Beginning near the door and working their way clockwise around the room, everyone takes turns identifying themselves and recounting their reasons for being here tonight. Some have been sharing their story for years. One or two others are here for the first time.
“My name is Claudie. My son was murdered on Easter morning 1999, by his wife. She got eight years manslaughter. She served, came back out of jail, and continues her social life. …”
Krystal, a first timer, finds it difficult to speak. “My daughter had cerebral palsy,” she says. “She was shot while asleep in bed. They shot her in the face. Five days after that, my husband died.”
“Her husband didn’t just die,” says a woman from across the room. “He was murdered.”
“My name is Maria. I’m here because my son was murdered last year, by his girlfriend. She claims it was an accident. She pulled the trigger and shot him in the face. She’s out free, enjoying the life insurance that he purchased for her a month before he was killed. So yeah, that’s why I’m here.”
“My name is Steve. My only child Kelsey was 11 years old when she was murdered by her mother in 2005. It’s been 15 years now. She was smothered with a bedsheet.”
Bob Nuelle’s daughter was murdered two years ago. “I’m sorry for everyone that’s here for the first time,” he says. “I wish to God I’d never met you. But if there’s any way I can help, just let me know.” ***
In 2019, there were 16,425 murders in the United States, according to Statista, a market data firm. That figure has steadily decreased since 1991 when 24,700 murders were reported. Despite the decline, the murder rate in the U.S. far exceeds most other countries, at 5.8 per 100,000.
Worse, fewer than two-thirds of all murders are solved. The FBI Uniform Crime Report estimates that investigators were able to close only 62 percent of murders in 2017. And the number of unsolved violent crimes, which eventually become known as "cold cases," increases year after year. Experts have calculated the country currently has 250,000 unsolved murders, a number that grows by about 6,000 each year.
Dismal statistics like these have given rise, in part, to organizations that can make it easier to solve and prevent serious crime, allowing victims of violent crimes, and their loved ones, to find justice. One organization is Crime Stoppers of Houston, located in the largest city in Texas, which is experiencing a homicide rate that could reach 400 before the end of the year, numbers not seen in decades. The total murder count in the city last year was 280. At the same time, the number of cases resulting in an arrest in 2020 is lower than a year ago.
Originally created in 1980 to operate a tip line, Crime Stoppers of Houston has since expanded to work in partnership with law enforcement, local media and the community. Sponsoring the monthly parents of murdered children meetings is just one way Crime Stoppers supports victims in their struggle for justice. Besides crime solving and prevention, the nonprofit advocates on their behalf, ensuring they have a voice in the criminal justice system. Governing spoke to seven Houston area victims of violent crime. Here are their stories.
A Stolen Life
It was still dark the morning of Jan. 25, 2019, when Elizabeth Barraza and her husband Sergio were arranging items for a garage sale at their Houston home. They were planning a trip to Orlando, to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary, just a few days away. Liz’s father, Bob Nuelle, was unemployed at the time and thought adding some things of his own to the sale might be a way to get some needed cash. The night before, he decided his time would be better spent looking for a job, so he didn’t make the trip to his daughter’s place that morning to help.
Sergio left for work about a quarter to seven, leaving his wife to continue setting up in the driveway. Three minutes later, a Nissan pickup pulled up. The driver, wearing a long coat, got out and approached Elizabeth. The person can be seen and heard on surveillance cameras, speaking in a muffled voice for six seconds before pulling out a gun and shooting her three times. “She was screaming,” says her father. “You can hear it.” As she lay on the ground, a fourth and fatal shot was fired, point blank, into her face. Her last discernable words were “Good morning.”
“The first month after she was murdered, we lived in total fear and isolation,” says Bob. “If this takes five years, I don’t know what the emotional and physical toll is going to be. Dealing with a murder is the first stage of hell. Dealing with the wait for a suspect and an arrest is the second stage of hell. And then you skip five stages and you go straight to the seventh level of hell when there’s a trial.”
Elizabeth and Sergio, both big fans of Star Wars and Harry Potter, paid regular visits to children’s hospitals, dressed in costumes that are exact replicas of those seen on screen. “They did a lot of things to help sick kids,” says Bob. “And that’s what really just lit her up. We have met so many people that she helped. I never knew how wonderful my daughter was.”
Elizabeth was pronounced dead a day after being shot. “But we kept her on life support so she could be an organ donor,” her father says. “She donated her heart, which saved a life. She donated both kidneys, which saved two lives. She donated her corneas. She donated enough organs to save five people.”
Aside from the surveillance video, there is no other known evidence to go on. “That’s why the case is unsolved,” says Bob. “There’s no motive. The police have been through everything imaginable. They have torn through every thread of her life. They tore through my life, my wife’s life.” As the two-year anniversary of Elizabeth’s death approaches, her father is philosophical. “There’s so much evil out there and it’s so easy to become jaded. I realized, her legend of being there for all these people was my salvation.”
