Variety of factors cited in rise in Houston murders in 2015

Flowers rest on the doorstep of a house where eight people were killed Sunday, Aug. 9, 2015, in Houston. Flowers rest on the doorstep of a house where eight people were killed Sunday, Aug. 9, 2015, in Houston. Photo: Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle Photo: Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Variety of factors cited in rise in Houston murders in 2015 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Houston's 283rd murder in 2015 took place in a north Houston hotel room.

Police said an angry boyfriend stabbed his 34-year-old girlfriend as her two sons, aged 16 and 18, tried to fight him off.

Monica Balderas' death on Dec. 19 marked another grim datapoint in the any increasingly bloody year, as authorities in both Houston and unincorporated Harris County battled a rise in murders, mirroring similar increases in other large cities across the country. Baltimore, for example, has seen killings rise more than 50 percent, while St. Louis has experienced an increase of more than 60 percent, and Milwaukee has seen a similar increase of more than 76 percent.

Though official numbers are not yet available, preliminary data from the Houston Police Department shows the city reported 297 murders by the end of 2015, a 23 percent increase over the 242 slayings the city recorded in 2014. In unincorporated Harris County, the number of people murdered in 2015 also rose sharply, to 90, from 68 in 2014. The 32-percent spike was lower than in 2013, however, when 106 people were slain across Harris County.

Theories abound as to the rise in murders nationally, from increasing populations to more gang violence to law enforcement agencies less willing to engage civilians because of the heightened scrutiny they have received over the last 18 months. However, police and experts in Houston stop short of attributing the spike in fatalities to any single factor.

"To me, nothing has jumped out as far as motive or nature or players, be it drugs, gangs, or anything like that," said Capt. Dwayne Ready, with the Houston Police Department's homicide division.

While the increase in murders here was potentially troubling, it was in line with past years, said Stephanie Karas, a lecturer in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Houston-Downtown. In 2010, for example, Houston police investigated 269 murders, according to FBI data. The following year, the city recorded just 198 murders, the lowest point in five decades.

Teasing out the cause of this year's increase is tricky, she said.

"Usually there's not just one factor," she said. "We want to identify something that's the culprit and when we can't do that, that's a tough pill to swallow."

Houston Police Chief Charles A. McClelland said Houston's upward tick in murders is consistent with trends in other large U.S. cities.

"We don't know why some years murders go up and some years murders go down," he told the Houston Chronicle.

"Even though they may be up in calendar year 2015 - two, three years ago they were at record lows," he said. "But the dynamics and demographics haven't changed... The basic motive for murder is drugs, some type of money, or passion. And the people who are victims and the people who are suspects are young, minority men. And many times they're carrying guns unlawfully."

Violence among young men and the availability of guns are often cited as driving forces in the city's murder rate.

McClelland said the department has shifted strategies over the past year and begun working more closely with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, to address the situation.

"We're trying to figure out how some of these suspects are getting access to the guns," he said. "Are they stealing them, buying them from someone through straw purchases?" He said the suspects in many cases "are not qualified to purchase a gun."

Moments after Balderas' death, Estanislao Balderas, her 30-year-old brother, got a call from his nephew, hysterical. The teen told him he and his brother had tried unsuccessfully to fight off Balderas' irate on-again, off-again boyfriend, who police said stabbed her to death with a kitchen knife. Police arrested 38-year-old Abelardo Narvaez immediately, after finding him hiding in the apartment. He had previously been charged with family violence, for abusing Balderas over the course of 2014, but had never been arrested.

Locally, police dealt with many cases where more than one fatality stemmed from the same incident.

In unincorporated Harris County, for example, 12 people died in just three incidents - the most shocking being the slaughter of a family living in northwest Harris County in August. Police charged David Conley, ex-boyfriend of one of the victims, with capital murder, he shot and killed his ex-girlfriend, her husband and six of his ex-girlfriend's children. That followed similar incidents in Harris County in 2014, when 10 people from two families were murdered in two separate incidents.

In Houston, multiple murders claimed at least 22 lives, half of which occurred in the first two months of 2015, according to Houston police data.

Criminologists and police say there is not enough evidence to suggest a crime wave and noted that many cities continue to experience a drop in, or steady rate of, crime.

According to a recent report from New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice, murder rates in 30 of the nation's largest cities have increased about 15 percent but overall crime in those cities has dropped by about 5 percent.

"While Americans in urban areas have experienced more murders this year than last year, they are safer than they were five years ago and much safer than they were 25 years ago," the authors wrote.

Locally, the region's growth was another factor potentially pushing murders upward, experts said.

"It's not surprising the number of homicides and manslaughters is rising - just because the population is growing," said William King, a professor and associate dean at Sam Houston State University's College of Criminal Justice.

State data projects the Harris County's population rose by 80,000 in 2015, to approximately 4.4 million people living in the county by the end of the year.

King noted that this year's murder count in Houston remained well below the city's highest levels, such as when 678 people were slain in 1982, at the height of the crack epidemic, when cities across the country were riven by high homicide and murder rates.

Some national law enforcement officials also have blamed the rise in murders on a so-called "Ferguson effect," referring to the riots and protests that broke out in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 after an officer-involved shooting of an unarmed black man there. Police have come under heightened scrutiny in the last year and a half following other lethal interactions with citizens, like the death of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy shot to death by a Cleveland police officer while playing with a toy gun at a park.

Earlier this year, FBI Director James B. Comey partly blamed a spike in crime on hostile attitudes towards law enforcement and a subsequent fall in morale among the nation's police.

"I don't know whether that explains it entirely, but I do have a strong sense that some part of the explanation is a chill wind that has blown through American law enforcement over the last year," he said in October at the University of Chicago Law School.

However, other law enforcement officials or crime experts have questioned the validity of those claims or argued there is not enough data to prove it.

"You have a lot of people using the so-called 'Ferguson effect' to advance their own agendas," said Larry Karson, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Houston-Downtown, pointing towards statements by police chiefs or unions. "At this point there's no evidence of a 'Ferguson effect' other than some people pushing an ideological agenda with it. Nationally, crime has dropped and continues to drop."

Capt. Ready said that domestic violence incidents - like the one that claimed Balderas' life - could be especially hard to prevent.

"The ones that occur in the home, they're very hard to deter and make an impact on," he said. "They happen behind closed doors. We either may not get a call, and certainly there's nothing we can do as far as visibility to be a deterrence like we can on the corners where gangs are involved or drugs are involved."

Balderas' six siblings, meanwhile, spent Christmas mourning the loss of their sister. Her brother Estanislao Balderas said some relatives had leaned on their faith to cope but when they remembered Balderas, the grief remained raw.

"They say time heals all wounds, but time isn't helping so much in this case," he said.