S.A. cop killer’s execution set for Wednesday
Fourteen years ago, struggling with a convicted criminal who had a history of fighting with cops and evading arrest, San Antonio SWAT Officer John Anthony “Rocky” Riojas was murdered with his own gun.
Riojas was shot once in the forehead and, with his wife by his side, died at a hospital a few hours after the late-night attack Feb. 2, 2001. He was 37 and had two children.
Manuel Fernando Garza Jr., 34, is set to be executed Wednesday in Huntsville for killing the 11-year police veteran.
Riojas’ widow, Sandra Riojas, declined a request for an interview, but his former colleagues spoke of him as a friend they remember fondly, describing him as kind, bright, strong and athletic.
Remembering Rocky
Riojas was a fighter from the beginning, his family recalled at his funeral at St. John Berchmans Catholic Church, where more than 4,000 mourners gathered around his flag-draped casket.
He and his twin brother, Victor, were born premature. Victor didn’t survive.
Isidoro “Izzy” Riojas, a boxing fan and 1956 Golden Gloves champion, gave his remaining son the nickname Rocky, after Rocky Marciano, when he was a month old.
“When he made it, I told my wife, 'This is going to be a tough little kid,’” the older Riojas was quoted as telling a reporter days after his son’s killing.
Riojas was born and raised on the Southeast Side and graduated in 1982 from St. Gerard Catholic High School, where he played linebacker on the football team.
It wasn’t until he was 17 that he picked up boxing, but he made up for inexperience with intensive training, his father said. In 1982, he made it to the finals of the San Antonio Regional Golden Gloves Tournament and lost a hard-fought bout to a more experienced opponent.
Friends and family said Riojas had always wanted to be a cop, but because of a bad back, it took three tryouts before he made it into the 1989 cadet class.
San Antonio Police Department Detective Guillermo Cantu Jr. was in his class and recalled that he and Riojas usually led the pack during the numerous running drills that cadets are put through.
“We hit it off like we knew each other for years. He just had that personality,” Cantu said. “He was very friendly. He wasn’t cocky, he wasn’t standoffish and he had no vices — he didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke — and he was very, very physically fit.”
During a 1993 pursuit of a suspect, Riojas took a bullet in the arm. The officer who was with him, also shot, told reporters after Riojas’ death that his partner loved the “thrill of the chase. He liked to do things the old way.”
A few years into his career, Riojas made it onto the elite SWAT team, comprising about 30 officers at the time. And in 1995, he married his wife, Sandra.
Cantu remembered Riojas, shortly after he married, asking fellow SWAT officers to go home with him on a dinner break to sing her “Happy Birthday.”
“That’s not too macho, but he didn’t care because he didn’t have anything to prove to anybody,” Cantu said.
Riojas liked to hunt, but he shunned sitting in a blind, preferring to stalk his prey. With other officers, he took trips to the Alaskan wilderness, reachable only by small plane, to go after big game: caribou, elk, even bears.
“Those guys were characters, all of them, but I don’t think any of them ever got a bear,” said Tim Berg, who owned and piloted the plane that would carry the group to a remote cabin in the mid-1990s.
“It hit all of us who knew him here pretty hard,” he said of Riojas’ death. “We were surprised someone got his gun away from him, as big and strong as he was. We still talk about him a lot up here.”
Riojas left behind a daughter and a son: 2-year-old Victoria, named in honor of his twin brother, and John Michael, just 8 weeks old and named for the patron saint of police officers, St. Michael.
His sister, Jolanda Sanchez, followed him into police work, joining SAPD in 1998. She is still an officer there.
Life of crime
By the time Garza, then 20, encountered Riojas at a Northwest Side apartment complex off Fredericksburg Road, he had been arrested 14 times as an adult and had at least three convictions as a juvenile for robbery, burglary and drug possession.
In the three years before the fatal meeting, Garza had been charged with evading or resisting arrest, escape or giving a false name to cops five times. He had five active warrants that night for other crimes, including two for vehicle burglary.
Garza’s father died of a heroin overdose when his son was about 14. He dropped out of high school in his sophomore year and had trouble maintaining steady jobs, though he had worked as a telemarketer, a busboy and most recently before the slaying as a short-order cook at a Texas Roadhouse restaurant, though he had left that job, too.
That night, Riojas was on patrol looking for car burglars and thieves who had plagued the area. Sgt. Javier Salazar, who was a narcotics detective at the time, remembers seeing Riojas as he loaded equipment into his patrol car that night to prepare for his shift.
“I looked over and saw him, and he just gave me the biggest smile and waved back,” Salazar said last week. “He was just always so happy to see you, so friendly to everyone.”
Garza would later tell police that Riojas stopped him and asked for his name. Knowing he had warrants and would be taken to jail, he gave him a fake name and ran off.
Riojas chased and caught him.
A witness to the struggle told police that the men were on their knees, with Riojas behind Garza. Garza gained control of the gun and held it over his right shoulder. A shot went off. The witness saw the officer drop to the concrete. It was a story Garza corroborated in one version of events he gave police.
Riojas died at 12:07 a.m. that night at University Hospital, with his wife at his side. Police arrested Garza 26 hours later.
“When this guy appeared to have taken advantage of him, it scared the heck out of everybody — if it happened to him, it could happen to any one of us,” Cantu recalled of the effect Riojas’ death had on the department.
“My take is that Rocky took it easy on him. … He pulled the gun on him thinking this guy was just going to give up. But this guy grabbed it and things went downhill from there, when Rocky could have very well just beat this guy.”
The trial
It took jurors less than an hour to convict Garza of capital murder and less than three to sentence him to death.
According to trial testimony, he had run to the nearby apartment of a friend, bleeding from the face and with abrasions on his neck. He said he had gotten into a fight, and he begged for a ride home.
The friend testified that after she read a newspaper account the next morning about Riojas’ slaying, she called police.
The boyfriend of Garza’s sister testified at his trial that about an hour after the shooting, Garza tried to sell him Riojas’ gun for $100 and an amplifier.
In one statement to police, Garza admitted pulling the trigger. But in a second statement, he said the gun fired accidentally. At trial, he claimed he acted in self-defense against an overly aggressive cop.
On death row, Garza was asked by a WOAI-TV reporter last week if he had anything to say to the slain officer’s family.
“No, I don’t. I mean, what can I say? What am I supposed to say? You know? I mean …” he said before his words trailed off and he let out a heavy sigh.
To this day, members of SAPD SWAT team wear a green-and-black patch on their bulletproof vests bearing the numbers of Riojas’ retired badge: 1168.
“What people don’t get is that we move on, we go on with our careers, but Rocky’s family suffers every single day,” Cantu said. “His wife didn’t remarry. She still, every day, has to deal with that — fatherless, raising two children. Daily, they miss him. And I think people take that for granted.”
http://www.expressnews.com/news/loca...ay-6193882.php
Bookmarks