When Rudy Aguilar arrived home from working overnight at a construction job on the Vanderbilt campus Dec. 2, he found the door to the apartment he shared with his girlfriend and two children chained from the inside. Aguilar, a 25-year-old Honduran immigrant, didn’t think much of it at first because Michelle Aguilar, his 3-year-old daughter, would sometimes open the door to strangers or wander out of the Harding Place apartment. Aguilar wasn’t surprised either when a woman’s voice inside the apartment told him in Spanish to wait, even though he recognized it wasn’t the voice of his 21-year-old girlfriend, Griselda Gutierrez. She often had neighbors or friends over to help with the children. He was tired but in a good mood, looking forward to a morning of sleep after joking and teasing with three work buddies on the ride home. Aguilar says his mood changed when a minute went by and the apartment door still hadn’t opened. He was kneeling to untie his shoelaces when a young white man opened the door and nudged his way past Aguilar in the narrow hall, followed by a Latino woman, who tried to close the door behind her. Aguilar pushed the door open and froze. In the distance, maybe 30 feet away, lay his little girl with a plastic bag over her head. Aguilar couldn’t see Gutierrez but thought she was probably dead too. He screamed, he says, then fled the apartment. In the parking lot, the woman who had been in his apartment was backing out a mid-1990s white Ford F150 with a Tennessee plate containing the numbers 380, Aguilar recalls. He says he tried to step in the path of the truck but the woman accelerated, nearly hitting him, and tore out of the parking lot, tires squealing. Aguilar doesn’t remember seeing the white man in the truck with her. Aguilar ran to a neighbor’s apartment. Police arrived shortly after and found Michelle suffocated and Gutierrez stabbed and bludgeoned. A pool of blood had accumulated in the kitchen and spots were found on the back patio and even down an outside wall of the lower unit. Aguilar’s one-month-old son Michael was found alive and unharmed. Since most victims of murder know their assailants, suspicion immediately turned to Aguilar. He was told to change clothes in a squad car and was asked the usual questions. Did he have any enemies? Was he in a gang? Was he involved in the drug trade? Was he in the country legally? When he answered no to the last question, he says, police then took him to police headquarters, where they questioned him for five hours. After that, they arrested him—not for murder but for possessing an invalid green card (which was actually pink), for which Aguilar says he paid $80 but never had the opportunity to use. The Department of Homeland Security dropped identity theft charges nine days later, and he was in jail the whole time. Rudy Aguilar now lives not far from where Griselda and Michelle were murdered, sharing a bedroom with his son at the home of his dead girlfriend’s family. In February 2004, in response to growing distrust between Hispanics and Nashville police, Chief Ronal Serpas announced at a community forum that his department would initiate an outreach program called El Protector, designed to instill confidence among immigrants. Police formed a 10-member citizen committee and placed Officer Juan Borges in charge of the program, which began in the south precinct, where some 30,000 Hispanics live. It was expanded to the Hermitage precinct last month. El Protector, an idea Serpas brought from his tenure as head of the Washington State Highway Patrol, is mainly a community policing initiative. Borges and other liaison officers network with Hispanic businesses, schools, media and churches. They teach Latinos about DUI laws, domestic violence and crime prevention, the overall hope being to create trust with the police department. Borges says the program is working. “Most of the people we’re dealing with in this effort are saying a lot of positive things,” he says. But questions remain about how serious Serpas’ department is taking El Protector. When the program was enacted, for example, only six of the department’s 1,300 officers were Hispanic. Two years later, there are seven Hispanic officers on the force, though another five are bilingual. El Protector in Spanish has a more aggressive connotation than The Protector does in English. In Spanish, it becomes a bad-ass term meaning a defender of justice. A superman. “If you put that name up, you’d better deliver,” says Yuri Cunza, the 34-year-old president of the Nashville Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “If not, it becomes just a joke.” Cunza is a Latino activist and publisher of the Spanish-language La Noticia who spent several months on the El Protector citizen committee before being dismissed, Borges says, for missing meetings and having a criminal record. Cunza, who arranged and translated interviews for this story, says he was kicked off for questioning Borges’ decisions. Cunza says the Gutierrez case, perhaps more than any other, is testing how committed Chief Serpas is to working with the Hispanic community. “El Protector was very well-intentioned,” he says. “It was supposed to build a network in the community. In the beginning, there was a lot of excitement. But that has died down and the lack of responsiveness continues. I criticize that.” The death of Griselda Gutierrez is complicated by the case of Genero Espinosa Dorantes, a Mexican national