First in a series

One spring night in 2012, a 26-year-old tree trimmer from Honduras pulled into the dark driveway of his small rental house in northeast Houston. As Denis Brisuela was helping his pregnant wife and infant daughter out of his green Ford pickup truck, he was confronted by a man wearing a stocking cap.

"Your money!" the robber demanded, pointing a silver semi-automatic pistol at his chest. Brisuela had just been paid $240 for a trimming job, but for some reason he claimed to have none. Perhaps he thought the robber would believe him. Perhaps the bills he owed seemed more threatening than some punk who might go look for more cooperative prey.

Within seconds the sound of gunshots echoed down San Fernando Street.

"I heard him say 'Oh, My God,' and my husband fell," Maria Cortes recalled. Brisuela died before reaching a hospital, the money still in his wallet.

The next day, homicide detective Sgt. Ryan Chandler came to the home and pledged the grieving widow that the Houston Police Department would move quickly to arrest the gunman and provide some measure of justice for such a pointless murder.

Disposable justice: An interactive map of HPD's forgotten homicides

Today, more than two years later, Cortes is still waiting. And so are many other spouses, siblings, parents and relatives of people slain in some of Houston's marginal neighborhoods. Brisuela was one of almost two dozen homicide victims whose cases were barely investigated or in some instances all but forgotten.

When news of the shocking oversight became public in April, Police Chief Charles McClelland apologized but said the problem had been fixed. That was of little comfort to the families of the victims, who were nowhere mentioned by name. The identity of each and the sketchy details surrounding their deaths are laid out in cursory offense reports recently obtained by the Houston Chronicle.

From an 11-month-old girl shot outside a crack house to a 41-year-old convenience store clerk killed in a holdup to the 31-year-old woman strangled and left by the side of a road, their common bond was to be considered less important than other homicide victims whose deaths led to full investigations and in many cases the prosecution of those who killed them.

And for 16 of the victims, there was another common bond. Their cases were assigned to Chandler, a 14-year HPD veteran once thought to be an up-and-comer. In some of the cases sent his way, he did a perfunctory amount of work and in some almost nothing. However little he did, supervisors typically failed to notice.

"I say if they had worked hard, they could have got him," Cortes said of the investigation into her husband's murder. "But two years have passed, and this detective didn't do anything. I feel bad and sad at the same time because a person was killed who never bothered anyone."

More Information About this series Earlier this year the Houston Chronicle reported that nearly two dozen Houston Police Department homicide cases had not been properly investigated, most of them involving poor minority victims. In today's Chronicle, reporters James Pinkerton and Mike Tolson examine how the homicide division failed to notice cases falling between the cracks for several years. In future stories, the newspaper will explore some of those murder cases in detail. Relatives of victims fear that as time drags on, cases may go unsolved and justice will be denied.

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A six-month investigation by HPD's internal affairs division eventually led to Chandler's termination and suspensions or reprimands for seven other officers earlier this year. The probe revealed investigators and supervisors shirking the most basic requirements of police work: failing to show up at crime scenes, misplacing key evidence, not attempting to interview witnesses or follow up on tips.

Two original files were removed from the office and not noticed for years. And even when supervisors eventually caught on to the troubled cases and ordered detectives to quickly wrap them up, they failed to follow through and make sure the work was done. After the IAD investigation, new detectives were assigned to the incomplete or unworked cases. Charges have been brought in six of them, but arrests have been made in only three. At least three cases have been "cleared" because suspects have been identified who police say are now dead, though HPD has not released information about those suspects or how they died.

Relatives of the victims remain shocked and angered that two or more years after the killings there is little in the way of meaningful progress. And some are now skeptical that killers will be found or that prosecutions will ever take place.

Received one email

Donta Deon Summerville was a 33-year-old computer technician who was between jobs in the early hours of Nov. 21, 2010, when three masked gunmen broke through the front door to his south Houston apartment and demanded money. By the time they left, Summerville lay mortally wounded on the floor.

His mother said the family received one email from Chandler in March 2011 saying that he "above all others wants to make the person responsible account for their crime" and promising to submit the murder to the CrimeStoppers tip hotline. After that, nothing. Then in February, a homicide sergeant called and said they had received information one of the three assailants, whom HPD identified as the shooter, had been shot to death.

"I just don't understand why more wasn't done when this happened," Sylvia Brown said of the minimal investigation. "It was a total disaster."

Brown said she has received little explanation of the crime or why HPD is certain that the dead suspect was the shooter. And what happened to the other robbers who were with him?

