By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
District Attorney Suzanne West says she’s relieved her office has successfully completed prosecution of the Oscar Gonzalez murder case, and is already looking ahead to the next set of trials.
West and Assistant District Attorney Jessica Shawver-Savino, who presented the state’s case against Gonzalez in the murder of Del Rioan Sabrina Rodriguez Cervantes, argued for and won a life sentence verdict for Gonzalez.
Shawver-Savino made the following statement after the case was complete.
“I would like to humbly extend my gratitude to all local, state, federal and international law enforcement partners who assisted in the investigation into the murder of Sabrina Cervantes and the eventual capture of the defendant. I am also grateful to all the members of our community, doctors and emergency services personnel who made this outcome possible as well.
“The family of Sabrina Cervantes has waited five years for justice. Five years and one day after her death, Sabrina’s killer has received the long-awaited consequences for his heinous and depraved actions. Justice has been served in the State of Texas versus Oscar Enrique Gonzalez, and although the defendant may have ended Sabrina’s life, he did not end her legacy in this community,” Shawver-Savino said.
Several days after the verdict, West spoke with the 830 Times about the case and the other murder cases her office has prosecuted, along with those she will present later this year.
West said her reactions to the Gonzalez verdict were “relief and hope that the family has a little bit of peace.”
“I think that everybody always assumes that when cases get set for trial or go to trial that it’s easier for the family, or once it’s done, everything is behind them, but they still have their grieving process to go through. We just try to get it done for them, so they can move on,” West said.
She said when she became district attorney, the Oscar Gonzalez case, which she inherited from the previous district attorney, immediately became a high priority as it was the oldest murder case in the DA’s office.
When West became district attorney, Gonzalez was still at large, living in Mexico where he fled after killing Cervantes.
“So when we came in, between the U.S. Marshal’s Office, the Val Verde County Sheriff’s Office, a bunch of different entities had made clear they wanted us to help push for him to be located, and then as soon as we made a very slight push, they jumped on locating him in Mexico, and once we got him brought back, then the judge sets the docket, but everybody put it at the top of the list once we had him back in custody,” West said.
West said the Gonzalez case was such a high priority because he had absconded “and because he was so dangerous.”
The callous and deliberate nature of the murder Gonzalez committed also played a role in the case’s priority, West said.
“The most heinous piece of it, to me, is when you watch that video (of the murder) and you see the slow calmness that he displays. He walks slowly into the house, comes back out, watches for Sabrina, and she’s rolling around on the ground in excruciating pain, and I don’t like to focus on those things, because we don’t want the family to have to relive that, but just the fact that he was there and watched her like that and was so deliberate in his actions,” West said.
She said the nature of the crime definitely contributes to the sense of urgency to bring the case to its conclusion.
“Absolutely, and even when (the suspect is) here in GEO, they’re not out on the streets, but there’s comforts here that there aren’t in the regular prison system. Here, they’re local, it’s a little more laid back, and they have family members that can come to see them, and they’re taking a space here in our jail, so we would rather get them to the state prison system as soon as possible so we can use their spot for the next one,” West said.
West said she still has several murder cases in her office, all stemming from the shooting of a young boy.
“We have the capital murder cases in which Nate Rubio was the victim, the 10-year-old boy who was shot while he was inside a friend’s house. . . So there’s three murder defendants and one conspiracy defendant, so there are four of them, and the trials are set to start in November,” West said.
The district attorney also spoke about how she and her staff prepare for murder cases.
“There is kind of a set way. The most difficult part is that the murders get old. This (Gonzalez) case was five years old, so our main (DRPD) detective who investigated it had retired.
“So literally the first thing we do with an old case like this is we make sure we can find everybody again, review everybody’s statements they gave at the time the initial investigation was done and make sure that we’re completely aware of what everybody remembers,” West said.
She said when law enforcement officers bring the case to her office, she and her staff go back over everything that was done in the initial investigation.
“That’s what our investigators do a lot of, backtracking things. Whenever we hire investigators here, and they help us do our piece, it’s beautiful to watch, because they can tell us, ‘This is how law enforcement thinks about things.’ So they help us bridge that gap of how we look at and think about things versus what they’re thinking we need, so every time we have a major case like this, (I believe) everybody gets better,” West said.
“Law enforcement knows what we need. Our processes get smoother. It’s unfortunate that we’ve had so many to catch up with since we came into office that we’re pretty smooth on it by this point. You’d prefer your small town (district attorney’s office) to not be so smooth on those types of cases,” West added.
West said there is also a massive amount of preparation that occurs in taking the case to court.
