Cinco de Mayo is a day of celebration in the United States, but in Houston, the date has bittersweet connotations. That’s because it also marks one of what advocates call the most shameful acts of police brutality in the city’s history, prompting a riot and the emergence of a civil right movement.

It's known by historians as the Joe Campos Torres case, a brutal, racially charged beating and murder of a Vietnam veteran committed by what was dubbed by the media as a “gang” of six Houston Police Department officers.

HOUSTON IN 1978: Riots, The Boss and Big Earl

The Annual Joe Campos Torres Solidarity Walk for Past and Future Generations started at 10 a.m. at the interception of 4800 Canal Street and 100 Burr Street, and followed the trail of events associated with the Campos Torres case.

It was Cinco de Mayo in 1977 when shortly before midnight, Houston Police Officer M. G. Oropeza was dispatched to check on a disturbance at a cantina located in the heavily Hispanic populated East End neighborhood. After arriving, he called for a backup unit.

Just after 11:35 p.m., as recounted by Mitchel P. Roth and Tom Kennedy in their book “Houston Blue: The Story of the Houston Police Department,” and other publications, Oropeza walked into the bar together with officers Stephen Orlando and Charles Elliot to subdue and arrest a 23-year-old man who the manager said was inebriated and quarreling with two other customers.

The man, a Vietnam veteran named Joe Campos Torres, was handcuffed and taken into a patrol car. By then, three police vehicles and six policemen were at the scene. One of the officers said that the young Hispanic man had put up a fight while being taken into custody.

That was enough for them to turn on Torres and begin a frenzy of brutal attacks. They had to “quiet” the guy, according to what officer Joseph Janish would say in subsequent criminal investigations.

The six officers drove their cars in caravan to take Campos Torres to “The Hole,” a hidden spot down below street level at the south bank of the Buffalo Bayou, near the Court House complex. Five of the policemen took turns beating Campos Torres, who was still handcuffed and unable to protect himself.

Campos Torres was then taken to the city jail, but he was so severely injured that the sergeant on duty ordered the officers to take him to the emergency room at Ben Taub Hospital. He refused to book Torres into the jail until he received medical treatment.

That was too much of a trouble for the gang; too much time to be wasted at the hospital for this Hispanic guy. They instead went back to “The Hole” for the ultimate act of brutality. Officer Terry Denson came up with the idea: “Let’s see if the wetback can swim,” he said.

One of them removed the handcuffs. And those who chronicled the attack said the executioner was Denson, who thrust Campos Torres into the Buffalo Bayou where he drowned.

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“When you have law enforcement officers acting like that and calling somebody a wetback just because they don’t like him, it becomes a very racially hostile situation,” said Lupe Salinas, who at the time was a Harris County Assistant District Attorney and attended the trial against the officers as an observer in Huntsville, Texas.

The additional devastation for “that family is that it was on Mother’s Day when they found Torres body floating in the Bayou,” said Lupe Salinas, who later became an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Southern District of Texas, and is now a law professor at the Texas Southern University.

Protests raged around the city.

The HPD fired all but one of the officers and immediately created an Internal Affairs Unit for the first time in its history, an attempt to remedy the badly-damaged image of the police department.

But it didn’t appease Hispanics and other minority communities, who were outraged not only by the death of Torres but other cases of brutality and corruption.

Tensions escalated after only two of the six officers, Denson and Orlando, were prosecuted but found guilty of only a misdemeanor - negligent homicide - and received lenient punishments of a year of probation and a $1 fine.

“Many of us protested and marched to push for the officers to be indicted and punished,” said Jonny Mata, a young Hispanic activist back them, now with the Greater Houston Coalition for Justice. “Unfortunately, the trial didn’t produce a satisfactory result and the policemen walked away from the court and just went on with their lives.”

Under pressure by the community, the Justice Department took three of the policemen to Federal Court on charges of violating Campos Torres civil rights, for which they served nine months in prison.

A year after the murder, at a park in the Northside Houston neighborhood, a party to celebrate Cinco de Mayo quickly morphed into a bloody riot to commemorate the Torres murder. It became what is known as the 1978 Moody Park Riot, where violence erupted as approximately 1,500 participants chanted “Justice for Joe Torres,” according to police reports at the time. One police officer was run over by a car, two journalists were stabbed and real estate properties and cars were set on fire.

It was a critical moment in Houston’s history, and a cause that motivated the Hispanic community to organize and fight for their civil rights, Mata recalled. One of the positive outcomes was that Houston police officials established a Hispanic liaison within the department so the community could bring their concerns. And historically, the Torres case was the first time in Houston that police officers involved in brutality cases were taken to trial.

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Margaret Campos Torres, the mother of Joe, is still grieving his death 41 years later, said Richard Molina, one of her grandchildren and nephew of Joe.

“My grandmother hasn’t been able to talk that much about Joe in many years, it overwhelmed the family and she just wanted my uncle’s soul to rest,” Molina said. He was born a few years after his uncle died but is now an activist for criminal justice and one of the organizers of the Joe Campos Torres walk today.

The walk is “important because it recognizes the pain and grief that family members of those killed by police experience," said Mario Salinas, a Hispanic activist in Houston and one of the coordinators of the walk. “It’s often overlooked, even though it is a pain that has been experienced for as long as law enforcement has been focusing on certain communities.”

He said that the problem of police brutality is still frequent in Texas and the nation.

“My observation is that police brutality is still too much an issue in the American society today,” said lawyer Lupe Salinas, who in the same year of 1977 prosecuted one of the most infamous cases of police misconduct in the history of the city. The case inspired the movie "The Killing of Randy Webster."

Lupe Salinas added that police brutality creates a cycle of violence in the society, in which officers disregarding the law and getting away without accountability generate an anger that sometimes turns into violence against the law enforcement.

“We need chiefs of police departments, district attorneys and other public officials that will not tolerate lawless police officers,” said Lupe Salinas.

olivia.tallet@chron.com

Twitter: @oliviaptallet

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