By Emerson Clarridge
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
FORT WORTH, Texas — During a second consecutive year of a spasm of gun crime in Fort Worth, more people were intentionally killed by another person in the city in 2021 than in any year since 1994.
With 118 homicide victims, Fort Worth struggled to tame exceptional violence and the attendant misery. An explanation for the 27-year record high and an understanding of why similar homicide increases have occurred elsewhere in the country is a focus of unsettled study in criminology circles. In 1986, Fort Worth recorded 202 homicides, its record high, as crack cocaine sales burgeoned.
The motivations of the criminal killings last year were familiar. Fights. Arguments. Altercations. Disputes. Rage. Others occurred during robberies of drugs or were fueled by gang and domestic conflict, police said.
Some of the victims were strangers with their killer and were slain as the assailant attempted to shoot someone else.
As she steered a car around an apartment building on an evening in April, Hailey Watts could not have known of the danger in her path ahead. Watts was 18 and launching her adult life.
Gunfire erupted around Watts and her boyfriend in a passenger seat as an assailant fired upon another target. Watts died in the parking lot.
In 2020, 115 people were slain in Fort Worth. In 2019, there were 71 homicide victims. Until 2020, there had not been a triple-digit homicide toll in a year in Fort Worth since 1995, when there were 108 victims.
The city’s population increased by about 460,000 people between 1994 and 2020. The per capita homicide rate was 28 per 100,000 people in 1994 and 13 per 100,000 people in 2021.
Homicides in the U.S. in 2020 increased nearly 30% over the previous year, the largest one-year jump since the FBI began keeping records, according to an Associated Press report on figures that the law enforcement agency released.
The only triple homicide in the year in Fort Worth was discovered with a 6:17 a.m. call for a fire in an outdoor trash container. The bodies of three people were inside it.
Police have said that Jason Thornburg told detectives that he killed David Lueras, Lauren Phillips and Maricruz Mathis over five days in September at a motel in Euless. Thornburg said that he strangled Phillips. To kill Lueras and Mathis, Thornburg said that he used a Milwaukee straight blade knife to cut their throats, police have said. He cut off their limbs and drove the bodies to the trash container in Fort Worth.
Police have also said that Thornburg told detectives that he killed his roommate at their house in Fort Worth in May and his girlfriend in another state in 2017.
In July, Miguel Chavez was killed with landscaping bricks. Police have said that a group of people struck Chavez with the bricks after he shot to death Joel Pocasangre Garay at a gathering in the Como neighborhood.
Far more often than strangulation or a blunt force injury, gunshot wounds caused the deaths of victims, according to a Fort Worth Star-Telegram analysis of Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office data.
Eighty-five percent of the victims last year were shot. Other victims died when they were stabbed or suffered another sharp force injury (9%) or blunt force injury (4%).
In the police department’s George District in the East Division, which includes the Poly, Stop Six, West and Central Meadowbrook, Eastern Hills and Carver Heights sections, there were 15 homicides, more than any other district, according to the medical examiner’s office data. The North Division’s Frank District in far north Fort Worth had the fewest with two.
Data was available for 105 of the homicides.
Seventy-four percent of the victims were under 40 years old. The youngest victim was 14. David Lopez Barrera was in June shot in an apartment complex parking lot during a robbery. In September, a man used a metal rod to stab the oldest victim, Tony Clark, 76.
Forty-nine percent of the victims were Black, 25% were Hispanic, 25% were white and 2% were Asian.
Ninety-six of the victims were male, and nine were female.
In June, there were more homicide victims, 17, than in any other month. March and November each had five homicides, the fewest in a month.
Fort Worth Police Department Chief Neil Noakes, in the job for just under one year, referred in a written statement to successes of an operation, begun in May, intended to reduce crime called Fort Worth Safe and of other efforts.
“No other focus is more important to FWPD than to combat violent crime in our city, and enhance public safety. To proactively address violent crime, we implemented initiatives such as Fort Worth Safe and relied heavily on units including Patrol, the Gang Unit, Directed Response, Narcotics, SWAT, INTEL and various other specialized units.
“Additionally, we recently established a Gun Violence Investigations Unit that has more effectively addressed non-fatal shooting cases,” Noakes wrote. “Improvements in technology utilization and our Real Time Crime Center have been instrumental in addressing violent crime, as well as our partnerships with local, state and federal agencies.”
Since May, Noakes wrote, the department has made about 1,500 arrests and recovered about 450 weapons “from the hands of criminals just through our specific violent personal crime efforts. Through the effective use of technology, data and intelligence, along with proactive, diligent police work in neighborhoods, we’re confident we’ll see more promising results in the future.”
Beyond criminal killings involving civilians, police officers shot three people in Fort Worth in 2021. Each died. Two of the cases involved Fort Worth police officers. In one of them, police said that a Black man who was an auto theft suspect fired a gun at a white officer who shot him. In the other, a white officer shot a white man who pointed what was later found to be a replica gun at the officer, police said. A Hispanic Lake Worth officer shot a Hispanic man who pointed a gun at the officer, who had pursued a car to Fort Worth, police said.
In Arlington, police said that there were 19 people who were victims of a murder or non-negligent manslaughter in 2021.
(c)2022 the Fort Worth Star-Telegram