Posted on Thu, Feb. 14, 2008

Chapter 5 | Teenager pays a terrible price for a dangerous friendship

By TIM MADIGAN, with DEANNA BOYD and MELODY McDONALD

Star-Telegram staff writers

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 police 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, but that case went cold. North-side gang member Andy Ortiz was accused of rape in another case and arrested -- but not charged. He was sent back to prison for a parole violation.

CHAPTER 5

The collect calls kept coming from the Tarrant County Jail, at least until Armida Garcia's father saw the charges on the telephone bill. Armida was on the phone too much as it was, Juan Garcia thought, but talking to a prisoner? That had to stop. So in late 1995 he laid down the law with his 13-year-old daughter.

But Andy Ortiz would not be deterred. The high school dropout, in his early 20s and in jail for gang-related crimes, began writing to Armida instead. The increasingly lurid letters became forbidden entertainment for the girl and her two closest friends, Alma Puente and Arianna Barbosa.

To them, Ortiz had seemed sort of brotherly at first, promising to protect the girls from neighborhood toughs when he got out. But then he asked Armida and Alma to send him photographs. (They didn't.) He asked them to send a pair of their panties. (Neither would think of doing it.) Then he began to describe sex acts, which the girls found at once disgusting and sort of thrilling.

"We were surprised because nobody would speak to us like that," Alma remembered thinking of the letters, then hidden in Armida's bedroom. "We were like, 'Oh my God! Oh my God!' This is the first guy who is actually telling us how he liked girls, what he likes girls to do and we're like, 'Do you think we would ever really like that?' I guess we saw him as a teacher of sorts."

Armida, for one, insisted that curiosity was as far as it went. On at least one occasion, she drew the line in a telephone conversation with the prisoner when he began to express more than a brotherly interest.

"Look, I don't like you in that way," she told Ortiz. "If you don't want to be my friend, then we just won't talk anymore."

"Well, I'd rather have you as a friend so I'm going to treat you as a sister from now on," Ortiz replied.

Ortiz was on his best behavior in a letter that Armida's mother later found stashed behind a picture in the girl's room.

"I know we've talked about weird [things] in the past, but I want to see you treated right," he wrote. "So will you let me offer you a good thing? Yes or no? I want to be like a big [brother] or best homie or [cousin] to you and I'll tell you why. Your nice as they come. Your pretty, sweet, dress all that, [firm] body, cute personality, etc. I could go on about you, [but] by now your blushing like a red apple."

Ortiz continued in that vein when he was released from jail just after Christmas 1995. Armida agreed to meet him once or twice, usually at the convenience store near her home, where other people would be around. But as time passed and Armida matured, her friends noticed that Ortiz's interest intensified. He would scream at her when she refused his increasingly blatant advances.

Which later raised the question: Why didn't Armida put him off once and for all? Friends would conclude that it was Armida's unwillingness to hurt another person's feelings, even if that person was a thug like Ortiz. Or maybe her reasons were more complicated, having to do with youthful affections that defied logic. In any event, for much of the last two years of her life, Armida continued a dangerous flirtation with one of the north side's most voracious sexual predators.

It went on even after she had been warned by Arianna's older sister, 16-year-old Angelica Barajas.

One day during the summer of 1997, Ortiz came up to Angelica on the street and launched into his series of pickup lines, which she rebuffed. Ortiz found out her telephone number and began pestering her with calls. One night he showed up uninvited at her house, coaxed her onto a porch swing, grabbed one of her hands and forced it onto his crotch until her screams sent Ortiz hurrying away in his car.

He continued stalking Angelica at the Carnival grocery store where she worked, calling her more than two dozen times on one particular day and showing up in the parking lot with his friends.

About that time, Angelica learned that the creepy guy had also set his sights on her sister's naive young friend, Armida.

"I know you want to wish that everyone is good, but this guy is not good," Angelica told Armida that summer.

But Armida didn't listen. In fact, on July 19, 1997, when she needed a ride home from Arianna's house, she called Ortiz, who pulled up within minutes. That night, Ortiz grabbed her by the arm and tried to kiss her when they arrived at Armida's home.

"What are you doing?" she asked. "We're just friends."

"So it's going to be like that, huh?" Ortiz asked, obviously angry.

"I guess so," Armida replied.

In a call the next day, Ortiz accused Armida of using him. He said he was through talking with her.

"I told him I just wanted to be friends," Armida told Arianna. "Why doesn't he understand that?"

For two weeks there were no words between them.

An ill-fated encounter

The silence ended at noon on Sunday, Aug. 3, when Ortiz called Armida and invited her to hang out with him for a few hours at a mall. He became furious when Armida declined.

On the telephone several hours later, Armida told her friends about the difficult exchange. But Arianna and Alma were much more interested in hearing about Armida's budding romance with a boy more her own age, a cute sacker at the neighborhood Carnival store named Onesimo "Mimo" Bazan. Mimo had come by to visit that afternoon, Armida told her friends, and she had agreed to go out with him after his shift ended that night. The three girls giggled in anticipation.

That afternoon, Juan Garcia told Armida that he and her mother were leaving to drop off a relative and pick up groceries for the week. Why didn't Armida come along? But she was on the telephone with her friends, and she sent her father away with a playful wave. With her younger brother, Fernando, at a friend's house playing video games, Armida was alone at home.