Those questions are familiar to the family of Mohamed L. Jalloh, who was found dying on the floor behind the cash register at the 7 Stop Food Mart Drive-In in east Houston on Feb. 10, 2006. A year and a half later, a homicide detective noted that a suspect had been developed after a tip from the robbery squad following other holdups. But the detective assigned the case apparently failed to follow up.

The case was reassigned to a different detective in 2010, and he was made aware of a connection to the suspect in two other robberies. Once again, no follow-up took place. Police now say the suspect in the Jalloh murder and the other robberies has subsequently died. But the department has provided no name or additional information concerning him, only the reprimand of the second detective who paid little attention to the case.

'Never got a call'

The parents of Patrick Russell Carver, 18, were hopeful of quick justice in the days after his father found him beaten to death on Sept. 1, 2010, in the home they had shared until shortly before his death. Rusty Carver said he offered Chandler suggestions about likely suspects - he believes his son's attackers were looking for drugs and money - and even brought police physical evidence that he felt was overlooked when technicians searched the home.

"They said they had figured it out pretty quickly, but none of that panned out," Carver said. "We never got a call from them after that. My ex-wife called and called. But nothing."

In case after case, families were left with myriad questions and few answers. Like Summerville, 17-year-old Christopher Snell was in his apartment on March 25, 2009, when he was stabbed to death by an unknown suspect. The HPD investigation of Chandler said he entered no reports on the crime scene or witness statements in four and a half years.

Embarrassing lapses

Even the tragic murder of 11-month-old Forever Donatto failed to spur Chandler into action. The baby was in a car seat inside her mother's vehicle in the driveway outside a "known drug house" early in the morning of Aug. 19, 2012. Shots were fired from a passing SUV toward the vehicle, but only the baby was hit. Neighbors did their best to help the child, but she later died at Texas Children's Hospital.

Chandler, who could not be reached for comment, was faulted for doing little original work on the investigation. His first update in November 2012 only referred to the autopsy report and fingerprint analysis. Almost a year later - after the IAD investigation was underway - he added information from a witness and a crime scene canvass that he had obtained right after the shooting. The Donatto case, like the others, has not been solved.

McClelland blames the embarrassing lapses on one bad detective, a few inattentive supervisors and an outdated computer system that was supposed to help the homicide division keep track of investigations but had crashed. McClelland said the forgotten cases, though inexcusable, do not fairly reflect the division's 83 investigators as a whole.

The chief, appointed by Mayor Annise Parker in 2009, said the ongoing cleanup will result in the delivery of justice in many of the old cases. HPD says that 15 of the identified problem cases have been cleared, either by arrests, the filing of charges, grand jury reviews and the deaths of three suspects. In fact, of the six murder cases where charges have been brought, five were filed after the IAD investigation began last October, according to the Harris County District Attorney. No arrests have been made in three of the cases where suspects were charged.

Reflects shortcomings

McClelland's confidence notwithstanding, experts on modern policing argue that for a department to simply lose track of so many homicides for so long reflects shortcomings in leadership, policies and hiring decisions.

"What you've got is a catastrophic collapse of management, of command, of the systems," said Roger Clark, a leading police agency consultant and former detective bureau commander at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. "I mean, this just does not happen in a modern police department. It can't happen without people who are not doing their duty."

In retrospect, the shoddy homicide work appears even worse because of another obvious implication that arises from victims in these cases: All save one were poor people of color. Yolanda Smith, longtime executive director of the Houston branch of the NAACP, said the inadequate murder investigations only exacerbate a nagging lack of trust in some of the city's neighborhoods. Taken collectively, the ignored cases are one more insult to go with past gross mismanagement of HPD's crime lab, the shooting of unarmed civilians and instances of apparent excessive force.

"They've already been victimized once in the sense they are no longer here, but then now they are victimized again if no one is investigating their homicide," Smith said. "Their murders have gone unanswered, unaccounted for."

Silence a mystery

For the widow Cortes, the enduring silence from police detectives was a mystery. After her husband's death, she remembers a tearful conversation with Sgt. Chandler in her living room. His words were reassuring and confident. He told her not to worry: "We'll get the person who did it because we're already on his trail."

As Cortes wept, Chandler tried to console her with certainty born of experience. The tall gunman had robbed another man in the same neighborhood only a few minutes earlier, he said. And the other victim had provided police with a good description of the gunman. Don't worry, Chandler repeated, you will soon see justice.

"But I didn't see anything," she said.