“We talk a lot in the office and we game-plan. So what we all do and most trial lawyers do this, anytime you’re meeting with witnesses, you’re prepping up your case, you’re basically picturing in your mind your closing argument or the law that goes into the jury charge, so you’re building your case mentally as you get there. Then my staff has checklists, so there’s lots of deadlines for things that we have to file to give notice to the defense.
“We have checklists for the lawyers to make sure they’re doing all that. The checklists and deadlines for when they have to give the evidence. There’s deadlines for witness lists. We’ve done something major the past year that’s been a big change, but we’ve got our new TechShare system, so that’s drastically changed our discovery, so basically everything we have is just open in the system, and the defense can access it online as they need to, so that has smoothed that process out really drastically. That’s been really good,” West said.
“In a case like (the Gonzalez case), I think there’s 600 pieces of evidence because every picture is in there, hundreds of pieces of evidence, and then, if you watched Jessica enter her evidence, I think she got to number 15, which seems like a lot in court, but it’s fraction of what we have,” West said.
Evidence can be anything related to the case, from a murder weapon like a gun or a knife to a piece of clothing left at the crime scene, to a photograph or the drawn schematic of a room.
“It can be a report or a witness statement, a supplement, a video, all of those things. So that’s the other thing, as we have our checklist of what we have to notify, we have to go through every piece and make sure we know what’s in that video, we know what’s in that picture, to make sure that we’re not missing anything that we want to use,” West said.
But though each case is unique and presents its own set of challenges, West said the Gonzalez case was not particularly difficult.
“Murder cases are complicated because there’s so much evidence. There are so many items that get tested, so you have experts and you have physical evidence and you have lab results, but if we have solid evidence of who did it and we can clearly identify who did it, then murder cases, actually, tend to be somewhat simpler than many other types of cases, for instance, a DWI.
“In some ways, to convince a jury, to present your case to a jury, other than the quantity of the evidence, it’s somewhat simpler. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but it can be easier than, for example, a child sex case. Those are harder because the evidence is different, and you’re going to have much different types and fewer pieces of evidence, and it’s usually going to come straight from witnesses’ mouths, whereas in a murder case, you have all kinds of physical evidence, so in some ways, they’re easier to put in front of a jury than other types of cases,” West said.
How will she remember the Gonzalez case?
“For me, it always comes back to the victims. So what stood out to me mostly was Isaiah, Sabrina’s little boy, and the fact that he stood in court. He’s probably about 10 or 11, which means he was about five years old when his mom was taken away, and as he’s standing there in court, all I could think of was, his memories of her are fading as we speak. He probably remembers a smell or a feeling, but does he remember her voice? Those are the things that stick with me the most, that no matter what we do, we can’t bring the people back, and I would do whatever I could to make it better for them, but the process is hard for them.
“The length of time it takes to go to court is hard. Having to be in court and hearing those tough things is hard, so, to me, everybody thinks it’s always for the victim, and in some ways, it’s an end for them, but the victims have to go through that process so the rest of society is safe from these people,” West said.
West said the trial process breaks opens the wounds caused by the murder.
“Every victim that we hear and that we talk to, they feel like that murderer attacked them personally, and he did, but what’s sad is somebody like this defendant, he didn’t think twice about Sabrina’s kids. It never crossed his mind that he was taking away someone’s mother, and these kids’ lives will never be the same again.
“First and foremost, it’s always about the victims, but the second thing that really stood out to me about a case like this is how much coordination it requires amongst law enforcement agencies. So, for example, had the U.S. Marshals not cared about finding him, we would have never had justice, and not only did the Marshal’s Service as a whole care, they completely carried it on their backs of ‘we will find him; we will go get him, we will bring him back to the United States,’ so we couldn’t do what we do a lot of times without the agencies’ help,” West said.
She noted Val Verde County Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez personally oversaw the transfer of Gonzalez from the marshals’ custody to the sheriff’s office jail.
“And all that for a police department case, and that is what hits me about a lot of these. You see things on TV and you feel like you get the full feeling of it, but the agencies that work for us here, my office included, the marshals, Border Patrol, the sheriff’s office, everybody, they truly care about the safety of our community.
“They don’t have to care. They don’t have to jump in. They’re not elected, like me and the sheriff, but they jump right in, and they take pride in what they do, and I picture the PD officer who worked this case. He had retired, and he came in and met with us and showed up at the courthouse for his subpoena, and he could have said, ‘Hey, I’m retired, I’m done.’
“Everybody felt like they were going to do their piece to make the community safer. It’s amazing to see it all come together. We’re kind of the hub, where we coordinate it all, but everybody has to do their part, and we have yet, on any of these major cases, every single murder case we’ve had, there have been multiple agencies that we pick up the phone and say, ‘Can you help us?’ and they say, ‘When and how?’ So it’s really great to see the coordination, because it doesn’t have to be that way. And it’s that way because people care,” West said.
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