Her cousin Roberto Jordan was the next person to see her. He pulled up about 8 p.m. and Armida was on the front porch with a chubby guy who looked much older. She was leaning against the railing, and the guy, who lowered his eyes as Roberto pulled into the driveway, sat slouched behind Armida on a sofa outside. Armida walked out to Roberto's pickup and asked about his new baby. The two young relatives chatted for a few minutes until Roberto drove off into the dusk.

About that time, the telephone rang inside Armida's house. Mimo had left the Carnival store that evening, hurried home to shower and then called Armida. She answered after a few rings and the two of them chatted happily, trying to decide on a restaurant, at least until Armida asked Mimo to hold on. He heard her talking to a man in the background but could not make out what was said.

Then the phone went dead.

'Did you hear?'

About 9 p.m., Alma and Arianna separately began to dial Armida's number, both eager to learn of any further romantic developments. But Armida did not answer.

Finally, between 10 and 11, Arianna's phone rang and she ran to pick it up, expecting to hear Armida's voice. Instead, it was a neighborhood boy.

"Did you hear what happened to Armida?" the boy asked.

"What are you talking about?" Arianna replied, her concern mounting.

Arianna was furious when he told her, certain that the boy was trying to play a horrible practical joke. But then came a knock at her door, and she saw a police officer standing outside. When she answered, the officer wanted to know when she had last talked to Armida and whether Armida had plans to meet anyone that night. The officer would not say why he was asking but directed her to the crime scene.

Arianna threw on clothes and tennis shoes and went with her mother to pick up Alma. The three of them sped to the block on Denver Avenue. The street was filled with emergency vehicles, and the night crackled with the sound of police radios. People stood in small groups on sidewalks. Armida's house was surrounded by yellow crime scene tape. The first person Arianna saw while she was running toward the house was Fernando.

"Where's your sister?" she screamed. "What's going on?"

When he replied, Arianna's knees buckled and she collapsed on the sidewalk, sobbing just outside the yellow tape.

A chilling discovery

Fernando had known immediately that something was wrong when he came home. It was after 10 p.m. and all the lights were off. That was strange because Armida was supposed to be there and Fernando knew she was afraid of the dark. Stranger still at that late hour was the music blaring from the stereo in the living room. He hurried around to the back door, which was normally unlocked, and was surprised to find a green towel wrapped from handle to handle to keep the door open. Fernando removed the towel and continued inside. He turned on the kitchen lights and lowered the volume of the stereo. He called Armida's name and checked her empty bedroom, where a large mirror lay on his sister's bed next to scattered makeup.

He continued to his parents' bedroom and turned on the light, noticing that a comforter was pulled from the bed onto the brown tile floor. He was about to pick it up when something stopped him. The comforter seemed to be covering a human form. He pulled it back and saw his sister, facedown on the floor.

Fernando called Armida's name and shook her, but she would not stir. He sprinted next door to the home of his older uncle, and the two of them hurried back to the Garcia home. The uncle saw Armida's body and told the boy to call 911. They frantically searched for the cordless telephone, which finally turned up on the living room sofa. The call came in at 10:15 p.m.

"I came to my house and my sister was lying on the floor," Fernando told the 911 operator, standing over his sister. "I think she's dead."

The operator transferred him to a paramedic.

"Is she breathing?" the paramedic asked. "Is her chest rising and falling? Is any air coming out of her mouth?"

When Fernando said there was not, the paramedic told him how to begin CPR and asked him to feel for a pulse on Armida's neck. That's when Fernando saw them: black shoelaces from his old sneakers, tied tightly around his sister's throat.

"Oh! Someone strangled her," Fernando cried. "She got strangled!"

"What is it around her neck?" the paramedic asked.

"A shoestring," he said.

"Find something and cut it right now, a scissors or anything," the paramedic said, his voice growing even more urgent.

Just then, other paramedics arrived in the bedroom.

"My sister is dead, fool. Someone killed my sister," Fernando said.

Then he began to weep.

"We've got to get PD here," a paramedic in the bedroom said. "This is going to be a crime scene."

Fernando was ordered from the room while the emergency workers cut the shoelaces from Armida's throat. When the ligature was sliced free, air gushed from the girl's mouth, giving paramedics hope that she was still alive. But Armida never drew another breath.

Next: Detective Joe Thornton catches his first big case.

Timeline

1984: Detective Curt Brannan joins the homicide unit of the Fort Worth Police Department.

Nov. 25, 1990: Andy Ortiz is arrested in the burglary of a car, the first of his many arrests as an adult.

Sept. 4, 1991: Ortiz kidnaps a 13-year-old girl. An aggravated-kidnapping charge is dismissed as part of a plea bargain when Ortiz agrees to a nine-year sentence for earlier burglaries. He is paroled after nine months.

1992: Brannan works the high-profile Caren Koslow murder case.

Aug. 8, 1993: Ortiz is accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl, but there isn't enough evidence to go to trial. He is returned to jail on a parole violation and is released after serving one year.

Early 1995: Ortiz first meets 13-year-old Armida Garcia at a convenience store and gets her phone number.

1995: Ortiz begins corresponding with and calling Armida from jail, where he is doing time on a theft charge.

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.

July 9, 1997: A 12-year-old girl is raped by a man matching Ortiz's description; she decides not to pursue the case after becoming fearful of reprisals.