The Story of Vicente, Who Murdered His Mother, His Father, and His Sister by Sandra Rodriguez Nieto

Author:Sandra Rodriguez Nieto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2015-11-10T05:00:00+00:00

* In Mexican courts, prisoners testify within a barred cell inside the courtroom.

7

ARTISTAS ASESINOS

Like Vicente León, El Saik was also detained on May 21, only he was brought in two years earlier, in the spring of 2002, when he was just nineteen years old. A group of state police officers came to his door with an arrest order because, according to crime scene investigators, El Saik had participated in a drive-by shooting that morning targeting a moving car in which Nelson Martínez Moreno, an El Paso native, also nineteen years old, was shot dead. The crime occurred on Vicente Guerrero Street in northern Juárez. El Saik allegedly cut off his victim on Brazil Street and began firing. He hit Nelson in the forehead, another passenger in the left forearm, and barely grazed the back of a third victim. The latter two survived and were able to identify their attacker. They knew where El Saik lived and, wasting no time, went that very day to report the crime to the police. It was only a matter of hours before the police were knocking on El Saik’s door.

El Saik was the alias of Éder Ángel Martínez Reyna, a young man who lived on Durango Street in the neighborhood of Bosques de Salvarcar of southeastern Juárez. Ever since he was a boy, El Saik drove his mother crazy by repeatedly running away from home, often for extended periods of time, forcing her to put up missing-person pictures of him around the neighborhood. Growing up in a one-story house, with two-bedrooms crammed into eighty-six square feet, and a common area that served as living room, dining room and kitchen, it seemed inevitable that the boy would spend long hours outside. El Saik did occasionally go to school, but nothing excited him like wandering the streets, where he soon became target and accomplice in various assaults that frequently landed him at the juvenile detention center, the Escuela de Mejoramiento Social para Menores, or the School. His only two passions were art and crime, and for long hours he would sketch the images of his inner world, filling up entire notebooks. When El Saik was growing up in the ’90s, there were no recreational areas, parks, libraries, theaters or other public spaces where a kid his age could constructively pass the time or broaden his world. There were only the streets, where, like a factory-made product on an assembly line, thousands of houses as small as his multiplied before him. These tiny houses would often abut vacant lots or maquiladoras, as was the case with El Saik’s house, which directly bordered the factory campus Intermex Industrial, where the aquamarine sign of the Siemens Technology Plant still towers over the landscape today. Nearby loom the factories of Motorola, General Electric and Honeywell, among others.

Near Intermex and its neighboring industrial plants on Durango Street and Las Torres Avenue, there are other residential areas, such as the neighborhoods of Horizontes del Sur, Villas de Salvárcar, Torres del Sur, Paseo

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