POOL PARTY!

International law was created during the Bush administration because a group of Mexicans – and one African American – gang-raped and murdered two teenaged girls in Houston, Texas. The crime made history in another way: it led to the most death sentences handed out for a single crime in Texas since 1949. Do you even know about this case?

The only reason the media eventually admitted that the lead rapist, Jose Ernesto Medllin, was an illegal alien from Mexico was to try to overturn the conviction on the grounds that he had not been informed of his right, as a Mexican citizen, to confer with the Mexican consulate.

Journalists have an irritating tendency to skimp on detail when reporting crimes by immigrants, a practice that will not be followed here.

One summer night in June 1993, fourteen-year-old Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena, who had just turned sixteen, were returning from a pool party, and decided to take a shortcut through a park to make their 11:30PM curfew. They encountered a group of Hispanic men, who were in the process of discussing “gang etiquette,” such as not complaining if other member talked about having sex with your mother. The girls ran away, but Medellin grabbed Jennifer and began ripping her clothes off. Hearing her screams, Elizabeth came back to help her friend.

For more than an hour, the five Hispanics and one black man raped the teens, vaginally, anally, and orally – “every way you can assault a human being,” as the prosecutor put it. The girls were beaten, kicked, and stomped, their teeth knocked out and their ribs broken. One of the Hispanic men told Medllin’s fourteen-year-old brother to “get some,” so he raped one of the girls, too. But when it was time to kill the girls, Medellin said his brother was “too small to watch” and dragged the girls into the woods.

There, the girls were forced to kneel on the ground and a belt or shoelace was looped around their necks. Then a man on each side pulled on the cord as hard as he could. The men strangling Jennifer pulled so hard they broke the belt. Medellin later complained that “the bitch wouldn’t die.” When it was done, eh repeatedly stomped on the girls’ necks, to make sure they were dead. At trial, Medllin’s sister-inlaw testified that shortly after the gruesome murders, Medellin was laughing about it, saying they’d “had some fun with some girls” and boasting that he had “virgin blood” on his underpants.” It’s difficult to understand a culture where such an orgy of cruelty is bragged about at all, but especially in front of women.

By the time the girls’ corpses were found four days later, their bodies were so badly decomposed that dental records were required for identification. The decomposition was especially pronounced in the head, neck and genital areas. Jennifer’s father, tipped off that bodies had been found, rushed to the scene, but the police held him back, as he shouted, “Does she have blond hair? Does she have blond hair?”