Murder for Hire
Frightened for what was happening to her, 30-year-old hotel manager Meghan Verikas strained against the zip ties that bound her hands and feet. Dressed in a dark suit, she was perched on the edge of a guardrail against the corrugated metal wall of a warehouse, somewhere in Houston. Duct tape was wound tightly around her head, covering her mouth. Pictures taken of the scene show her head bowed, staring at the dirty floor. She was in real danger, but not from the men who had tied and gagged her. They were undercover police, staging Meghan’s capture in order to thwart an actual plot to kill her.
Two years earlier, Megan had moved here from Pittsburgh with Leon Jacob, her doctor boyfriend. Soon after, the relationship began to sour. “After I moved in with him, it was very clear to me that he was not a surgeon,” she says. “He said that he was working on a transplant team. … It was all lies.” Verbal abuse gave way to physical abuse, ultimately causing her to flee their apartment. When she returned days later with police, all of her possessions were gone.
“I was basically in hiding for several weeks and he continued to stalk me,” Meghan says. “Online and in person. He went to my family, he went to my friends, he went to my job.” Multiple arrests did not deter him. “At the hearing for my protective order he was arrested for stalking,” she says. “That was his second arrest within almost two weeks. And he was released on bond immediately after. Both times.”
Attempting to hire a hit man to kill his former girlfriend, Jacob unwittingly reached out to undercover officers who then staged the phony kidnapping. He said he feared that she would someday testify against him and thereby impede his ambitions to practice medicine. “I prefer not to have to [kill her], but my survival is more important,” Jacob can be heard saying on tape. “I worked too hard … to get where I am.”
The would-be doctor was arrested for solicitation of capital murder. A co-conspirator killed herself soon after being released on bond. In March of 2018, Jacob was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, eligible for parole in 28 years.
“I appreciate everything that the Houston Police Department has done for me,” Meghan says. “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for specific people. But … there was a lot that could have been done differently. It was not an easy process at all. Even just to get the initial charges filed. He had records in multiple states for violence. The fact that that wasn’t even considered when they let him out of jail those other times, it was so frustrating.”
Unanswered Questions
I have two sons,” says Valerie Cerda, in her Houston living room. “One in heaven, one here, still on earth.” Robert Cerda and his girlfriend, Rachel Delarosa, left home two years ago, on a Monday morning in December, to run some errands. Eventually, they ended up at a seafood restaurant a little more than a mile away. Video shows them having a good time together. “Hugging, kissing, talking and laughing. Kidding around,” his mother says. They left and went to a store across the street where another camera caught them, still smiling and kissing. “You could see that they were just so much into each other. In love,” says Valerie. “They walked out of that store and we didn’t see them anymore.”
That night, when police responded to a call reporting gunshots heard, Rachel’s bullet-riddled body was discovered some distance away, at a subdivision retention pond. The next morning, Robert’s body was found by railroad tracks, more than 20 miles from Rachel. Today, both locations are marked with a white cross, made by Robert’s father, Daniel. “Someone had to see something,” says Valerie. “Did someone see them walking? In which direction? Did someone see some kind of altercation? Did someone see ANYTHING? Anything? Something?”
After two years of passing out fliers, holding press conferences and waiting for answers, Valerie is worried about the lack of progress in her case, but tries to be understanding when unforeseen circumstances interrupt the investigation. “When COVID took over the world, everything just froze,” she says. “Someone in the department caught it, so they were all quarantined.”
But she is increasingly frustrated with a perceived indifference on the part of police and detectives. “When you’re grieving for your loved one … and they don’t call you back … that can get you very angry,” Valerie says. “I would be satisfied with just one call with no news, than with no call at all. That is the complaint of a lot of families. Not getting their phone calls returned.”
Robert’s bedroom at home is as he left it two years ago when he went out for the day with Rachel. Scattered around the room are awards, basketball trophies, family photos, prom pictures, childhood mementos and his high school graduation cap and gown. “These are all his clothes. His shoes. … He wasn’t too tall. Just a little taller than I am,” says Valerie. “I can get into his sweatpants and his tee shirts. And in the beginning, when all of this happened, I would put it on.”
“We want this to be solved. We want my son to have justice. Both of them. They deserve it. They didn’t deserve whatever happened to them.”
Survivor
Nissi Hamilton lives in a beautiful house with her husband and six children. Their home, built on a corner lot, looks like something from the pages of a glossy magazine. A soaring entryway leads to an open living area with a two-story stone fireplace on one side and a great, curving staircase on the other. An oversized kitchen stocked with high-end appliances is visible in the distance. The only thing that seems out of place are the cardboard boxes of food stacked high around the house.