A 34-year-old immigrant from Honduras, like her husband, Cortes struggles to get by without Brisuela's income, working long hours as a maid. Her husband took extra jobs to support the family, which included not just their baby but three of Cortes' children from an earlier marriage. Now she has five children to look after. Her youngest child was born six months after his death.

Cortes passed the second anniversary of her husband's shooting last month in another well-worn rent house, only a few blocks from where he was slain. The carpets in the sparsely furnished home are badly soiled with dark stains, walls marked with crayon scribbles.

As a memorial of sorts, she had matching purple dresses made for Brisuela's two daughters - Keylin, 2, and Denisse, 1 - and adorned them with a picture of the couple in a happy embrace. The photo is applied to the front of the dresses along with the Spanish words "Daddy, you will always be in our hearts."

As the months dragged on after his death, Cortes began to wonder if his murder was being ignored because he was not a citizen and she does not speak English well.

"That's the first thing you begin to think because you're a Hispanic, and you're not from here," she said. "And that's why they (authorities) say, 'What importance is it?' But if they had worked on it, they would have found out it was a case where two daughters lost their father."

Little comfort

McClelland's promised cleanup in HPD's homicide division, which includes new procedures for supervisors, is of little comfort to the family of Elfego Z. Mena. What they know - all they know - is that he was killed eight years ago and no one was made to answer for it.

Maria Luisa Gutierrez, 47, remains haunted by fragments of memory: the heated words, the gunshot, the gasps of her dying common-law husband. It had been a long day, with Mena and a friend from the neighborhood repeatedly arguing over the phone about an unknown dispute between the two. Back and forth it went, with the friend calling again around midnight. Mena told him to come over so they could sort it out.

But the face-to-face meeting resulted only in a more heated argument. It was shortly after 1 a.m. that Gutierrez remembers hearing gunfire outside her home on Ambern Drive, a working-class neighborhood in the far reaches of southwest Houston. Gutierrez edged toward the front door, then slowly opened it.

Peering into the darkness, she saw the 48-year-old Mena lying on the ground near the driveway. Standing near him was the neighborhood man she believes shot him. Her son and a neighbor saw the killer as well. After a few more interviews, police quickly identified him.

The date was Oct. 24, 2005. More than 100 months have passed. No arrest has been made. As Gutierrez put it, "Nada, nada, nada."

So she was stunned when two HPD investigators came to her home several months ago with a revelation. Her husband's murder investigation had been forgotten, fallen through the cracks.

"I asked, 'You're investigating after eight years?" Gutierrez recalled. "They told me they didn't know for what reason the case had been forgotten, but they were going to investigate."

Some of the details of the long-delayed investigation soon became public. One retired homicide detective, Ed Gonzalez, acknowledged he inadvertently took the original Mena case file home with him when he resigned in 2009 to join the Houston City Council. The other investigator on the case said a police officer's murder had occupied his time. But his disciplinary letter of suspension said he simply failed to do any work on Mena's slaying.

Suspect was deported

This was not the worst news Gutierrez received. When HPD's cold-case detectives retrieved the original file from Gonzalez last December, they looked first at the suspect who had been identified through a photo lineup. It was an easy ID. He was a neighborhood tough guy known to carry a gun. But soon they learned he had not been arrested in intervening years until he was picked up by immigration officials, who had no way of knowing he was a suspect in a murder. The man was deported to Honduras in 2012.

For Gutierrez, the visit from HPD detectives rekindled old emotions, many of them uncharitable.

"I thought that since we were Hispanics and because we were poor also, they aren't concerned about us," she said. "If it had been an American, they would have quickly picked him up and investigated, and they never would have forgotten about it."

Gutierrez, who works housekeeping jobs at two Houston hospitals, said her life with Mena began 20 years ago. The couple met at the Astrodome, where Mena had a maintenance job and Gutierrez worked on a cleanup crew. Over the years, Mena was not only a hard worker and a good provider, but he helped raise her four young children as his own. It was very hard on them when he died, she said.

One of her two sons, Heriberto Lagunas, 28, couldn't understand why his stepfather's killer was not quickly arrested: "They had everything. My mom was here. She saw who did it. My brother saw it."

Gutierrez still lives on Ambern Drive in the same modest home she and Mena shared, and in the front yard there is a small brick shrine that encloses a statue of Jesus on the cross, just a few yards from where Mena fell near the driveway, shot once in the back of the head. She still thinks about his killer, and wonders about other crimes he may have committed.

"He must be punished," she said.