Houston Chronicle by Olivia P. Tallet 1/18/2022
'I can hate no more': Mother of Joe Campos Torres, vet killed by police, breaks decades of silence
When Mayor Sylvester Turner last month announced plans to honor José “Joe” Campos Torres by renaming a downtown plaza and establishing a memorial at the spot where he was killed by Houston police officers, his mother summed up her feelings in one word.
“Finally,” said 87-year-old Margaret Campos Torres, who has said little publicly in the decades since her son was brutally beaten and dumped in Buffalo Buffalo by Houston police in 1977. She spoke recently with the Chronicle, in what she and her family said was her first-ever interview with a media outlet on his death.
Margarita, as she is called, still has the stoic manner and fortitude captured by cameras as she advocated for justice after her son’s body was found floating in Buffalo Bayou.
“He was so young,” she said of her son, a Vietnam era veteran who was 23 when he died.
In the first couple of years after her son’s killing, she made brief speeches in public places and at Guadalupe Church in the East End demanding justice. Then she crashed, depressed from the loss of her son in such a “brutal and senseless way,” she said, and frustrated by a justice system that didn’t deliver. Silence about the topic has been her way to cope with the pain for four decades, her family said.
His case is “an example of the worst police brutality and the failure of prosecutors and juries to act upon it,” wrote Lupe Salinas, a retired judge and law professor from Houston, in a Michigan State Law Review article.
More:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/I-can-hate-no-more-Mother-of-Joe-Campos-16783105.php
