Guadalupe Torres held her head in weathered hands.

Tears trickled between her fingers.

In a world with a God, your children do not die before you.

But Guadalupe's son, Felix, did, in fact, pass over.

He was 47.

Abuela Guadalupe is that saddest of women.

No faithless husband ever inflicted pain this intense upon her.

In April, she pulled back the gauze on a wound that never will heal. She spoke of her boy.

A grandchild handed a visitor a small bottle of water as the tragedy unraveled in words around the kitchen table.

Felix Torres routinely bicycled to work. To keep his eye on traffic, he pedaled with cars coming toward him.

Mesa police stopped him on September 30, 2013.

The cops believed he should have moved with traffic, which common sense tells you is more dangerous.

But the law is not a negotiable thing . . . nor is it forgiving. As these things do, the stop because of a bicycle violation deteriorated quickly.

Torres was taken to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's jail when Mesa police discovered he had outstanding warrants for driving without a license and failure to appear in court.



SEE ALSO:

• COVERAGE OF JOE ARPAIO'S DECADES OF MISDEEDS

• ARPAIO'S CULTURE OF CORRUPTION AFFECTS EVERYONE IN MARICOPA COUNTY



During the stop, police discovered that Torres was in possession of a drug pipe as well as an empty baggie containing meth residue.

Once in jail, the sheriff's detention officers and medical staff needlessly and carelessly killed Felix Torres.

Here, in greater Phoenix, families live the Day of the Dead all year long with the Sheriff's Office. Here, families cry with regrets instead of exchanging sugar skulls.In Maricopa County, the Dia de los Muertos calls for burials, not celebrations.

Since Arpaio was elected in 1992, government records show that the county has paid out claims against the sheriff totaling more than $74 million.

This does not include legal expenses, which, for example, in the ACLU's ongoing Melendres racial-profiling lawsuit against Arpaio, includes another $44 million in estimated cost.

In this context, Felix Torres is not just another dead Mexican. In fact, he's not one of the poor migrants Sheriff Arpaio abused; he's American born and American dead.

Felix Torres is one example of the viciousness our sheriff has embraced. Arpaio became "America's toughest sheriff" by bragging about the brutality in his jails. At the beginning of his reign in 1995, the sheriff told a national magazine that "jail is not supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be punishment." And that he, Arpaio, "educates through punishment."

Felix's mother, Guadalupe, has sued Joe Arpaio for $3.25 million over the education that killed her son.

We have seen a parade of corpses, a seemingly endless procession of cadavers taken out of Sheriff Arpaio's jail as he shuffles the calacas into eternity.

This isn't racism. The jailers kill all races.

Which isn't to say that Arpaio's office isn't full of crackers.

In the groundbreaking lawsuit, still in the courts, the ACLU has held the sheriff responsible for racial profiling as his deputies patrolled the Valley of the Sun. Federal Judge G. Murray Snow agreed with the allegations and found Arpaio guilty. Furthermore, the sheriff now faces contempt-of-court charges for defying Judge Snow. But racial profiling is only one moving part in what a Valley attorney alleges in pleadings is a "culture of cruelty."

The ACLU lawsuit was filed in 2007.

Eight years later, litigation continues.

Reform, such as it is, is judicially glacial.

And in all that time, the brutality in the jail kept pace.

Of course, the sheriff and his deputies set out to harass brown people at home, on the street, in their cars, and while they worked. That's been proven, litigated, and admitted to in court.

Furthermore, these deputies notoriously passed around virulently racist jokes about Mexicans in their e-mails.

What do you think happens when these badges get their hands on scofflaws, the unlicensed, the behind in child support, the ne'er-do-wells, the mentally ill, the petty and the felonious, the indigent, the drug dependent?

Chaotic hell.

That's what happens.

Doesn't matter what race you are. And it doesn't really matter whether you're Mexican or American.

Felix Torres' story was important enough that Sheriff Joe Arpaio — a lawman with a four-person public relations department always in overdrive — filed papers seeking a gag order from the courts to prevent any journalist from talking about this death and, more specifically, to silence the family's principal attorney, Michael Manning.

The sheriff is notorious for his press stunts with Hollywood has-beens like Pamela Anderson and Steven Seagal. The doors of the jail are thrown open for the press for staged dramas with celebrities.

Just don't inquire of the sheriff about the bodies carted out of his cells.

The courts refused to gag anyone in the Torres case; but this doesn't mean people aren't walking on eggs.

The perpetrators know that Felix Torres died in agony, died slowly, and died in front of witnesses. The perpetrators know that you don't get to kill those who have lost their way because of drugs.

But the knowledge is merely a legal tangent.