

In his eyes, the jury’s verdict was in no way justice.

“The system protected them,” Torres said. “I hope they did something good and positive in their lives.”

Torres was buried at the National Cemetery in Houston, where former police chief Troy Finner apologized to his family in 2021 and ruled his death a murder.

The death hit the community hard, bringing 200 mourners to his memorial service at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. It had to be a closed funeral. The church is on Janie Torres Memorial Road on Navigation, just past the Esplanade.

The group eventually reached the Commerce Street plaza named in 2022 for his brother, where a path led to where officers threw him into the water. Under a bald cypress tree, Torres and the others began planning next year’s march.

Just before, they stopped on the McKee Bridge, got out and waved their signs toward a group of kayakers sliding into the bayou below. Their guide, David Urias, knew exactly who Torres was. He often explains who the man in uniform is in a hanging portrait to his Buffalo Bayou Kayak Tour clients as they float near the criminal courthouse complex.

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“God bless you,” Urias shouted through a loudspeaker. “His story is very important to history.”