Armida Garcia has a chance encounter with gang member Andy Ortiz in 1995. The two become friends, even while he is in jail.
Chapter 3 | A chance encounter leads to a dangerous friendship
Star-Telegram staff writers
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CHAPTER 3 | A chance encounter leads to a dangerous friendship
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To Catch a Killer: A true-crime serial novel
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This series contains explicit language and graphic descriptions of violence.
Editor's note: To Catch a Killer is the true story of killer Andy James Ortiz, his young victims, and the Fort Worth detectives and Tarrant County prosecutors who brought him to justice.
The story so far
Young Brenda Salazar was found strangled in her apartment near Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. Fort Worth police, including Detective Curt Brannan, combed her apartment for clues. But the investigation turned cold, as suspects were eliminated one by one. Brannan promised the 20-year-old woman's parents the case would not be forgotten.
CHAPTER 3
Armida Garcia was a willowy teenage beauty of the sort who left boys her age tongue-tied. In fact, her friends said that she resembled the Tejano singer Selena, a particularly apt comparison because Armida's singing voice was lovely and the Fort Worth girl also seemed destined to perform. Years later, friends still recalled how she belted out Selena songs at a junior high talent show, how Armida sang a love ballad over the telephone to a special boy.
But something more than looks and talent distinguished the girl, who was 15 years old in the summer of 1997 and was preparing for her sophomore year at North Side High School. It was her naivete, an innocence and purity that had somehow survived the hardscrabble life around her.
Armida, her parents and her younger brother, Fernando, lived in a modest home on Denver Avenue in the Stockyards district of north Fort Worth. It was a mostly Hispanic neighborhood where life revolved around family and church, where baptisms, birthdays and quinceañeras brought large extended families together in celebration. But it was also a place where most families struggled to make ends meet, where street gangs battled over turf. Still, Armida clung to her idyllic view of the world.
She proudly showed friends a photograph of her father, a house painter named Juan Garcia, as he hoisted his wife, Graciela, in the air. In a world where divorce was common, Armida boasted to friends that her parents were deeply in love, and the girl said she dreamed of a similar relationship with her own husband someday. Armida had her flirtations but insisted that she would remain a virgin until her wedding night.
She was famous among her friends for her kindness, loath to hurt anyone's feelings. And she stubbornly believed, despite much evidence to the contrary, that there was good in everyone, absolutely everyone. That might have explained her friendship with a notorious neighborhood gang member named Andy Ortiz.
'You could see the hate in him'
They met one day in 1995 at a convenience store near Armida's home. Ortiz was relentless when it came to pursuing girls, the younger the better, and on that day Armida was still in junior high school. Ortiz lied to her, saying he was still a teenager himself, when in fact he was in his early 20s. He was a short, rather doughy young man with a scruffy goatee and short dark hair. But looks weren't everything to a girl as young and impressionable as Armida. Ortiz had a car, for one thing, and Armida could not help envisioning rides to the mall or to the movies. So when Ortiz asked for her phone number, she saw no harm in giving it to him.
Months passed before he used it, and when he did, it was a collect call from the Tarrant County Jail. An arrest for theft, Ortiz explained, which was a crime easy enough for a girl like Armida to forgive. She almost certainly didn't know that there was much more to his past, that over the previous decade Ortiz had built a reputation as one of Fort Worth's most incorrigible gang members, a thug who had proved himself beyond redemption. Police who worked the north-side patrol or in the gang intervention unit still remembered Ortiz a decade later.
"On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being mild and 10 being the worst [gang member], he was a 15," said officer Dean Christensen, who worked in the Fort Worth police gang unit for much of the 1990s.
Ortiz's gang career began with petty stuff when he was a teenager. Though his juvenile records are sealed, police remembered that Ortiz quickly graduated to serious crimes, such as car theft and suspected involvement in drive-by shootings. Ortiz was also on the receiving end of a gang bullet and had his jaw wired shut for months after he was shot in the face. Then he couldn't cuss at police as they drove by his home on Lee Avenue. He resorted to shooting them the finger instead.
