Posted on 07/10/2006 11:28:37 AM PDT by BradtotheBone
It wasn't news to anyone that Derrick Sean O'Brien was bad news. He fought often at school, once breaking a kid's jaw. Lots of times he was drunk. Sometimes he carried a knife. He was full of bluster about his prowess as a car thief.
But it was in 1993 that O'Brien hit rock bottom. In January of that year, O'Brien later admitted, he murdered and tried to rape Patricia Lopez, a 27-year-old mother of two young children, in Melrose Park.
And on June 24, 1993, he took part in the brutal gang rapes and murders of Jennifer Ertman, 14, and Elizabeth Peña, 16, after the girls stumbled into a drunken midnight gang initiation rite in T.C. Jester Park.
Tuesday, O'Brien, 31, is scheduled to be executed for his role in that crime.
The death date is the killer's second this year. In May, O'Brien received a brief stay as judges considered his claim that death by injection is cruel and unusual punishment. O'Brien's attorney, Catherine Burnett, an associate dean at the South Texas College of Law, filed a new appeal on his behalf with the U.S. Supreme Court.
"I hope the son of a bitch rots in hell," Ertman's father, Randy, said last week. "He deserves it."
"It doesn't make me happy," Peña's father, Adolfo, said in a recent interview. "But this is the punishment he was given, and it's justifiable. ... I kind of feel numb in a way, knowing that I've been waiting so long for this day to come. ... I've been looking forward to this for a long time."
The murders of Ertman and Peña rocked the city in a way that few deaths could.
The Waltrip High School students, balanced at that awkward point between childhood and young womanhood, spent the hours before their deaths at a poolside party at a northwest Houston apartment complex.
As their midnight curfew approached, they debated the best way to Peña's home. Their normal route would have taken half an hour, but they chose a well-known shortcut down the railroad tracks through the park.
Minutes after the girls left the party, they were intercepted by O'Brien and five other members of the loose-knit gang, who had just concluded a track-side initiation rite. The girls were pulled from the tracks, raped and strangled. Court testimony revealed that O'Brien grunted with exertion as he tightened a belt around Ertman's neck.
Then, after stomping on the girls' throats, the killers divided the victims' belongings.
O'Brien was at the crime scene four days later when police, alerted to the bodies' location by the brother of a gang member, began their investigation. Unobtrusively, the killer stood among spectators who gathered in the park. Ertman's father also was in the crowd.
Days later, O'Brien was arrested. He will be the first of the convicted gang members to be put to death.
Others facing execution are Peter Anthony Cantu, described as the gang's leader, and Jose Ernesto Medellin, both 31. Death sentences for two others — Efrain Perez and Raul Omar Villarreal — were commuted to life in prison when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that those who were minors when they committed murders could not be executed.
The sixth gang member, Venacio Medellin, who was 14 at the time of the murders and testified against the others, received a 40-year sentence.
"Don't say time makes things better," Peña's father said. "It never goes away. It's never going to go away. The hurt is still the same. I still find myself crying just out of the blue."
Kill him then ask the parents why a 14 year old was out at midnight
Don't be late!
"It doesn't make me happy," Peña's father, Adolfo, ...
Where were you guys when your daughters were roaming the gang-infested neighborhoods at midnight? And what kind of values did you instill in them prior to that?
I'm all for lethal injection for the rapists/murderers, and when they're done, they should inject the fathers with something non-lethal but painful.
Anybody familiar with this neighborhood? I've lived in neighborhoods where two girls of this age would generally be quite safe, and others where I wouldn't let them walk across the street at that time of night.
"As their midnight curfew approached, they debated the best way to Peña's home."
How does anyone know this?
PS, this three time murderer can rot in hell.
They shoud make Catherine Burnett take the bastard home to live with her.
How can anyone say that with a straight face? The legal system in this country is a long way from having any sort of perspective on what constitutes cruelty.
Again, since Catherine Burnett likes murderers so well they should make her take Efrain Perez and Raul Omar Villarreal home to live with her.
She don't give a damn about those poor innocent girls and the horrors they suffered from monestors who do not know what mercy and decency is.
They should be given the same mercy they gave the girls.
1993 to 2006 - that's downright fast-track compared to California; we let 'em get old enough to get yet more appeals based on 'too old to execute'...25 years seems to be the average.
If you hav read the article they were at a party and when their curfew was approaching they were headed to one of the girls houses. There is no implication that the girsl were loose or promicious.
Ah, the good ol' USSC, doing what's best for America. / s
Yes I think you're right - I read the 2nd part too quickly. I was initially under the impression that the girls were voluntarily part of the gang activities. I'm still a little perplexed though - it was at best incredibly naive and at worst homicidally negligent to let girls walk home at midnight in gang territory.
(The Palestinian terrorist regime is the crisis and Israel's fist is the answer.)
I understand.I do it often myself.
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