who fled the country after his 4-year-old stepson was found tortured, murdered and dumped at West Park on Morrow Road in February 2003. Dorantes is now on the FBI’s most wanted list. According to police spokesman Don Aaron, police were afraid that if they didn’t detain Aguilar, he would have escaped as well. “We kept him in a place where we knew where he was and in such a way where he would not be able to leave Nashville or Tennessee,” Aaron says. That police decision may have had a chilling effect on the willingness of witnesses to come forward. Word quickly spread that police had trumped up charges against Aguilar even though nothing indicated he was the murderer: three co-workers he rode home with would have been able to vouch for his whereabouts before the murder, and there was nothing to indicate he was responsible for the gruesome scene—no bloody clothes, for example. The conventional wisdom was that, if police would arrest under bogus circumstances an immigrant whose closest family members were brutally murdered, there was no telling what they might do to witnesses likely in the country without proper documentation. “It was really bad what police did to Rudy,” says Rosa Landaverde, Griselda’s mother, during a translated interview. “There was plenty of proof he had nothing to do with the murder. It’s not like Rudy was trying to steal someone else’s identity. The [green card] didn’t have someone else’s name on it. Not to minimize what he did, but by focusing on the charges, it might have given the murderers time to switch everything around so there are no more leads. In a way, Rudy is a victim too.” Landaverde fears her daughter might have been murdered because somebody wanted her grandchildren’s Social Security cards. Whoever killed Griselda didn’t bother to take her purse, which contained a Homeland Security identification card, an employment authorization card, a United Healthcare card and $34. Rudy Aguilar says the only three items he could tell were missing from his apartment were his children’s Social Security cards, which might be worth $10,000 on the black market, and $600 hidden underneath the carpet in a closet. About a week before Gutierrez was killed, she went with a friend, whom the Scene will call Maria because she asked not to be identified, to the Woodbine Community Organization, a United Way nonprofit that provides a range of services to low-income people. Gutierrez wanted to obtain a voucher for baby formula. According to Maria, a short, stocky woman with shoulder length hair approached Gutierrez. Maria describes the woman as looking more manly than feminine. The woman told Gutierrez that she would sell identity papers for the two children to travel in and out of the country for $500. Gutierrez replied that the children, born in America, were already legal. The woman wanted Gutierrez to go outside to her truck but Gutierrez refused, saying the weather was too cold for her children to be outside. But Gutierrez, who was normally careful about revealing information to strangers, later admitted to Maria that she did something foolish. She gave the woman her phone number and address. Maria says the stocky woman later sat next to her and tried to draw her out by saying she thought she recognized Gutierrez from a Donelson McDonald’s. But Gutierrez had never worked at a McDonald’s. And Maria was suspicious for another reason: she didn’t seem to have a reason to be at the clinic. “She said she had to get something for her little girl, but she didn’t have a little girl with her,” Maria says. Maria was one of the last people to see Gutierrez the morning of the murder. She dropped off the keys to Gutierrez’ truck, which Maria had borrowed to move out of the complex where Gutierrez was murdered. Gutierrez was supposed to circle back to see Maria and another friend before heading to the Woodbine clinic for Michael’s six-week checkup. That gave the killers a 45-minute window to attack Gutierrez. Maria was fingerprinted the day of the murder but police have yet to ask for her testimony. She is so afraid to stay at her apartment alone that she leaves during the day, arriving home in the evening when her husband returns. Several weeks ago, she says, two black men tried to kick her door down, saying they’d kill her if she didn’t open up. Maria is uncertain whether the confrontation is linked to her friend’s murder. Perhaps it was nothing more than a case of mistaken identity. Maria says it took police 45 minutes to arrive at her apartment after the door-kicking episode—the same amount of time the killers had to murder Griselda Gutierrez. It’s an irony not lost on Maria’s husband, who has known Rudy Aguilar since they were boys in Honduras. He says the slow response time is similar to the treatment he’s received when he’s tried to contact detectives to offer Maria’s testimony and other details of the murder. “Why is it that people with information are the last priority?” he asks. Paul Walwyn, the attorney who successfully defended Aguilar against the identity theft charges, says simply that the police department’s approach in this case has been flawed. “They never followed leads Rudy provided,” he says. “They never asked a sketch artist to draw the suspects Rudy saw. If police suspected Rudy, they could have played along instead of arresting him. That’s a sham now. I think the chance of finding the person or persons responsible for this tragedy has diminished considerably.”