When she was 14 years old, Nissi was alone and homeless, living in a cardboard box behind a Walmart. “My mother was in jail, on and off drugs,” she says. “I was alone, completely abandoned by my family.” Living outside and occasionally couch surfing with friends, Nissi had her first baby at 15. “I’m catching three buses, so that I can go to school. I’m late every morning, I can’t get up on time. I couldn’t afford day care.” Homeless, unemployed, out of school and with a baby to care for, Nissi was desperate. That’s when she met someone who offered a way out.
An old friend, someone she trusted, offered Nissi a place to live, an ID and a waitressing job at a Houston strip club. The friend’s boyfriend would watch the baby while she worked. “I’ve got AC, I’ve got water. I’m off the street. I’ve got my kid. This is the best option. Because it’s the only option,” Nissi says now. On a good night, she made $75, all of which she gave up in exchange for a place to sleep and babysitting. Suddenly, the terms of the deal changed. “You have to make $200 every night, or you won’t get your baby back.”
“Somebody saw me as an opportunity,” says Nissi. “They saw my pain and my hardship as an opportunity for them to make wealth. I did it because I wanted to see my baby every night.” Within a few months, her overseer traded her to another man who set her up at another club, while living in a townhouse with other women. Soon, she was an underage stripper, selling her body to strangers, being passed between pimps and getting pregnant. “Nobody’s looking for me,” she says. “I have no family. Nobody knows where I’m at. I’m a lost black girl, walking around Houston.”
Once she mustered the courage to leave, it took Nissi years to escape the bonds of sex trafficking, fighting her way through a court system that often worked against her. Today Nissi is a vocal advocate for victims of trafficking. She is CEO of A Survivor's Voice of Victory, an organization she founded to provide food, shelter and clothing as well as education and job training to young girls in need. The boxes of food at her house are just a part of what she distributes at a weekly giveaway. “That’s always been a big thing for me,” she says. “To make sure people eat.”
Missing Mother
It’s never really quiet in Gloria Jimenez’s house. The sounds of chirping birds and a bubbling fish tank are ever present. A yapping pit bull puppy bounces from room to room. The single mother of two is now the mother of three, having taken on her sister Maria’s little girl, Destiny. Maria has not been seen since June of 2018, after dropping Destiny at the babysitter on her way to work. Her Silverado pickup was found that night, parked just a few blocks from home. Police are now treating the case as a homicide. A man named Eric Arceneaux, who she was seeing at the time, has been charged with Maria’s murder. He has not been seen for over a year.
Phone records place both Arceneaux’s and Maria’s phones at a Home Depot the day Maria disappeared. He is seen on the store’s surveillance video. She is not. While there, he purchased a chainsaw and trash bags, which police believe he used to dispose of her body. Arceneaux has a history of criminal activity including an aggravated assault charge in 2011 when he held a gun to his girlfriend’s head, threatening to kill her.
Today, a shiny new pink bicycle is parked behind the house, a sixth birthday present to Destiny from the local police. “We can’t have parties and stuff due to the COVID, so I did a parade birthday,” says Gloria. “I invited everybody who wanted to come.” But to be safe, she asked permission from the police beforehand. Ten uniformed officers showed up with the bike and joined the parade. “We don’t have a big family,” Gloria says. “It’s me, my brother, my father and the kids. They made her day.”
But Gloria cannot hide her frustration with the investigation. “I’m sure they’re working,” she says of the detectives. “A lot of respect for them. I’m thankful for what they do. But I wish that they would put a little more effort into this. Maria’s daughter is waiting for her to come home. We understand that maybe she’s gone. Maybe she’s not with us anymore. But we want her remains. We want to figure out what happened.”
“We need justice,” says Gloria. “We need to find Maria.”
Justice Delayed
David and Debbie Schwartz waited 21 years for their son’s killer to pay for his crime. Back in the spring of 1994, 20-year-old Douglas Schwartz and his 19-year-old friend, Eric Heidbreder, were both shot multiple times in the head while parked in a southwest Houston neighborhood. They were there to purchase marijuana.
“How could I have been so naïve as to not see what was going on with my son?” asks his father, a registered pharmacist. “But he was living in Austin at the time, going to the university.”
“We put out flyers, posters, contacted all the people that we knew,” David says. It took the police less than two weeks to identify the killer. But by that time, he had fled the country. “We knew who he was. He was an acquaintance of my son.”
For two decades, David and Debbie Schwartz stayed focused on finding their son’s killer, calling the detectives as often as once a week. “I wanted somebody to get caught and be punished,” David says. “Nothing happened. I put up $100,000 of my money. Nothing happened. I never, ever gave up hope. I knew I was going to stay on the case.”
Finally, in June of 2015, the call came that they’d been waiting for. The FBI had found their son’s killer, sitting in a Venezuelan jail, arrested on a drug offense. The jury trial lasted nine days. Concurrent sentences of 75 years were handed down for the murders of the two young men. During the trial, David came to understand that investigators could not share everything they knew with him.
