Harris County DA will seek death penalty against MS-13 gang member

Omar Torres is facing a capital murder charge. Omar Torres is facing a capital murder charge. Photo: HPD Photo: HPD Image 1 of / 9 Caption Close Harris County DA will seek death penalty against MS-13 gang member 1 / 9 Back to Gallery

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Omar Torres was already behind bars when he ordered the hit, police say.

The suspected MS-13 gang member was arrested in June 2016 after the brutal slaying of Noe Mendez four months earlier. He could have been facing life in prison —but only if the teen slated to testify against him lived to tell the tale.

He didn’t.

Now Torres is facing the possibility of even harsher punishment. Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg is seeking a death sentence in the case, believed to be the first initiated by her office since she took over in January 2017.

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The MS-13 case joins four older cases — most with multiple victims — in which Ogg is pursuing the ultimate punishment, according to documents obtained by the Houston Chronicle through an open records request.

Still, the numbers are down from this point in the last administration, when prosecutors were handling more than a dozen pending death cases at once.

“I don’t think that being the death penalty capital of America is a selling point for Harris County,” Ogg told the Chronicle previously.

The shift comes amid a long-term decline in capital punishment, even in Harris County; last year was the first year in three decades the county doled out no new death sentences and saw none of its killers executed in Huntsville.

‘A really bad act’

The decision to seek a death sentence in the Torres case seemed obvious to prosecutors.

Less than a week after Torres’ arrest, investigators found the bloody body of the witness against him — 16-year-old Estuar Quiñonez — in a Fort Bend County park, surrounded by 25 shell casings.

“He was already in jail for murdering a guy; it was an MS-13 gang shooting,” said Assistant District Attorney Colleen Barnett. “He arranged to have that witness killed and we believe that was just a really bad act that he committed.”

The 26-year-old Houston man was charged in the second slaying in July 2016 and prosecutors made the decision to seek death late last year. His lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.

The other four cases in which Ogg’s office is still seeking death are grisly holdovers from previous administrations.

One of the oldest is Lucky Ward, who is charged with strangling a homeless woman with a bra and choking to death a transgender woman known as Gypsy. Shortly after his arrest, police called the frequently homeless man a serial killer and said they’d linked him to at least three other bodies. Then-DA Pat Lykos originally sought death in his case back in 2012, and Ogg decided in February 2017 to continue on that path.

A week later, Ogg’s office opted to keep aiming for a death sentence for David Ray Conley, a Houston man who allegedly shot his estranged ex-girlfriend Valerie Jackson, her husband and six children, including his own son.

He later told the Chronicle in a jailhouse interview that he didn’t approve of how Jackson was raising the children.

“The Bible says, ‘Thou shall respect your mother and father or your days shall be short,’” he said. “I’m not God, but you know, then, I’m the man of the house.”

In July, prosecutors decided to keep seeking death in the case of Steven Alexander Hobbs, a Crosby security guard accused of raping or killing six prostitutes since 2002.

Finally, in November, Ogg decided to continue going after the harshest punishment in the case of Ronald Haskell, a Utah man accused of disguising himself as a FedEx worker and breaking into a Spring home to shoot a family of six execution-style in 2014.

In at least one case, Ogg’s office reversed course and decided not to seek a death sentence. Under a prior administration, prosecutors had planned to pursue the ultimate punishment against Maytham Alsaedy, a Harris County man accused of stabbing 22-year-old Kella Bracken to death and leaving her body in the car at a pizzeria parking lot.

Initially, Ogg’s office elected to seek a death sentence against the mentally ill 26-year-old after reviewing the case in April. But after the victim’s mother requested a life sentence for her daughter’s killer, prosecutors reevaluated the case in November and decided against death.

The following month, Alsaedy hanged himself in the Harris County jail, a week before he was set to accept a plea to life without parole.

‘Mirroring’ national trends

The relatively low number of cases headed toward a death sentence comes as prosecutors have tweaked their process for deciding whether to seek the state’s harshest punishment.

Under past administrations, prosecutors would send recommendations for death or life up the chain of command, Barnett said. Ultimately, their input would be taken into consideration but the final decision rested with the district attorney.

“You can tell when there’s a case that we need to seek death on,” Barnett said. “It’s never, ‘Well we’re not sure.’ We’re always sure.”

When Ogg took over the office, she shifted to a more democratic process, where top prosecutors meet a few times a month, review the cases, consider mitigating evidence from the defense, and vote on whether to seek death.

"We are gatekeepers for the use of the death penalty, which is the most serious action a government can take against an individual," Ogg said Friday. "That is why we bring our most experienced legal minds to the table to make these decisions."

But in recent years, souring public opinion and the availability of life without parole as a sentencing option have led to fewer death sentences, even in a state with more executions than any other.

“If you take a look at the national trends, Harris County is mirroring the national trend,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “Everywhere we are seeing a reduction in the use of the death penalty and that would be the case even if we had the same prosecutorial culture in place. But when the prosecutorial culture changes, you tend to see even more dramatic changes in the way the death penalty is pursued.”

Although Ogg has not opposed the use of capital punishment, she expressed caution about its frequent use even before taking office.

While her opponent aired radio and TV ads touting herself as a “tough prosecutor” and promising the death penalty and long sentences, Ogg was more circumspect.

“Under an Ogg administration, you will see very few death penalty prosecutions,” she told Reuters before the 2016 election, calling the death penalty “a terrible image for our city and our country.”

Just a little over three years ago, the district attorney’s office, under then-DA Devon Anderson, was seeking death in 16 cases, including 13 new ones and three retrials. Two of those — Hobbs and Ward — are still on the list of death-noticed cases under Ogg, their trials delayed by DNA testing and Hurricane Harvey, among other things.

They’re scheduled to go to trial within the next year.

keri.blakinger@chron.com

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