Officers later wondered whether things would have been different if Ortiz's parents had been willing to believe what police were telling them. His father, David, was a car salesman who had twice run unsuccessfully for Fort Worth City Council. Mother Stella ran a flower and gift shop. Both seemed to be doting parents, who once took their three sons on a Disneyland vacation. But they could not, or would not, believe that their three sons -- David Jr., the oldest; Andy, in the middle; and Elton, the youngest -- were headed on a dark path to nowhere.
Each son had a long arrest record. Cops remembered chasing the boys through the neighborhood and right into the house on Lee. The parents would slam the door in the officers' faces and threaten to file grievances with the Police Department for harassment, saying the Ortiz boys were targeted because they were Hispanic. (David and Stella Ortiz declined repeated interview requests for this story.) Of the two parents, police remembered Stella Ortiz as the staunchest advocate for her sons, continuously proclaiming their innocence despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
"Mom always defended them," said officer M.M. Salinas, a longtime member of the gang unit. "Anytime we went knocking on their door when they were listed as suspects in this assault or that drive-by shooting, she would always fight the police. She and her husband would always protect their kids. 'It wasn't my child. I have a good child. I know my child.'"
Years later, Salinas wondered whether the parents could see what was happening, particularly with Andy. "You could see the hate in him," Salinas said. "He was very hateful, and not just toward the police but to other individuals. He had no respect, even for his own brothers. We would get calls that they were fighting one another. ... With that kind of individual, you can't reason with them."
So Andy Ortiz's gang career blossomed, and the nature and frequency of his crimes escalated. On Nov. 25, 1990, just 21 days after his 17th birthday -- when he became an adult in the eyes of the law -- he was arrested for burglarizing a car. He quickly posted bail and was arrested again for the same crime less than two months later. Over the next decade, his rap sheet would grow to include 62 entries, arrests for crimes ranging from traffic violations to burglary to probation and parole violations to bomb making to assault. But the arrests and felony convictions in the 1990s never resulted in more than a few months behind bars.
"That was always frustrating," Christensen said of Andy Ortiz and other gang members. "We'd nail them for something and think, 'Now we got them good. This time they're going to be gone for a while.' Wrong. They were back in no time, up to their old business. I'm sure it had to do with the court system somewhere, but that's another story."
That story, state officials said at the time, had to do with overcrowding in the prison system and a parole board that, as a result, freed 8 in 10 parole-eligible inmates.
"The parole board became a releasing authority instead of a parole authority," Victor Rodriguez, then-chairman of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, said in 1997. "It contributed to an attitude problem among people committing the crimes that the state had a system that was broken and you aren't going to jail anyway."
By the end of the 1990s, the state had built thousands of new prison cells, and the parole board had become much less forgiving. That came too late to stop criminals like Ortiz, who took full advantage of the revolving door. And as his rampage continued, police began to notice something about his activities that caused them grave concern.
"As a young adult, 19 or 20 years old, he was always going after young ladies but no one his age," Salinas remembered. "They would be 13 or so, so naive that they would believe anything he'd say. When we would catch him with those girls, we'd tell the parents their daughter was with someone like Andy."
But for many girls, their parents didn't find out about Ortiz until it was too late.
Next: Some charges on Ortiz's rap sheet stand out.
TIMELINE
1984: Detective Curt Brannan joins the homicide unit of the Fort Worth Police Department.
1992: Brannan works the high-profile Caren Koslow murder case.
Summer 1996: Nineteen-year-old Brenda Salazar moves to North Texas to pursue a job in the airline industry.
May 26, 1997: Salazar's roommate returns from out of town and discovers Salazar's body in their apartment just after
5 p.m. She was killed either late on May 25 or early on May 26.
May 27, 1997: Salazar's parents, who live in the Rio Grande Valley, are notified of her death.
May 28, 1997: Salazar's parents come to Fort Worth to meet with Brannan.
June 5, 1997: The Salazars return to Fort Worth to get Brenda's belongings and give Brannan a letter that raises his suspicions about one of Brenda's co-workers; the lead doesn't pan out.