“When we got to court and they started laying out a timeline of what [the Houston Police Department] did, and what the FBI did, I was blown away,” he says. “I didn’t know 90 percent of what was going on.”
Within two weeks, the killer’s attorney filed an appeal. Three more times appeals were filed, and all were denied. “This guy is not going to give up. He’s eligible for parole in 26 and a half years. The good thing for him is I’m not going to be here.” Someday, the burden will fall on the younger generation, people who never knew Douglas. David points to a picture of his granddaughter. “She knows that there was an Uncle Doug, but she doesn’t know what happened to him. And she needs to know at some point because she’s my future when parole comes up.”
Crime Stoppers of Houston plans to videotape David and Debbie talking about their family’s decades of pain and suffering. Copies of the recordings will go to the parole board, years from now. “Here’s his father and mother, talking about how it affected their lives,” says David. “It’s us, talking from the grave.”
“When someone says ‘now you’ve reached closure,’ that’s not closure. Don’t ever use the word closure to me.”
Twice a Victim
Sharon Shepard’s nephew was shot and killed in his Houston home. “They have not caught anyone yet,” says Sharon. “I don’t know who did it. But we have an idea of some people that may know something.” That was over four years ago.
In June of 2019, Sharon lost another nephew, shot in the back of the head, in the middle of the street. The first cousins were both 30 years old when they died. Because the victim’s parents live far away, Sharon, an employee of the city of Houston, has taken it upon herself to tend to their cases. “They just couldn’t do it,” she says. “I handle everything. Both funerals. I’m the spokesperson.”
Keeping track of two murder investigations has taken its toll. “When the second one happened, it just built to the point where I ended up going to counseling,” she says. Both cases remain unsolved and Sharon is unaware of any progress made on either one. “I thought because I work for the city it would get me a little more help. And that’s not the case,” Sharon says. “I’ve talked to the chief. I’ve talked to a couple council members. I’ve talked to [District Attorney] Kim Ogg. We need homicide to do what they need to do. And that’s what angers me. Every time I call or text them it’s always me initiating it. They never call me.”
There were six murders in Houston on a single day in November: One of the victims was a police officer responding to a call on his way to work, the second officer killed in three weeks. A suspect is already in custody.
“I would love to see them [the police department] give my family, and all families that are going through the loss of a loved one, the same respect that they give to the police officer’s family when losing a loved one,” Sharon says. “They are on it to find out who killed them, ASAP. Do the same for our families as well.”
Crime Stoppers
Crime Stoppers of Houston is the first chapter of the national organization to have its own headquarters building. Opened three years ago, the modern, three-story structure occupies an entire block in Midtown Houston, providing a permanent home to staff, volunteers and several outreach programs. The heart and soul of Crime Stoppers is Andy Kahan, its first-ever director of victim services and advocacy.
Andy served for 26 years as a victim advocate in the mayor’s office and police department before retiring and joining Crime Stoppers of Houston in 2018. Typically dressed head to toe in black, Andy uses his considerable connections with local and national media to bring attention to the many cases that come his way.
Sharon Shepard, whose nephews were murdered, has made numerous television appearances to publicize her cases, always with Andy by her side. “I’ve been on Fox 26. We did Channel 11. I was on 26 a couple of times,” she says. “He makes that happen. The days when I go to the show, he’s there with me. It was kind of hard the first time I went. It was hard, but it was okay, because he’s there with me. Every time I went, he was there.”
When Elizabeth Barraza was slain at point-blank range in her driveway, Andy Kahan guided her father through the difficult days that followed. “He told me how to interact with my detective. He told me how to interact with law enforcement. He told me how to interact with the media. He just made sure that I had the tools I needed,” says Bob Nuelle. “The thing he kept telling me is we only need to reach one person. We need to reach the person that knows something. You might have to give 500 interviews to reach that person. He said I want you to work with your detective, and I want you to be open to talking to the media.”
Parting Words
After everyone has had their turn to talk, the November meeting of Parents of Murdered Children winds down. Talk turns from horrific tales of violence to things more mundane. There is disagreement on whether or not the district attorney works on behalf of victims. Will there be a meeting next month? Questions then arise about whether or not the annual holiday memorial tree ceremony will go on as usual, given the COVID-19 restrictions in place. All the while, the homeowners can be seen through a glass door, still tending to their business in the next room.
But before the meeting adjourns, Andy Kahan has the last word. “This organization will be an immense help to you,” he says. “As you can see. There are people here that are walking in your shoes. They understand what you’re going through. They can help you navigate through this system that really isn’t set up to be victim-friendly right now. I would encourage, particularly the people that are new, to rely on all of the experience that we have here. I’m here to help you. You’ve got a lot of people in your corner. Understand that you’re not alone.”
