70 people were killed in Fort Worth last year. About three-quarters of them were shot.
Raymond Castillo was lying on his couch on a late November morning with his shoes off. He was dead and bleeding from a bullet wound in the back of his head.
John Andrus was shot on a sidewalk between two buildings in an apartment complex. The Five Deuce Hoover Crips gang member ran to the door of an unlocked unit and yelled for help.
Wrapped in a white sheet and black plastic, Jennifer Diaz’s body was left on the floor of a motel room bathroom. She had been stabbed in the neck and her throat had been slit.
They were among 70 homicide victims in Fort Worth in 2019, according to police department statistics and reports.
There were 11 more criminal killing victims last year than in 2018, but the 2019 total matches the 2017 homicide tally.
The killings were fueled by rage, narcotics, robberies, conflict involving love and other motivations. Most of the victims knew their assailant, but outside an apartment building in May, a suspect firing a rifle killed a woman as he intended to shoot someone else, police said.
The locations of the killing scenes included a tunnel, the base of a stairwell outside a downtown church and a train station parking lot.
On a Saturday in mid November, two children playing hide-and-seek on a second-floor apartment breezeway found a dead 27-year-old man identified by police as a gang member.
Gang killings appeared to be clustered in two spasms, in February and early March and late October to early November, according to the police data sought by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in an open records request. In 18, or 26%, of the homicides, either the victim or the suspect was a documented gang member.
In 2019, 54 of the homicide victims were shot. Four of the victims were stabbed. Blunt-force injuries killed three victims. One victim was intentionally struck by a vehicle. The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office did not describe the cause for four victims, and the Star-Telegram could not gather from police or medical examiner’s office records the cause of death in four other cases.
Two of the cases involved multiple victims, a double homicide on Jan. 17 and a triple homicide on April 22.
Inside his house, Ronald Parra shot to death his sister-in-law, 45-year-old Melinda Mercado; his two children, 4-year-old Alyssa Parra and 1-year-old Michael Parra; and himself, police said.
The children’s mother discovered the bodies.
In a parking lot in far south Fort Worth, Zyshonne Dunkley, 20, and Olynthus Davis, 19, were shot dead by a person they were attempting to rob, police said.
The youngest victims were 6 weeks and 2 years old. In each case, police accused adults in their 20s of killing the victims.
A woman was accused in the death of her 6-week-old daughter. Acelyn Rogers suffered multiple fractures caused by repeated blows to the head. A man beat to death his girlfriend’s 2-year-old son, Kaison Jackson-Tuzolana, police alleged.
There were more homicides in November, 11, than in any other month. July had the fewest killings with two.
In the Police Department’s East Division, which includes the Poly, Stop Six, White Lake Hills and Woodhaven neighborhoods, there were 18 homicides, more than any other district. The North Division had the fewest with five, three of whom were slain at the same time.
Clearance rate and arrests
At 96%, the Fort Worth Police Department’s homicide clearance rate is exceptionally high compared to cities with similar populations. The rate is calculated with 2019 cases and cases cleared last year in which the victim died in a previous year. The rate was 84% when counting only 2019 cases.
Seventy-four percent of the cases were cleared by an arrest. Ten percent were cleared by exception, a classification that applies when, for example, the suspect is dead.
In 2017, the clearance rate for homicides in cities with populations near Fort Worth’s was 57%, according to FBI data.
There were 16 homicides in Arlington in 2019. That department’s clearance rate was 88%, which includes 13 of the 2019 homicides and one that occurred in 2014.
Of the Arlington homicides in which there was an arrest, one involved a documented gang member, police said.
Beyond the 70 criminal killings in Fort Worth, there were four justified homicides in Fort Worth in 2019, police said. Each involved a police officer shooing a civilian.
One case in which an officer fatally shot a civilian was listed neither on the department’s record of criminal or justified homicides.
The 51st homicide victim in Fort Worth in 2019 was Atatiana Jefferson.
After Jefferson heard noises outside her house in October and thought there may be a prowler in the back yard, she reached into her purse, grabbed a handgun and pointed it toward a window, her 8-year-old nephew told authorities. The boy also was present.
Fort Worth police Officer Aaron Dean, called to the house with another officer when a neighbor saw its doors were open, was outside and shot Jefferson through the window, police said. Dean was indicted on a murder charge in December.
This story was originally published January 13, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
